Ending Well

I have run out of bulletin material for the secretary and she is pressing me to do that task. I have been preaching through the Gospel of Matthew. I am on the 25^th chapter, and will preach on our Lord’s great judgment message of identificational ethics where He becomes the hungry and the others who are wounded by a broken world. This is truly the “end times” or eschatological truth of the Gospel. So, I will finish Matthew with this passage. I had intended to suspend the Matthew series for Advent and take it up again after Epiphany. That can’t happen.

Because of the circumstances that have arisen in the congregation I serve which is an extension of the dynamic in the PC(USA). It is likely that January will be my last month of ministry. It might happen at the beginning or end of the month, but, after ten years here and thirty-two year total, the end of my current pastorate and ministerial career is coming to a close. I will always be a Christian and thereby a disciple of Jesus Christ. I will always, with every Christian, seek to demonstrate the presence of God in my life as a witness to our Savior. Where that calling will lead I do not know. Not only is a chapter ending but the whole volume of books entitled “The Pastoral Work of Rev. Gary W. Miller” will soon be over. I remain startled by the truth.

I have thirteen more sermons to preach. I rarely preach a topic series but that would work best. Even with a topic, I want to exposit a single text and allow the word of God to inform the message and not vice versa. I think I might preach on the tenets of the Apostles Creed. Calvin structures his Institutes on the tenets of that Creed, the Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. I began my pastorate here preaching a series of these documents and the five points of Calvinism. Perhaps it would be fitting to revisit at least part of that series. No, I don’t preach from a manuscript and I do not file my outlines, so I will start fresh. I see a sermon as more akin to Jazz than Classical music. 

At the core of it all, I am simply a messenger boy sent by his Master to deliver the truth of Another. I think there is no place from novelty in the content of that message. The goal is not novelty but clarity. It is also persuasion. But persuasion needs to be secondary to the force of clarity. Only God can persuade the sinner to believe and the saved to believe with greater earnest. Yes, that’s it! It is the core set of Christian truths that will end my preaching ministry, if our Lord wills it.