Joel Gregory's 50th Preaching Anniversary Message

0:00 Ander. I am speechless and I'm supposed to talk. To Drs. West and Watson, who co-chaired this evening, my friends of the year, and my board member, Dr. William Crouch, who worked with them, I owe a debt beyond my ability to state But let me also say a word about this dear church. For the last nine summers, at the invitation of founder and pastor and dear personal friend, fellow laborer in the gospel, Reverend Dr. Ralph Douglas West, Sr., here. It has been my privilege to stand here in the summertime and to speak to this great church and its location.

1:05 Thank you. I must say there is no more cherished privilege in my yearly round of speaking than to stand in this place for my good friend. And I want to thank you yet even still again, Dr. West, for your friendship, for the embrace of this church, which permits me to do, if I might say, pastoral type of preaching, knowing you better year by year. I thank you. And have we not been blessed by this great mass choir this evening? If I were to respond to everyone here this evening, giving the weight and the significance and the gravity to the friendship, support, encouragement, investment, and belief, it would not only take the rest of this evening it would take the remainder of this week and I would do injustice to one to say something about anyone without everyone that I generally say that there are those who have been with me in good times and in bad times in life's highest places life's hardest places friends who've been true through the years in ways and instances that some of them, only they and I, know it.

3:04 And it's very difficult to find appropriate words on this kind of occasion without preempting the entire occasion. The great ballerina Pavlava was asked one time what she meant by a dance. and she responded, if I could have said it, I wouldn't have danced it. And in a sense, I feel the most appropriate response this evening is to turn to what we're here celebrating, and that is 50 years of attempting to proclaim the Word of God. Jeremiah chapter 1, the word of Jeremiah. Son of Hilkiah, one of the priests who were in Anatoch, Benjamin.

4:15 to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah son of Ammon king of Judah to the thirteenth year of his reign, it came also in the days of Jehoiachim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, and to the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, and to the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month. But then the word of Lord came to me. Would you be seated? If I were to cast these words not of the great biblical prophet Jeremiah, and not as a parody but tracing my little life over them.

5:25 The introduction might be the word of the Lord came to Joel, the son of Clifford and Edith Gregory, of Jacksboro and Gainesville of the tribe of Texas. It came in that summer referenced, 1964. Freedom Rider, demonstrations, millions of people glued to colorless televisions watching Lawrence Welk and Myron Florin play accordion duets. Tom Landry was a young man with hair trying to start a new NFL franchise.

6:25 Matt Dillon was cleaning things up in Dodge City. Word of the Lord came. LBJ was president. And then Nixon and Ford and Corderney. Yea, that word of God continued to come until the presidency of Barack Obama, and until the taking away from the captivity of Floyd Casey Stadium to Drayton Clayne Stadium of the Baylor ball team by the river. Fifty years. Fifty years. What is it called? There's a mystery in that word to many people. Our eponymous namesake already mentioned George W. Truitt was working on a farm at White Wright, Texas outside of Sherman, north of DFW. He was a Sunday school superintendent. He wanted to go into another vocation but the church saw in him a preacher and ordained him against his will.

7:38 He was literally absent and ran in and tried to stop the proceedings and the elder said, we will not stop. He didn't want it and it arrested him. Another minister who's an exact contemporary of him, George Campbell Morgan of the Westminster Chapel in London, from the time he was a little boy wanted to preach. He even held memorial services for the pets of his children. playmates. But when he preached before a Methodist ordaining council, they turned him down flat and said, go do something else. He sent a one-word telegram to his father, rejected. But his father wrote back a telegram, rejected on earth, but accepted in heaven.

8:21 And no preacher in the English-speaking language has more sermons published today than George Campbell Morgan. That living icon of all American preachers, Gardner C. Taylor, was a student in Louisiana. He'd already been accepted at Michigan to go to law school when at a midnight accident driving the Packard of the president of the college, he was involved in circumstances that almost certainly would have led to his incarceration when, as a miracle of God at the inquest. He was exonerated in the most unlikely way, and he said, I must preach. And he became winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. There are many ways that God calls. The same sun looks different at every sunrise. The same sea looks different at every seascape.

9:20 and the call of God is as individual as those who respond to it. Jeremiah, his name literally means God hurls. God throws down. God casts in his name. He bore the reality of his ministry that he was thrown down. When he didn't seek it, he was cast into it. He was arrested. He was conscripted. He was drafted. and if after 50 years I could put in one sentence something about preaching, I would say this, I did not choose it as much as it chose me. And I have that sense of being thrown down into it. Inescapable.

10:15 Now, sometimes people say, you hear a call? If it were Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell, they'd say, people like you think they're Napoleon too. You hear voices? Are you like Kevin Costner 25 years ago out in that cornfield in Iowa? Build it, and he will come. And then he went and tried to convince James Earl Jones. that he really heard a voice. No, there's no question that there are delusions, but this is not a career that you choose simply because you see a need for it. I've had some bad haircuts, never wanted to be a barber. I've eaten some awful meals but never wanted to go to culinary school. I've seen some awful architecture but didn't feel like I had to be an architect.

11:12 But something different happened to me in the matter of call to preach. It selected me rather than my selecting it. And you might say, well isn't it rather narcissistic to say God set you apart? Let me clarify that if I could. Jeremiah needed the word he spoke more than anybody he spoke it to. He was a lonely... Read the book. He was a lonely man, rejected man, depressed man, misunderstood man, sometime presented in false light, sometime slandered, one time lured into a well of muck. He needed that word. More than anyone, he spoke it to. I spend 50 years feeling like a bread truck driver who has to get out and eat what's behind me in the truck.

12:12 50 years feeling like someone who delivers water. And in the midst of the delivery route, I have to get out and drink some of my own goods. Could I say this? Jesus had an inner circle, which meant he had an outer circle. That inner circle was Peter, James, and John, the three. The others were out of Peter, James, and John. They got to go into the room when he raised Jairus' daughter. They got to go up and see him sparkle like lightning, the word is, on the top of the mountain of transfiguration. They got to go into the garden with him. The other nine were outside the door. They were at the bottom of the mountain. They were at the edge of the garden. Now, the churches often said Peter, James, and John were called closer because they were better, or they had more aptitude.

13:07 Maybe not. Maybe he kept them closer because he had to. Peter would curse and deny him. James and John would say, we want the corner office with the key to the executive washroom.

13:29 Thomas never said that. He said, let's go to Jerusalem and die with him. Philip just kept bringing people to him. Maybe he calls some of us. Because he knows that unless professionally, Every week we have to get up and face his word. Paul said we have this treasure in earthen vessels if you read this entire chapter before Jeremiah before you were knit together in the womb I knew you Before you were born, I set you apart. And Jeremiah lived with the reality that there was no prior claim in his life.

14:31 Nothing could be earlier than in his life. We Baptist folks, and I'm Baptist born, Baptist bred, when I die, be Baptist dead. Being one of us, I can say we've never really had a clear focus on ordination, not like our Roman Catholic or Episcopal friends. Their feeling is somebody put hands on me, who put hands on them, hands on them, hands on them, all the way back to the apostles. The Baptist tribe is somewhat different. 400 plus years ago John Smith in reading the New Testament said I only see believers being baptized and of all things he baptized himself and then baptized Thomas Helwis and some others and thus it started and we talk about ordination among Baptists it's not so much that it's a succession of hands, my goodness, Charles Spurgeon the greatest among us was never ordained he was called Mr. Spurgeon He said ordination is putting empty hands on an empty head.

15:39 Now I wouldn't go that far. But that is to say the ordination that matters is that ordination that says before, you were formed. I knew you. And no human artifice or ceremony can never substitute for that. We talk about a call. We use the word call casually. Telephone call. Your broker may call you if things go down with a margin call. Depending on whose fan you were this last week, you may not have liked some of the referee's calls. GM and Toyota are involved in recalls. Even at the office when you do something right, they say that was a good call. But when it comes to this kind of call that we're together celebrating tonight, it's a different thing.

16:42 It's a thing from the past. Two of my lifelong friends are here from the Connell Baptist Church. It was on a June hot summer night at a vacation Bible school for teenagers in a second floor little chapel at 4736 Bryce on the west side of Fort Worth. When sitting there without expecting it, God called. You say, was it in an audible voice? know it was a whole lot louder than that. And for 50 years, that has been an anchor.

17:23 It's so far back, I can hardly even see the anchor, but I can pull on the chain. It's in the past. It's like flying a kite that goes up into the clouds in the westerly winds and you can't see it but you still feel the tug. It's like being the lead climber going up the face of an alp. And down beneath you are those tied to you with the repelling ropes. And you know that you have to use your ice pick and your cleats because you feel the pull of them. It's a 50 year long call. but on the other hand it's a present call Paul not only talks about called in the past Thessalonians 5 24 he says we are being called there was some Baptist preacher years ago named Harper Shannon he wrote a book about the preaching life all I remember is the title Trumpets in the morning writing to preachers he said you ought to wake up in the morning and hear something like that I wonder if he didn't have in mind that cloud of fire, pillar, fire, there in the book of Numbers. When it moved, the Israelites moved. When it stopped, they stopped. But when it moved, there were priests who blew silver trumpets. And when they blew them, even at midnight, Israel got up and moved.

18:48 It's not just enough to pull on a chain from the past. Those of us who do this thing need to hear something in the present. But, but, but, and I'm closer to this than not. In Philippians 3, Paul said, we press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call. Not only behind him like an anchor and alongside him like a trumpet, but the closer he got to it, something pulling him forward.

19:25 That Jesuit anthropologist, Teilhard de Chardon, called it the omega point. He said that Christ is not only behind us and alongside us, but he's out there in the future pulling us toward him. And I can assure you, because I'm closer to this than not, that there comes a time in ministry when that anchor is further in the past and that pull is closer to the present. I can't explain it. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher, was a cardiologist. He was on the team of Lord Thomas Jeeves Hoarder, a baron in England, the number one physician. And as a young man whose destiny was to treat the royal family at Buckingham Palace, Horder had treated every monarch from Edward VII through the current Queen Elizabeth II until she died in 1955 that was his destiny when out of nowhere God called that Welshman to preach and when you stand facing Buckingham Palace his church is two blocks to the left when he heard that call he didn't serve the Queen But he served the king two blocks away.

20:53 And there's no explaining. That sort of thing. Well, anyone with much sense would say what Jeremiah said. I cannot speak for I am a youth. Hebrew word in the R suggests a teenager. A teenager. Maybe 16.

21:19 As Moses and Isaiah and Amos and others can't do this. God brushed it aside and said, don't say that. Your going will be in my sending and your speaking will be in my saying. And that sets the agenda. I'm not confusing myself tonight with Jeremiah. Don't think that. No, no, no. That would be like the flea and the elephants here. The elephant went over a wooden bridge and the whole thing rattled and when they got to the other side, the flea whispered, we really shook that thing, didn't we? No, no, no, no, no. I'm not an egomaniac. I don't think I'm Jeremiah.

22:11 But those of us who do this have to trace our little lives over the lines of those great lives. For God says this is how it is done. that summer 1964 50 years ago this month i got up out of a seat and went forward and told the youth minister john scales god is calling me to preach he said i'm not surprised but those were the days when if you did that in a baptist church they immediately said well get up and show us if you can do it and about two weeks later reverend ira bentley put me up in front of a wednesday night crowd. And I did it. But before I did it, I went to a friend of mine at Arlington Heights High School, Isaac Butterworth. Isaac was a senior. I was a sophomore. He was the only other teenage preacher I knew. And I said, what should I say? And Isaac sternly looked at me and said, don't ask me that. You're not supposed to borrow a message. You're supposed to hear a message and say it.

23:26 Have you ever puzzled over whose word this book is anyway? Verse 1 of chapter 1 says, these are the words of Jeremiah. All right. Verse 4 says, the word of the Lord came to me. Whose word is it after all? If that's a thesis and an antithesis in verse 9, you find the synthesis. The Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth and said, I have put my words into your mouth.

24:06 Now who could say that? What an audacious claim for any little piece of human protoplasm, finite, mortal, on this little planet. Well, I tell you what you can't do. It doesn't say he touched his own mouth. God save us from invented messages. Nor does it say the congregation touched his mouth. It was not an imposed message. Nor did he go have another prophet touch his mouth. No, he said the Lord has put his words in my mouth. That's the mystery of this thing and I don't understand it. I don't understand it. after 50 years. Karl Barth, the great theologian of the 20th century, said there's threefold form of the Word of God. Barth said it, that Swiss theologian, the living Word, Jesus. The written Word, Scripture, but right alongside of it, he said the preached Word. And the great confession, the Reformed Church, still in print, is the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God for the people of God.

25:22 When preaching really takes place, it turns wasness into isness. Thenness into nowness. Theirness into hereness. And the word of God takes flight. But did you notice in verse 9 the order there? The Lord said, I have put my words in your mouth.

25:46 One of the greatest concerns of any of us who do that is that we not flip that script. and say, God, I've put my words in your mouth. We might do well to read the book by Michael Horton called Christless Christianity, in which he indicts a good deal of contemporary preaching for being moralistic, therapeutic, deism. or more profoundly the words of Richard Niebuhr who famously said of some preaching it is a God without wrath preaching to people without sin in a kingdom with no judgment under the ministration of a Christ without a cross if I were to make one appeal to anyone preaching here give your life to the proclamation of the living Christ through the word of God not the banalities of a mere moralism, not a truncated gospel that gets up and gives dime store therapy on Sunday, or not an absentee God who is a deistic God over there somewhere if I need him, but rather proclaim the rich fullness of the living, saving, redeeming word of God.

27:18 You know, I say, well, how does that happen? The Greeks had a harp called the Aeolian harp, named for Aeolus, the god of the wind. There in the Greek islands, they would put them on the mountainsides, and when the Mediterranean winds blew. It would vibrate the strings and make strange music as the winds blew. What an interesting thing. One of the church fathers said that's how God works in the proclaiming of his word. God gives the wind, but he has to have someone put up the harp and catch the wind. No human can make the wind blow.

28:13 But every now and then he puts his hand on a poor mortal and says, if you'll stand up and hold the harp, I'll make the wind blow. Phillips Brooks, that great rector of Trinity Church in Boston, first lecture of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale, gave the most famous definition that every one of you preachers knows about preaching. It is God's truth through human personality. It is not truth without personality, and it's not personality without truth. that is God makes the wind blow it blows across a mystic like John who gives us a gospel that is so different from Mark whose Lord is always in a hurry immediately blows across a mind like Paul who gives us the logic of a book of Romans truth through personality but wait a minute you not only said you're speaking will be in my saying to this objection that the teenager gave him.

29:16 He said, your going will be in my sending. As if to say, Jeremiah, you speak the word, and I'll worry about the venue. His venue was over nations and over kingdoms.

29:37 When I was 16 years old, and they gave me that license to preach 50 years ago this month, The first place I went to preach was some older members took me downtown to a rescue mission it was called. A mission where inebriates from the street would come in Sunday morning and had to endure a sermon before they got breakfast and a bed. I often wonder what those men thought looking at that wise 16 year old telling about all the trials of life My friends would take me to the Piccadilly cafeteria and they would dissect my sermon, and I tried to do better the next week. And then they took me to care facilities, what we called then rest homes, perhaps. And with everyone in there asleep, I would preach.

30:36 And I remember once in my 16 year old preaching, I said we need to wake up to the truth of the gospel. And I went to little churches named Valley View or Post Oak, Texas in Jack County or places that were so little they didn't even have a town, Wind Hill, Mountain Home, and preached youth revivals. And they listened to me. And from that day until now, God has been responsible for the venues. When I came to Baylor University as a 17-year-old, I was just sure that First Baptist or Columbus would recognize it and ask me to preach the first Sunday I hid town. Where I preached was in the McLennan County Jail.

31:34 To the prisoners on Sunday morning at sunrise and at Kate Ross Homes on South 12th Street, government housing, I'd play an old upright piano. I was piano player and preacher. And after double-clutching that old upright and singing, There's Power in the Blood, I would get up and try to preach. I've learned to leave the venue in his hands. I want to thank a member of the Bailey family. For now, the better part of 20 years ago, when I wondered where my next venue would be, the late Reverend Dr. E.K. Bailey asked me to come into the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas. I thought I was going to a seminar with 20 preachers. I walked in and there were a thousand African American preachers and something said, you better preach.

32:32 And not only one of the most unusual things in my life, but one of the most unusual things in the kingdom of God in America grew out of that room. I don't know how the venue happens, it just happens. Come close to me a second. I made a deal with the Lord half a ministry ago after a lot of disruption in my life that I wouldn't go anywhere that I wasn't asked. In the last 10 years, he's kept faith with the venue, preaching 200 times in 20 states a year. He's given the venue. I was talking with a famous evangelist who had fallen in the midst of ministry and we were helping get back up. And I said, I never tried to kick any door open. He said, I don't either, Gregory, but I put WD-40 on the hinges. I've learned.

33:38 You don't have to do that. The consignment is his. To this teenager two and a half millennia ago, he said, I'm going to put you before nations and kingdoms. I expect if Jeremiah went back to Anathos and said, guess what God told me? A tiny village in the smallest tribe of a little nation about to vanish. They would have probably said, that's okay, son. You'll be better. But he did. And the fact that 2,500 years later, in a place that he could never imagine, where reading his words validates that. God told him that when the Acropolis in Athens was a bare hill and the Parthenon was not even in the blueprints. God told him that when Rome was a city not even dreaming of being an empire. The Acropolis is in ruins and Rome long gone. But I can assure you over this planet today millions of people read something written by that teenager, Jeremiah.

35:04 The proof of it is right here in our presence and in this book. Time fails me in this autumn of ministry. I look back over a lifetime where he has been good to give me wonderful venues that I feel like I never deserved.

35:30 Preaching 38,000 people at the Southern Baptist Convention in a crisis, pleading with them for unity, preaching throngs of people at conferences across this country, preaching at the Baptist World Alliance and so on. But you know, in the autumn of ministry, all of those kind of run together. they're suffused with a distant light quite frankly sometimes when I think of them I just feel tired those were good but if I could imitate Haddon Robinson the great preacher for a moment because I'm closer to this than not I am it's realistic standing in that day before the one who called me don't know how it'll be maybe they start with the A's and go down to the G's they'll get down to the G's here it is Gregory Gregory Maybe a voice out of the light saying, Summer, summer, Gregory, summer.

36:45 Oh, yes, summer. Summer, that's when I preached the Southern Baptist Convention in San Antonio. He may say, I don't know, I didn't go that year. I don't know. But, but, but. No, Gregory, summer. Oh, oh no, that's when I preached in the Olympic Stadium in Seoul to the Baptist World Alliance. He said, well, Gregory, I was there, but I didn't pay any attention to what you said. I was with the people from Bangladesh trying to help them be Baptists. Ah, summer! Yeah, that's when I turned in my dissertation for Ph.D. at Bailey. Biblical hermeneutic of Patristic Kiliast, Papias Herapolis through Justin. He might say, I never understood that time.

37:47 Summer. I don't know what summer. And he would say you were 20 years old. and you'd bought an old school bus at the Edgefield Baptist Church and you and Deacon Donaldson took spray paint and painted the old used bus blue and then some stencils and wrote Edgefield Baptist Church. Yeah, I remember.

38:28 Do you remember that on a Saturday just north of Interstate 35 he walked up 8th Street South Waco that time a lot of substandard I remember it was hot that day do you remember going up an alley yeah I do it was when they really had alleys deep ruts fetid water stench do you remember when the little boy came out of the back door because he lived in the back?

39:07 And he sat down on a broken wooden porch. Yeah, yeah, I remember. And you took a little New Testament and told him about Jesus. And he rode your bus and Sunday he came forward and you baptized him. Yeah. and he'll say that's what I remember