The Preacher’s Portrait: Five New Testament Word Studies

By John Stott

In this updated version of The Preacher’s Portrait John Stott presents a portrait of the ideal preacher; a portrait painted by the hand of God himself on the broad canvas of the New Testament. Through studying five roles of a preacher – steward, herald, witness, father, and servant – Stott illustrates God’s ideal for a preacher’s character, message and purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Langham Creative Projects
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783681464

John Stott

John Stott is known worldwide as a preacher, evangelist and communicator of Scripture. His books have sold millions of copies around the world and in dozens of languages. He was honored by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World."

Book preview

Foreword

John Stott’s The Preacher’s Portrait rates among the three or four most influential books in my life. I first read it when I was a university student, about twenty years old, with my sights set on vocational ministry. It gave me some life goals that I should set my sights on. Reading this book again about forty-seven years later, I am struck by how many of the principles I learned from it are still very important to my life and ministry.

I have come to the conviction that the secret of long-term freshness in service is being faithful to the biblical basics of life and ministry. Perhaps the neglect of this is responsible for the number of casualties we see in the ministry today. Many servants of God live with a lot of anger, many are dropping out because of burnout, and many are serving without the passion they had when they first responded to the call to ministry. In preparing people for the ministry we may have neglected some of the basic things that go into nurturing truly biblical ministries and ministers. The emphasis on developing technically excellent ministers may have eclipsed the task of nurturing ministers who are above all men and women of God and of the Word. This book focuses on this latter task.

Needless to say, I think this book is extremely helpful reading for younger Christians with a love for preaching, whether or not they are called into vocational ministry. I was delighted to find that my youth-worker son has been reading it. But The Preacher’s Portrait is not only for younger servants of Christ. It is a wonderful refresher for veteran preachers too. I find that I often go to older books in search of spiritual and emotional refreshment. Books written outside the rushed, pragmatic culture of our day have a way of bringing deep refreshment to our tired souls.

Refreshment comes especially from reading books, like this one, that are solidly based on the Bible. The Scriptures, as George Mueller says, exercise a constant recuperative power . . . upon [our] whole being. The Scriptures have a way of restoring us after we have received the inevitable blows that come with a life of service. The story is told of a pastor who left his library behind in the church office when he left the ministry, suffering from burnout. His successor noticed that books he had bought earlier in his ministry were mainly about Bible study and doctrine. The books he had acquired later were mostly practical (how-to) books on various aspects of ministry and leadership. Perhaps he had deprived himself of the healing and refreshment that come from lingering with scriptural truth.

People today are not as excited about the value of objective truth as they were a few decades ago. So whenever they read something, they look for some immediate practical application. If they cannot find that, they dismiss what they have read as useless. They risk missing the privilege of being enriched by the unchanging, security-providing truths which undergird the Christian life. The result is that today we have an insecure and restless generation of Christians. But there is great security in having our lives rooted in unchanging truth. The unchanging nature of the Word of God itself makes it a delight, as the psalmists often said. So another result of the deep enrichment of immersing ourselves in scriptural truth is joy.

Stott’s writings contain the depth that comes from lingering with God’s word. That makes them enriching and joy-generating. But they are also loaded with practical application – what today’s readers are looking for. I am so happy that his writings are being made known to a new generation of Christians. This will help many to avoid the shallow Christianity, which fosters insecure Christians, that is plaguing the church today.

Ajith Fernando

Teaching Director, Youth for Christ, Sri Lanka

Editor’s Preface

It is no small matter to be asked to abridge a work by one of the best-known evangelical writers of the twentieth century, particularly when there are many who are eager to protect his legacy. Accordingly, I approached this task with considerable trepidation, as well as with considerable interest.

As I worked on this book, I became increasingly aware of the major cultural and linguistic shifts that have taken place since it was first published in 1961. Preachers and authors who were well known at that time are largely forgotten today. Moreover, partly as a result of the work done by leaders like John Stott, the location of potential readers of this book has shifted. Now, many of them are in the Majority World, and so we can no longer assume that they will be familiar with the culture of the British church or with Western history. The English language too has changed in the past half-century. It has lost some of its elegant phraseology and now aims to move more directly to the point, in shorter sentences.

To accommodate these changes, I have deleted or modified references and quotations that may baffle twenty-first century readers and have shortened or straightened out sentences. I have also modified pronoun use as there are many readers today for whom he and man do not function as generic pronouns when applied to all of humanity. My goal was to remove anything that might come between the reader and the truth that John Stott so eagerly sought to convey. At no point, however, have I modified John Stott’s meaning or the substance of the rich biblical teaching he provides.

All changes were made with the approval of the executors who were appointed by John Stott before his death to oversee his literary legacy. I am grateful for their encouragement and diligent support for this project. Our shared goal has been to extend the blessings of John Stott’s ministry to new generations and to continue to work to extend the kingdom of our Lord and Master. May God the Father bless this work, and may the Spirit apply it to our hearts, whether we are preachers or those who are blessed by the ministry of preaching.

Isobel Stevenson

Senior Editor, Langham Partnership

Author’s Preface

This book does not deal with preaching techniques or with problems of communication – although I do not doubt that there are methods of preaching that need to be learned and that communication is vitally important when the gulf between the church and the secular world is so wide that few bridges are left between them. What this book is concerned with are the words used in the New Testament to describe preachers and the task of preaching. Studying these words will give us a clearer view of God’s revealed ideal for preachers, what preachers are and how preachers are to do their work. So I shall be considering preachers’ message and authority, the character of the proclamation they are called to make, the necessity of their own experience of the Gospel, the nature of their motive, the source of their power, and the moral qualities that should characterize them, notably humility, gentleness and love. This, I suggest, is the preacher’s portrait, a portrait painted by the hand of God himself on the broad canvas of the New Testament.

I do not pose as an expert on this subject. But as God in his grace has called me to the ministry of the word, I am deeply anxious to conform my ministry to the perfect pattern he has given us in the same word.

J. R. W. S.

October 1961

Introduction

What a Preacher Is Not

Before looking at the five words that are used in the New Testament to paint a preacher’s portrait, we need to consider some words that are not used. Failure to do this may result in accepting wrong answers to the first important question that confronts every preacher: ‘What shall I say, and whence shall I derive my message?’

A Preacher Is Not a Prophet

Christian preachers are not prophets in the same sense as the prophets in the Old Testament. That is, they do not derive their message directly from God as an original revelation. Today, the word ‘prophet’ is sometimes used loosely. A person who preaches with passion may be described as possessing prophetic fire, and a preacher who can discern the signs of the times, who sees the hand of God in the history of the day and seeks to interpret the significance of political and social trends, is sometimes said to be a prophet and to have prophetic insight. But these are not the most important characteristics of the Old Testament prophets.

In the Old Testament, a prophet was the mouthpiece of God. When God appointed Aaron to speak the words of Moses to Pharaoh, he explained this arrangement to Moses in these words: ‘See, I make you as God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet’ (Exod 7:1, 2). Earlier, God had said, ‘You shall speak to him [Aaron] and put the words in his mouth; and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you what you shall do. He shall speak for you to the people; and he shall be a mouth for you, and you shall be to him as God’ (Exod 4:15–16). These examples make it plain that the prophet was God’s ‘mouth’, through whom God spoke. Similarly, in describing the prophet like Moses who would arise, God said: ‘I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him . . . He shall speak in my Name’ (Deut 18:18, 19). Prophets did not speak their own words or in their own name; they spoke God’s words in God’s name. This is why the Old Testament often introduces prophecies with phrases like ‘the word of the Lord came unto . . .’, ‘Thus says the Lord’, ‘Hear the word of the Lord’, and ‘the mouth of the Lord has spoken it’. The last occurrence in the Bible of this formula ‘the word of God came unto’ refers to John the Baptist (Luke 3:2). He was a true prophet.

The key characteristic of prophets was not that they foretold the future, nor that they interpreted the present activity of God, but that they spoke God’s word. As Peter put it, ‘For prophecy [that is, true prophecy, as opposed to the lies of the false prophets] never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit’ (2 Pet 1:21).

The Christian preacher, therefore, is not a prophet in that sense. Our task is not to communicate a direct and original revelation we have received from God. Our task is