Proverbs 26:6 Fools need not apply

Sending a message by the hands of a fool is like cutting off one’s feet or drinking poison.

It is important that a preacher is not a fool, that is a moral reprobate, one who is unable to do what he is asked. Putting a fool in the pulpit to preach is like cutting off your feet so that you cannot walk or drinking poison so that you will no longer live. A preacher is meant to bring a message from God. If he is a fool he will be unable to do so. Preachers need, therefore, to be converted men who are properly trained and who thoroughly prepare to preach.

Considering the call to the ministry R L Dabney gives balance to this point by writing that while on one hand

we freely assent that Christ has no use for fools in the pulpit. The impotent, beggarly, confused understanding should not undertake to teach other minds. And the very noblest capacities are desirable, and will find ample scope in this glorious work.

Nevertheless some young men wrongly

excuse themselves by profess­ing a doubt whether they have natural talents adequate to so responsible a work as the ministry

(Dabney that's he fears that "in many cases, if their friends were to concur candidly in this doubt, their vexation would betray the insincerity of the pretended hu­mility"!).

He goes on to say that

nothing more than respectable good sense and justness of mind is requisite to secure such usefulness in the ministry as should decide any pious heart, if that mind is used to the best advantage. Let the heart be warmed and en­nobled with Christian love, the good common mind will be ex­panded and invigorated, and a conscientious diligence will give it an indefinite and constant improvement. Love and labour will make the small mind great.

He refers to a then recent memoir of Dr. Daniel Baker as containing an instructive testimony on the point. "His energy and success in the gospel" Dabney says

led some to remark how emi­nent he might have been in worldly pursuits; what a millionaire, if a merchant; how eloquent, if a lawyer; how popular, if a statesman! But his biographer, who is his own son, says: “No; it was his religion that was his strength; grace alone made him great.” Blessed be God, the church has often found that plain talents, faithfully improved for God, by love and zeal, have ac­complished the largest good.

Dabney concludes

Let the young Christian, then, judge his own qualification by these truths. It is clear that, in the general, the church must always expect to find her ministers precisely among those who honestly appraise their talents mod­erately. For who would like to see the young Christian come forward and say “that he felt called to preach because he con­sidered himself so smart!”