WHEN PULPIT HUMOR IS HONORABLE

Carnal humor, in the form of foolish talking, jesting and joke telling is never appropriate in the pulpit. It’s detrimental to the purposes of preaching, diminishes its power, and has a denigrating effect on all that is associated with the pulpit. Preachers who use it should stop using it and those who don’t use it should never start. But it would be wrong to throw a blanket indictment over all humor used in the ministry of the Word of God as being sinful. There is humor that is sinful, and serves the purposes of Satan, and there is humor, used in preaching and teaching that is sanctified by, for and to the purposes, of God.

Sanctified pulpit humor, unlike sinful pulpit humor is complementary and conducive to the purposes of preaching. It can be wielded by the Holy Spirit like a gardener’s hoe at the beginning of a sermon to prepare easier, deeper, entry into hearts of what is to come, and used like a tool at the end of a sermon to tamp seed already sown, more solidly deeply into hearts. But it is the prerogative of the Holy Spirit to use humor through him when and as He sees fit to do so. Humor is not something for preachers to calculatedly use as a mechanism to achieve effect.

Dr. John Broadus (1827-1895), pastor, author, and founder and second president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was considered by Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) to be “the greatest of living preachers,” He summed up the distinction between sanctified and sinful pulpit humor fairly well when he wrote the following:

“When humor is employed in preaching, it ought to be an incidental thing, and manifestly

unstudied. It is so natural for some men to indulge in quaint, and even in very odd sayings,

they so promptly and easily fall back into their prevailing seriousness that the humorous

remarks are unobjectionable and sometimes, through well-known relation between

humor and pathos, they heighten the effect. But an effort to be amusing, anything odd

that appears to have been calculated, is felt to be incompatible with genuine

seriousness and solemnity.'

Three are three things generally speaking that identify “sanctified” humor. In the first place it is natural. It is spontaneous. It is humor that does not impress listeners as having been contrived or “worked at.” Much humor in the pulpit today comes across as planned and canned, right down to pauses for effect and facial expressions that are aimed at, and waiting for, a laugh. Premeditated jokes and foolish jesting in the pulpit are among those things that come out of a preacher’s mouth about which James 3:10 says, “My brethren, these things ought not so to be.”

Secondly, sanctified humor is relatively scarce, in the sense that those who use it don’t use it very often. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to find examples in the Bible, of a prophet, apostle or any other preacher incorporating humor into his message (Do not confuse the scathing sarcasm used then by these preachers with the silly slapstick of today's funny men in pulpits). It’s also hard, if not next to impossible, to find instances where people (other than wicked scorners) laughed at something said by a preacher. Church history and the biographies and printed sermons of preachers indicate, up until very recent times, that while there was some use of sanctified humor by preachers, this was comparatively rare. The use of unsanctified humor by preachers was something virtually unheard of and unimagined; again, until this modern day.

Thirdly, really sanctified and appropriate pulpit humor always proves itself to be that which is “meet for the master’s use" (2 Tim. 2:21). Sanctified humor is validated by the good, positive, spiritual effect that results when and where it’s used.. Furthermore, sanctified humor is never offensive to spiritually minded people, and rarely offensive to anyone else. It doesn’t alienate people from, but instead attracts people’s attention more closely to, truth preached.

Many famous preachers, undeniably pious men who were greatly used of God such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, D. L. Moody and others frequently incorporated humor into their preaching. This is true even of the puritan preachers, who are labelled en masse as “humorless” by those who know the least about them. Nothing, in fact, could be farther from the truth. Some of the puritans, like some preachers today, were austere to a fault, but a great many of the most renowned of them  demonstrated a wonderful and blessed sense of humor and the ability to use it effectively in the ministry of God’s Word.

God knows all about the intricacies of personality men have when He calls them into the ministry, and His intention is to use these intricacies of personality to suit His own purpose. But before this can happen, a preacher’s personality and temperament must be sanctified: “Be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord” (Isa. 52:11). Paul's understanding of this can be seen in the priority he assigned to his own personal sanctification: “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway (1 Cor. 9:27).

Men who are by nature, fun-loving, lighthearted, men to whom laughter comes easy and the ability to provoke others to laughter comes just as easily, are a blessing, but they need to be careful to avoid sinful excess of expression relative to this part of their personality. Good men of God know that the humorous part of their personality that God wants to use to His glory and man’s good is something that the devil wants to highjack as often as he can to serve his own purposes.

Such men are aware of their tendencies toward, and how easily they could caught up in, “foolish talking [and] jesting, which are not convenient” and that this sin could “easily beset” them, weigh their ministries down spiritually, and make them stumbling blocks to those to whom they minister. They are especially careful to bring their flesh into subjection in this area knowing that if a man will “purge himself from these … he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified and meet for the master’s use, and prepared for every good work” (2 Tim. 2:21).