Christian Cartoon: THE PREACHER

Everyone wants to be heard.  Everyone has a voice.  Everyone has a message.  Everyone has an opinion.  Everyone…

But few have a pulpit…or an audience..or a soapbox…or a blog…or a tribe…or even a listener within an earshot who cares at all about what they have to say.

As a pastor, a guest preacher, a volunteer prison chaplain, I have personally had my own moments when I felt as though everyone sitting in the audience couldn’t care less about what I was saying.

In fact, one of the first sermons I ever preached in my life was inside a jail facility to about 100 inmates.  Somewhere in the middle of my sermon, a huge black man stood up and yelled, “You’re boring me!”  (Needless to say, I wanted to crawl under a rock at that moment.)

It is strange sometimes when I speak, because we preachers are looking at your faces, and wacky facial expressions, and you’re telling us loads and loads and loads about what you’re thinking at that moment.

In fact, I have even asked my wife once or twice on the way home from church why she was making weird faces while I was preaching.  Come to find out, she was merely thinking about and considering what I had to say.  My, how looks can be deceiving!

But I’ve also sat in plenty of pews where I found myself daydreaming and otherwise disinterested in what the preacher was saying at that moment.  Shame on me!

But also shame on us preachers for making God’s awesome and inspired Scripture seem almost mundane.  God’s Word is living and breathing and sharper than any two-edged sword.  It is like a lion, and we preachers simple need to open the cage and let the King loose!

Below is a picture I drew that makes me think about how we (we who are sitting in the pews) often feel when someone is teaching God’s Word to us.  Certainly, this is a broad generalization and wouldn’t apply to you (perish the thought!), but I think it has happened to a few other people sitting in the pew next to you.

Wouldn’t you agree?

I call this picture, The Preacher.

[stextbox id=”custom”]Let me know what you think about this one.  Also, if you liked it, please consider using the social sharers off to the side there and send it around via Twitter, “LIKE” in on your Facebook page, Google+ it, or maybe even post it on StumbleUpon.  God bless![/stextbox]