The Texture Of Preaching
Let’s think of something other than the text and other than the technique. By the texture of the sermon we mean the indefinable yet unmistakable “feel” of it in the moment and event of its contact with those to whom it is directed. Here is climate, spirit, quality. Here is a combination of mood and manner. Here is the distillation of traits and tempers, of broodings and blessings, belonging to the inmost soul of the preacher.
When Paul had his last meeting with the “elders” of the Ephesian church, he said, “Take heed unto … yourselves, and to all the flock” (Acts 20:28). When he wrote his next-to-last message to Timothy, his plea was, “Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:16). Concern for the flock and concern for the faith! But note that in both instances something came first: “yourselves” … “thyself.”
An authentic sermon is, above all, God in projection. It is also, secondarily but importantly, the preacher in projection. There is a species of ministerial failure that can never be redeemed by all the homiletical artistry in the world. It is the preacher himself going unwashed, unhumbled, unsanctified to his task. Richard Baxter, I have no doubt, had this peril in mind when he wrote picturesquely and warningly to his fellows in the high calling: “Many a tailor goes in rags, that maketh costly clothes for others; and many a cook scarcely licks his fingers, when he hath dressed for others the most costly dishes.” The text? Appropriate enough. The technique? Skillful enough. But the texture? Flawed.
With what choice threads is an authentic texture woven?
One of them, surely, is serenity. Who has not felt that back of the turbulence and vastness of great music are the long hours of quiet brooding through which the composer has passed. It is not otherwise with preaching. Back of our most impassioned utterances, if they be more than “sounding brass,” must be many a calm interlude in which the soul of the preacher is hushed into an awful stillness before the Lord.
Men who are all frenzy in the parish and mostly fizz in the pulpit need an Elijah experience of being set aside and of learning to hear “the still small voice.” Even in a day when “Whirl is king,” it is possible to find an answer to our prayer:
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.
Or think of humility. Subtle as it is splendid, there is no replacement for it in the fabric of preaching.
“I can think,” says Paul Scherer, “of no more insidious or deadly foe than self-esteem, the habit so many people have of being ‘starched before they are washed.’ Yet I would hazard the guess that this is peculiarly the sin par excellence of the clergy.” They sting, these words, because they come not from an outsider but from one of ourselves.
To be sure, humility has its distortions: a preoccupation with self-effacement that masks a pious egotism, or a disguised self-pity (perhaps anxiety) that, in order to escape responsibility and hard work, engages in a habitual downgrading of one’s own talents, or possibilities, or future.
On the other hand, if humility has its distortions, it has also its demonstrations. A Bible teacher I loved held a series of meetings in a church wherein was a lady I had long known. Meeting her, not long after the series was finished, I asked her about my friend’s ministry. Her answer I shall always remember: “That man can put more of Christ into his ministry, and less of himself, than any man I ever heard.” There you have it: a sermon texture that was “cloth of gold.”
Another component is sensitivity. In many ways our work is repetitious. It therefore, and easily, breeds both monotony and callousness. Sunday after Sunday, text after text, sermon after sermon: so the cycle runs.
The late Roy Smith, when a pastor, was ready to commence a funeral service. The deceased was the only son of a couple he knew very well. The young mother, in the quiet of the family room, said, “Roy, you do this kind of thing all the time, but remember that he was all we had!” I heard Dr. Smith say that suddenly fresh fountains of sympathy and awareness were opened within him. His “service” was somehow different that day.
God—let me be aware.
Stab my soul fiercely with others’ pain,
Let me walk seeing horror and stain.
Finally, there’s that thread in the sermonic texture which we shall call urgency. “He preached as if he was deein’ to save me,” said the old Scottish lady who was wooed to Christ under the importunate preaching of Robert Murray McCheyne. Paul had it in his preaching: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). Against the door of many a preacher’s heart must be laid at least one shaming charge: that too little goes on within it which bums with this intensely beseeching quality.
Frederic W. H. Myers, recalling the influence upon his life of Josephine Butler, once said, “She introduced me to Christianity as by an inner door: not to its encumbering forms but to its heart of flame.”
It was Myers who later projected himself, poetically, into the preaching soul of St. Paul. The Apostle, seeing the pageantry and pettiness, the folly and frenzy, of Christless souls, is made to cry:
Then with a rush the intolerable craving
Shivers through me like a trumpet-call—
Oh, to save these! to perish for their saving,
Die for their life, be offered for them all!
A man who is at home in the stillness of God, who has an engagement with Christ so absorbing as to shatter conceit, who is not ashamed to own a soul with bleeding edges, who knows the ache of longing that the whole world might be brought to the feet of Christ—that man, whatever his text or outline, will fashion a sermon in which the tones are less important than the overtones and the glory of the Wordless flames round the words.
It’s the texture of preaching.
PAUL S. REES
Unto him who loves us, … to him be the doxology and the dominion … (Rev. 1:5b, 6b; read vv. 1–20).
This passage, great in the King James, yields more riches through exegesis of the best Greek text. Our new translation: unto him who loves us, and redeemed us from our sins with his blood, and made us a kingdom of priests to his God and Father, to him be the praise and the power (the kingdom and the dominion), for ever and ever. Amen.
I. Christ’s Love for Us Continuing, ever present. In this book the scrolls unfold and the trumpet peals, but a soft voice says: “Trust my love.” The same yesterday, today, and forever, His love is everlasting. He has promised that he will never desert us, and that nothing shall ever separate us from his love. Day by day he bids us keep ourselves in the love of God.
II. Redemptive. He bore our sins in his own body on the tree. He was wounded for our transgressions. His punishment brought us peace, for by his stripes we are healed. Since he met for us all the exactions of the Law, in him we are justified, forgiven, adopted as God’s children. Through this redemption the grace of God brought us out of thralldom to sin and Satan into the glorious liberty of God’s children. As we stand beneath the redemptive Cross, our grateful hearts murmur: “God is like that!”
III. Contagious, love that creates a like community. Love created the apostolic band, and then the community of the Resurrection. Love brings us into fellowship with the Father and the Son. Here love is signalized as making us a kingdom of priests who reflect the King’s qualities. As priests of the Most High we intercede for one another. Beneath God our Father, beside our Elder Brother, we gather together in warm fellowship as the redeemed family of God.
IV. Victorious. In love God goes forth conquering and to conquer. In mercy he confronts us and makes us his own. He lifts our hearts in paeans of praise to his Father. The Lord even bends our stubborn and rebellious wills to his mastery. As long as Satan can misrepresent God, portraying Him as a hateful despot armed for our destruction, he arouses our opposition. But when the Spirit shows us God coming in Christ to reconcile the world to himself, the doors of men’s souls should lift up in their first knightly act to receive the King of Glory.
God shines in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Christ. When we are frustrated and about to give up in failure, God opens our hearts to receive the love he commends in the blood of Christ. This love constrains our love. His redeeming grace evokes our gratitude. His fellowship frees our spirits to glorify Christ, and to seek his dominion over the earth.
We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:23, 24; read vv. 18–31).
Paul believed that the main business of Christly men was Gospel preaching. When the firebrand of Tarsus preached Christ there was no time for meddling with current controversies. Whole cities depended on him for the preaching of redemption. For that reason he lived largely in the imperative. Let our own spirits possess a like urgency!
I. The Gospel Proclaimed. The transmission of the Gospel rested in the hands of men of good will. With high passion those men pleaded powerfully for the souls of others and shook civilization to its foundations. When men so awake to their responsibilities as Christians the momentum of Christianity will sweep over the enemies of the Gospel like a tidal wave.
II. The Gospel Antecedent: a divine sacrifice. God called for the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, so that now we see the devilish nature of sin, and our own guilt before God. We likewise see in the Cross the means by which life is restored. This was done in Christ, who by his own blood dissolved sin and brought man back to his waiting God. But at what a cost and with what a payment!
III. The Gospel Message we preach is a divine testimony. All that God has to say to men he says in his Son, who discloses it all in love, a love greater than the mind of man can comprehend. This love will hold until the graves give up their dead and time shall be no more. There I must realize that I am not my own; I am bought with a price. In the Cross I gain forgiveness of sins; in the Resurrection the guarantee of power to live His life.
IV. The Gospel Objective. When obeyed, the Gospel results in human redemption from sin. Hence we preach Christ crucified. Today Christianity is a completed system of truth, a revelation given once for all. On earth there is no authority to change this Gospel. We conclude that he is wise who simply determines to abide by the law of life thus divinely given. With Paul let this ever be our triumphant testimony: “We preach Christ crucified!”—From Christ Is All (Cincinnati: The Standard Press, 1962).
Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? (Luke 24:32).
Every Christian ought to be happy in the Lord. Many believers, alas, are not. Even after Easter we talk about “the lost radiance of the Christian church.” Fortunately, as believers in the Crucified and Risen Lord we can recapture such radiance where we lost it, in our assurance of the Living Christ as he appears after the Resurrection. Today as on the first Easter Christian radiance comes through.
I. Fellowship with the Living Christ. Those two hearts began to burn as soon as the pilgrims fell in step with the Lord. So it should be every day with us who believe. In private devotions, at the family altar, and along the dusty way, why not commune with Him? Alas, some of us read nothing daily but a Bible verse in a devotional manual, with a prayer by someone else.
II. Understanding the Scriptures. The two disciples had long known God’s Book, but at last they learned to enjoy what they may have merely endured. Before the burning heart comes the opening of the eyes to behold Christ where formerly one saw something else. So it seems that in the hour of worship the opening of the Book should lead to the burning heart.
III. Enlisting for Christian Service. Radiance comes through “the illumination of obedience.” If those two had kept their discovery a secret, the fire would have died down in their hearts, the glow would have faded from their faces. After beholding the Risen Lord we ought ever to be “abounding” in his work. Hence the Resurrection Chapter leads up to an appeal for giving.
IV. Abiding in Christian Hope. On Easter morning those two felt disconsolate because they had lost their hope. They had begun to look backward and feel sorry for themselves. On the other hand, the Gospel of Easter bids us look up and rejoice. Because of this hope, “never again in the history of the Church has the life of worship revealed such power, such depth, such fruitfulness as in those early times.”
Does anyone here long for such radiance? If so, you may have it now, as well as more and more in days to come, if daily you enter into loving fellowship with the Risen Lord.
