Being called a "steward" is not enough; one must be a steward. It is not enough to be called a preacher; one must be a preacher. And the true preacher, Paul tells us, honors the commission from God to handle and herald the divine "mysteries," the startling, saving, sustaining truths of the gospel. Stewards are highly privileged persons.
Among the many memorable and insightful cartoons Charles Schulz created in his "Peanuts" series, there is that now-classic one that shows Charlie Brown striking out while at bat. As Charlie walked away from the plate, disgusted with himself, he saw Lucy seated on a nearby bench and lamented to her, "I'll never be a Big-League player! I just don't have it! All my life I've dreamed of playing in the Big Leagues, but I know I'll never make it!" Lucy interrupted Charlie's lament with the comment that he was thinking too far ahead. She suggested that what he needed to do was to set himself some limited, more immediate goals. "Immediate goals?" Charlie asked. "Yes," Lucy replied. She then advised that when he walked out to pitch for the next inning, he should just try to walk out to the mound without falling down!
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How I remember the many Charlie Brown moments when disgust filled me after striking out in the pulpit! What preacher hasn't had such moments? After "striking out" many times early in my ministry, I found encouragement in something Aurelius Augustine (354-430 A.D.), bishop of Hippo, confessed about his preaching efforts. Intent to help a discouraged friend regain inspiration to continue his work with readiness, Augustine wrote On Teaching the Uninitiated, and in that treatise admitted his own felt limitations as a preacher:
"For my part," he wrote, "I am nearly always displeased with my discourse. For I am desirous of something better, which I often inwardly enjoy before I begin to unfold my thought in spoken words; but when I find that my powers of expression come short of my knowledge of the subject, I am sorely disappointed that my tongue has not been able to answer the demands of my mind. For I desire my hearer to understand all that I understand; and I feel that I am not speaking in such a manner as to effect that. This is so chiefly because intuition floods the mind, as it were, with a sudden flash of light, while the expression of it in speech is a slow, drawn-out, and far different process ..."
While each one of us might readily and honestly identify with what Augustine confessed, it is to our shame if we fail to work as diligently at preparing to preach as Augustine continued to do. It is my judgment that in the pulpit work of that noble preacher-theologian, the greatest of the Latin Fathers, we have the best example of the stewardship of preaching since apostolic times. I hardly need to remind you of the extent to which Western Christianity is indebted to Augustine. His book On Christian Doctrine was one of the first manuals addressed to preachers to help their stewardship. The fourth section of that manual treats preaching style, offering Augustine's methods for handling biblical substance, which he discussed in the first three sections of the book. Please note that Augustine gave more space to treating substance, "the mysteries of God" — Scripture — than he did treating style. Augustine wisely kept "first things first."