Kudos to Mrs. Gaunt

I was on a run, listening to Issues, Etc.™ on my iPod. As I hurdled a downed tree on the trail, Pastor Gaunt was speaking about his sermon preparation. What he said brought tears to my eyes, although it was really his wife’s words that got to me:

There’s so many times when I’m preparing [my sermon], usually late on Saturday night. So I’m kind of a Sabbatarian really. I do all my work - I rest on Friday night, goofing around. Then I just work like a madman on Saturday trying to get ready for the next morning. And I’m feeling like I don’t have it. I don’t have anything there. And it’s at that time that my wife will say “Just go in and preach the Gospel. Tell the people the Gospel. And you can do that.” “You know, you’re right.”

It is always the Gospel that aching souls need to hear – sinners who have first been convicted by the preaching of the Law. But it’s not the pastor who is speaking those words of forgiveness in the Gospel, it is Jesus Christ himself. Through the Word, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the pastor’s voice delivers what no other word could ever deliver, forgiveness, life, and salvation. As Jesus says:

The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life (John 6:63b, ESV).

You can never stray by sticking to Mrs. Gaunt’s advice: “Just go in and preach the Gospel. Tell the people the Gospel.”

And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:11-13, ESV).

Pastor Doug Gaunt is the undershepherd at Trinity Lutheran Church in Orchard Farms, Missouri. This was an excellent show - a pastor’s roundtable on the Third Commandment, which you can listen to here: