His First Sermon Flopped

The world-famed Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones candidly shared how his very first sermon flopped: “The little church was filled with my relatives and friends, all anxious that the young man should do well.

I had prepared for three weeks, for I was to be God’s lawyer and argue His case well. I started on rather a high key and after a half dozen sentences used a word I had never used before and I have never used since: indifferentism.

Whereupon a college girl smiled and put down her head. “Her smiling so upset me that when I came back to the thread of my discourse it was gone.

My mind was an absolute blank. I stood there clutching for something to say. Finally I blurted out ‘I am very sorry, but I have forgotten my sermon,’ and I started for my seat in shame and confusion.

“As I was about to sit down, the Inner Voice said: ‘Haven’t I done anything for you? If so, couldn’t you tell that?’ I responded to this suggestion and stepped down in front of the pulpit-I felt I didn’t belong behind it-and said, ‘Friends, I see I can’t preach, but you know what Christ has done for my life, how He has changed me, and though I cannot preach I shall be his witness the rest of my days.’ “At the close a youth came up to me and said he wanted what I had found.

It was a mystery to me then, and it is a mystery to me now that, amid my failure that night, he still saw something he wanted. As he and I knelt together he found it. It marked a profound change in his life, and today he is a pastor, and his daughter is a missionary in Africa. As God’s lawyer, I was a dead failure; as God’s witness, I was a success.

That night marked a change in my conception of the work of the Christian minister-he is to be, not God’s lawyer to argue well for God, but God’s witness, to tell what Grace has done for an unworthy life.”