If you are a preacher, missionary or teacher, you have some questions to consider. What are you teaching? Is it what a person taught you? Is it a rehashing of some great teacher’s revelation? Or have you experienced your own personal revelation of Jesus Christ? If you have, is it ever-increasing?
Paul said of God, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts17:28, NKJV). True men and women of God live within this very small yet vast circle. Their every move, their entire existence, is wrapped up only in the interests of Christ.
To preach Christ, we must have a continuous flow of revelation from the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, we will end up repeating a stale message. “For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual” (1 Corinthians 2:10-13).
Such revelation awaits every servant of the Lord who is willing to wait on him, believing and trusting the Holy Spirit to manifest to him the mind of God. We must preach an ever-increasing revelation of Christ, yet only as that revelation effects a deep change in us.
Paul voiced his personal concerns about this very topic. “I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27). Paul certainly never would have doubted his security in Christ; that was not in his mind here. He dreaded the thought of standing before the judgment seat of Christ to be judged for preaching a Christ he did not really know or for proclaiming a gospel he did not fully practice.
We cannot continue another hour calling ourselves servants of God until we can answer this question personally: Do I truly want nothing but Christ? Is he truly everything to me, my one purpose for living?