“And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”-1 Corinthians 2:4-5
The buzz around artificial intelligence is real and rampant. As the pros and cons are laid before us (whether we like it or not), one cannot help but wonder what will come from this new technology. While mankind rarely misses an opportunity to find ease and convenience, one cannot help but wonder where this will fit into the life of the Bible believing Christian and the role of preaching the everlasting gospel.
In first Corinthians two, the Apostle Paul makes plain the driving force of his preaching. What moved people to convert and come to Christ was not a matter of powerful oration, or a calibrated sales pitch. Nor was it his sound presentation of facts or logic. It was something, but it wasn’t that! Then what was it? It was the power of God. Herein the Apostle Paul confesses this so that our faith will not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. If preaching was merely the presentation of facts, then AI could rally them together and populate a page within a fraction of a second. It could search the Bible and scavenge the web to synthesize the key pillars of doctrine and present them to the reader. However, God did not choose the foolishness of presentation, he chose the foolishness of preaching. Preaching is not in man’s wisdom. The Word must go forth with power. There is something supernatural that must accompany the proclamation of the Word of God which can only come from an intimacy with God. Many a man has walked into the pulpit or sat down with a pen and paper, trusting in his personality to make up for his neglect of the prayer room. His charisma, mixed with a few positive scriptures to patchwork together a “message” for the people. While the hearers may have been instructed, they were not converted. As Lenord Ravenhill once said: “preaching is thirty minutes to raise the dead.” This cannot be done with charisma or human personality, only by the Spirit, and no matter the sophistication of the chat bot, there can be no connection between the bot and God. You cannot circumvent the personal time with God. As Moses ventured up the mount to sit before God, we must go up. As Christ prayed and fasted on a mountain side, we too must take our station there “and wait for thee”. It is not to say that words have no place in preaching. For even Christ himself said: “heaven and earth shall pass but my words shall not pass.” What the Apostle is saying is that the message is as much about the man, as the message. Not the ability of the man, but the surrendering of him. My speech, my preaching. He is a man that has surrendered to the reality that the well spring that he received, this water of life, came from a depth much deeper than human wisdom. It is his only in the capacity that God has called him into the ministry by a sacred calling, and he is blessed to labor as such. It came from God, delivered by man. Preaching is as much about the man as the message. He sat with God, and waited for a word from God. Then preached it to the people and it saved them that believed. This will never change, and this is what is foolish to the world.
While many an orator would never measure up to the sophistication of the chatbots and the brain of millions training them, the ones who employ these bots to build sermons will never measure up to the power of the preacher who waits before God. The sophistication of the bots and the brains of millions will never come close to the agent of the Holy Ghost and its fruitful working within the heart of man. So, will ChatGPT do your preaching?
