"You Just Swing The Club"
The fellow who started me to playing golf and gave me my first instructions in that game was an expert. He had been playing professionally and knew all there is to know about golf. He didn't help me much, but it wasn't his fault. One day, after seeing me make a particularly bad shot, he said, "Preacher, you are trying to guide the ball. Don't do that. Just swing the club like I showed you, and let the club do the work. If you swing the club right, you don't need to worry about where the ball will go."
I have thought about that statement many times, and how aptly the principle applies to doing the Lord's work. If we preach the truth faithfully, we need have no fear of the results. In Isaiah 55, God speaks of his word on this wise: "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither but watereth the earth and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth. It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."
We are not always satisfied with the results we see when we preach the word, so we presumptuously try to help it out with our human arrangements, and when we do we make ourselves ridiculous and manifest a lack of confidence in the all sufficiency of God's ways. We need to learn the lesson that the golf player tried to teach me: Swing the club (preach the word) and let it do the work. The power is in the word, not in the preacher. If we preachers could all convince ourselves of this fact, we would be a long way toward straightening up the mess that ambitious and unstable men have made in the church in the last decade or two. The church is full of people who are not converted to Christ; who do not know the difference between the church and a denomination, between truth and error. This is due, partly at least, to the fact that they have been "converted" by something other than the word of God. God said, "My word will accomplish that which I please." If a man can't be "brought in" by preaching of that word, then it does not please God for him to be "brought in." And when we bring him in with anything else we haven't helped him any, and we may have done the Lord's church a lot of harm. And any church trouble that can't be settled by the word of God just can't be settled. It can be whitewashed with pretense and politics, but there is a difference between whitewashed and settled. The church that is properly taught and properly disciplined will grow as God wants it to grow. Any other 'growth will be cancerous. Cancer is nothing more than an unnatural growth of cells. So let us just "swing the club" and leave the results with God.
LaPorte, Texas