Too Many Teachers! (James 3:1)

You know that I’m a great admirer of Charles Spurgeon. Spurgeon is probably the greatest English-speaking preacher who ever lived. He preached personally to more than 10,000,000 people in his lifetime, and his sermons were read every week as far away as American and Australia. He wrote dozens of books. He started very large orphanages. He pastored the largest church in the world. Amazingly, none of this seems to have gone to his head, and he stuck faithful to the Bible to the end.

One of Spurgeon’s most lasting accomplishments was starting a Bible college called “The Pastor’s College.” It really was a new kind of school, and it was the forerunner for Bible colleges that are all over the place today. The Pastor’s College trained over a thousand pastors who ministered all over the world.

When I was reading one of the biographies of Spurgeon many years ago, one thing stood out to me about this pastor’s college: Before anyone could join the pastor’s college and study to be a pastor, Spurgeon had to hear them preach. If they didn’t have a natural ability to preach, then Spurgeon wouldn’t educate them. He actually turned away a bunch of people from his college—not because they didn’t have character or good grades, but because they didn’t have preaching ability.

I always thought that was strange. When I went to Bible college, we used to joke that they would take anyone. When I was coming up, it seemed like there was a great deal of pressure to become a preacher. If you were a young man in the church and didn’t become a preacher, it was almost like you were a lesser Christian or something.

Our text tonight deals with this subject. It’s just one verse, James 3:1. Let’s read it:

”My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation.” (James 3:1)

---

I want to preach to you tonight on the subject, “Too many preachers.”

Let’s pray and we’ll get into that.

We need more preachers and God-called, Spirit-filled Bible teachers. Jesus only told us to pray for one specific thing, and it was that “we would pray the Lord of the Harvest that He would send forth laborers into His harvest.” We need more missionaries, pastors, and evangelists.

Bu at the same time, we need to apply the brakes because there are many people who want to be a pastor, a missionary, or some other Bible teacher for the wrong reason. There are many people who aren’t qualified. There are many people who aren’t gifted. Some people see being a pastor as an easy life, or they see it as a path to prestige, so they take on what they were never called to do.

Adam Clarke, a preacher and commentary writer from the early 1800s, said this about unqualified preachers:

They have not only sinned in thrusting themselves into that office to which God has never called them, but through their insufficiency, the flocks over whom they have assumed the mastery perish for lack of knowledge, and their blood will God require at the watchman’s hand.

Ouch.

That’s what James here is warning about when he says, “Be not many masters.” The word “masters” is “didaskalos.” It’s the word that we get “didactic” from. It’s a word that generally means “teachers,” but almost always in the New Testament, it’s talking about religious preachers.

So what James is saying here is, “Don’t all of you try to be the preacher, and don’t all of you try to be the Bible teacher.”

So I’m going to give you a bunch of points tonight on this theme, but I’m going to break it into two main categories:

1. The limiting of preachers.
2. The liability of preachers.

So let’s look at the first point:

1. The limiting of preachers.

Why should we limit who is and isn’t a preacher? The Bible actually has a lot to say about this.

Just in the New Testament, consider all the damage that was done by false or unqualified preachers:

• In Acts 15:24, a group of preachers started adding the works of the law to Christianity, and they perverted the gospel and confused a lot of people. Paul actually had to write the book of Galatians in response to these false teachers.
• In Romans 2:17-29, it talks about preachers and teachers whose lives don’t match up to their message and how powerless and pointless that is.
• In 1 Timothy 1:6-7 it says:

”6 From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling; 7 Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.”

So some people were preachers who had no idea what they were talking about, and it caused problems in the early church.

• In 2 Timothy 4:3, it talks about how in the last days there would be preachers who scratched people’s ears, telling them what they want to hear rather than what the word of God says.

In other words, even in the Bible, even when Christianity was still very new, there were already lots of preachers who shouldn’t have been preachers, and they caused damage. They perverted the truth; they confused people; they left people hungry for knowledge; they told people lies. It’s a bad deal.

That’s just the New Testament. All you have to do is read the prophetical books to see how often it references the false prophets and phony preachers in the Old Testament. For every Elijah, there is a Balaam. For every Aaron, their is a Korah. For every Jeremiah, there is a clown telling people exactly what they want to hear.

So James is saying, “Don’t every one of you try to be preachers or Bible teachers. Be very cautious about this. Make sure you are qualified. Make sure you know what you are getting into.”

The New Testament has several things to say about the qualifications for preachers, let me give you three of them:

First, preachers should have an ability to actually teach and preach. 1 Timothy 3:2 says that pastors need to be “apt to teach.” That means they should actually have preaching ability. They should be able to stand in front of people to speak and make sense.

This is why Spurgeon wouldn’t take people into his college until he heard them preach. He recognized that there are some people who have no business being preachers because they just can’t preach. They mumble and jumble; they aren’t coherent; they shrink up when they are in front of people.

I’m sure you know people who are like this. There are people who tell themselves they that are preachers or called to pastor but who can’t preach. It’s sad.

A second thing the New Testament teaches us about teachers is that they should labor in their teaching. 2 Timothy 2:15-16 says:

”15 Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 16 But shun profane [and] vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness.”

1 Timothy 5:15 says:

”Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who labour in the word and doctrine.”

Preaching is work. It’s labor. You have to labor in study. You have to read constantly. You have to make sure you aren’t misrepresenting God’s word and that you are “rightly dividing the word of truth.” You have to labor to understand what the Bible actually is saying, and then you have to labor to make it understandable to the people you are preaching to.

It takes hours and hours of work. If a preacher is faithful, what you see when you hear a sermon is the tip of the iceberg.

Sometimes people ask me what it’s like being a preacher, and I tell them it’s like having to write three college term papers every week, and then stand and deliver them to the same people week in and week out without boring them. That is hard!

A third thing you need to know about being a preacher is that you shouldn’t be a novice. You shouldn’t rush into it. Sometimes people get saved, and we try to make them preachers almost right away. That’s usually a terrible idea. Maybe we try to make people into pastors when they are still very, very young. There have been great young preachers. Charles Spurgeon starting pastoring when he was 17. The evangelist James Stewart was preaching to great crowds when he was much younger than that. I think Pastor Sexton was still in his teens when he started pastoring.

But for every Charles Spurgeon, Clarence Sexton, or James Stewart, there are dozens of young men who aren’t ready yet, who rush into preaching too soon, and who make a mess of it.

Man, I thought I was the cat’s meow when I was 22. I was hot stuff. I was so frustrated because I didn’t get to preach more. I was constantly trying to jump out of the oven before I was done.

That seems like a long time ago, and I’m a much worse preacher than I was then. I’ve got a long way to go. I’m grateful to God that He surrounded me with wise people like Pastor Scallions who didn’t let me rush out as a novice.

I had this friend many years ago who got saved in his twenties. He had no church background, but man, he was zealous. He almost immediately answered the call to preach, and it wasn’t a year later he was trying to leave and go out on his own and start a church. You can guess how that went.

So before you rush into a call to the ministry, or before you let someone else rush into a call to the ministry, know what you are getting into. Make sure you actually have ability. Make sure you know that it’s going to be studying, writing, delivering, repeating, every day, every week for a long, long time. Make sure that you know that it’s going to require a long preparation time and that you can’t jump in as a novice.

Make sure you are qualified. ”Be not many masters.”

Now, the second half of the verse tells us why we shouldn’t all rush into being preachers.

”knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation.”

The first point was the limiting of preachers. The second point is...

2. The liability of preachers.

In other words, James just didn’t say, “Don’t all of you rush to be preachers.” He gave us a reason: “Preachers will be held liable for their preaching. “ Put another way: “God is going to hold preachers responsible in a way that others are not.”

Think about it this way: Doctors have a greater liability than we do. If they are preforming surgery and prescribing medicine, they are dealing with some powerful stuff. They can miss a cancer diagnosis, or they can prescribe the wrong medicine that ruins your life. They can cut out the wrong part in surgery and leave you impaired for life.

With the privilege of being a doctor comes a great responsibility.

Years ago, there was a horrific school bus accident in the news (I think it was in Tennessee). The driver had a history of reckless driving. He’d been censured many times before. One day he was driving like an idiot with a bus full of kids and ended up killing many of them. That bus driver has a powerful tool—a huge bus—and a huge responsibility—the lives of precious children. He’s going to live the rest of his life with the stain and responsibility of his wrongdoing.

The specific point James is making here is that teachers and preachers have one main tool and it’s a powerful one: The tongue. Just like a doctor can do lots of damage with a prescription sheet and a bus driver can kill with a bus, anybody can cause lots of damage with their tongue.

Whoever came up with “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” needs to be hurt with sticks and stones because words can do lots and lots of damage.

All of us, whether we are a preacher or not, need to work on controlling our tongue. That’s what next week’s message is about, but those of us who are preachers we have to be extra careful because this “fire that no man can tame” is our main tool.

And we are going to stand before God and be judged for how we use it. We have power, but with that power comes the greater opportunity to mess up and hurt people.

So what are the lessons here, let me give them to you and be done:

1. If you ever feel “called to preach,” make very, very sure that it is God calling you, and that it isn’t motivated by ego or some other thing.
2. If you are teaching the word of God—whether it is in a Sunday School class or behind a pulpit—remember that you have power and work hard at it. Be careful what you say.
3. Remember that all of us are going to give an account to God for our work on this earth. Preachers and Bible teachers will have a higher level of accountability.