Preach It with Authority
One other verse is important here because it provides a further clue as to how the church should proclaim the Word. Paul instructed Titus, his other pastoral representative, who was assigned to the island of Crete, "These things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you" (Titus 2:15). The church's preaching must be done with authority because in the Bible we have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
We keep coming back to this issue of truth because it is rapidly becoming a lost concept in our world. And since 9/11 the intense focus on Islam and the Muslim world has given us a new truth challenge to contend with. This is the charge that we Christians are being arrogant and bigoted when we claim that the Bible is the only true Word of God. After all, the Muslims and other religious people have their own "holy books" too.
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We could talk about all the evidence that supports the Bible's truth claims, but we'll save that for a study of the Bible itself. The point here is that what the Bible calls authoritative preaching of the Word is now considered by the world at large to be biased and even hate-filled preaching.
Actually, this problem isn't all that new, because Paul and Timothy also lived in a world that was hostile to absolute truth. First-century Ephesus was a culture of relativism, but Paul's instruction to the church there was to preach the Word when people liked it and when they didn't, when they wanted to hear the truth and when they didn't.
No pastor who is preaching the Word needs to apologize for the message. People need an absolute and absolutely reliable standard by which to measure their lives. I illustrated this at church one Sunday morning by reading the time on my watch and then asking several people in the congregation what time they had. One person's watch agreed with mine, but others were several minutes different. One guy's watch wasn't even close to the time, making me wonder where he had been.
But the point I made was that it didn't really matter whether we all agreed among ourselves, because none of us on our own had the exact time. That is kept by the government's atomic clock in Colorado, which sets the official time for the nation. Without that we could argue all day about the right time. But once the standard is set, we have to adjust to it. The church must proclaim God's Word with authority so everyone is on the same page when it comes to God's standard.
Having seen what, when, and how the church is to carry out its ministry of proclamation, we're ready to answer the why of the matter.
Why must we preach the Word in all of its convicting and teaching power? Because people need to hear the truth and feed on healthy spiritual doctrine, and because they aren't likely to get this if left on their own.