Hard Preachin'

I've been a preacher for nearly forty years, so I've heard--and told--a lot of jokes about preaching. "You stand up to be seen. Speak up to be heard. And, shut up to be appreciated."
I can tell you about the preacher who used to time his messages by placing a lozenge in his mouth. When it melted he knew it was time to quit. By mistake he put a button in his mouth one Sunday morning--preached himself to death.
A friend of mine is fond of commenting--often correctly--that a preacher passed up several good opportunities to quit.
I don't recall that anyone has ever told me, but I figure folk have surely thought that I'd "done quit preachin' and gone to meddlin'."
A number of comments and stories about preaching have to do with "hard preaching." Putting those two words in your web-browser will produce a number of hits.
I never considered myself a hard preacher. I want folk in the front row to be safe from slobber-showers, and I've found that pounding the pulpit tends to make my fist sore. Yesterday, though, I preached so hard that one of my fillings came out. Truth be told, it was already loose. I had already made an appointment with the dentist to get it cared for.
All humor aside, Biblical preaching is often hard. I don't mean loud or bombastic. Rather I refer to the fact that some of the truths that the Bible contains are hard to proclaim. Things like the universality of sin, Romans 3:23, or Romans 6:23, which speaks of the consequences of that sin. The Bible frequently instructs us to do hard things, Matthew 5:10-11, for example. Those are hard truths, They are hard to proclaim. But, they must be told. It is not hard, for example, to tell people to love the nice and lovely, but to proclaim Jesus message that we are to love even our enemies, that is hard preaching.

Lord, I'd like to keep my fillings, but let me be a hard preacher. Amen

It's STTA.