If the Lord commands us to serve him, he will give us the gifts that we lack. We must not focus on our perceived weaknesses, or make them an excuse for not obeying; we must focus on his strength. ‘So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase’ (1 Corinthians 3:7).
No refusal is acceptable. As a preacher said many years ago, believers are all called ‘to do and to enable to do’. If you cannot speak then you can enable others to speak. We are all one family in the church, doing or enabling, and if we cannot do, we can pray, and we can support, and we can enable. Every Christian believer has a calling which God has given to them, and God will not take a refusal from us. ‘I don't want to do this’ – what a terrible thing! ‘Whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.’
That goes for believers in every age. The whole problem that strikes us again and again through the history of the Christian church is this burning need for something that will make people sit up and take notice. So various ideas come up. How can you reach the people unless you make it a vast crusade of some kind, and you have a choir of thousands, and the whole thing is so big and you have organised so much support that you can get it on the radio and the television and all the rest of it. Without all this, you cannot move surely! And the same spirit, that quite reasonably in a way, struck Jeremiah comes up repeatedly in Christian life and witness. When we preach, when we teach in Sunday School, we are not here to tell jokes, or to tell irrelevant stories. The gospel is not to be communicated by singing. We do sing; we sing praise to God, and sometimes people are moved by the words of the song. But the preacher’s job is not to sing to people, and have great choirs and musical arrangements. Our task is to declare what God has told us to declare. We are proclaimers. The work of the gospel is a proclaiming work, not an entertaining work, not a work where we search for all sorts of other media rather than speaking, teaching, preaching. Not psychological ideas for straightening out people's lives, but the word of God: all our counselling comes from there. That is what God instructs Jeremiah to do from the very beginning. ‘Whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.’