When it was my privilege to address
you on the first evening of our conference, it was within the
framework of the theme, what constitutes true preaching? And I suggested to you on that
occasion that any attempt to wrestle with that question within
the lids of the Word of God will bring us at least in principle,
if not in absolute agreement on the precise terminology, it
will, I say, bring us at least in principle to the conviction
that true preaching involves the proclamation, the explanation,
and the application of the Word of God by one who legitimately
occupies the position of and self-consciously conducts himself
as a herald of God. And having supported that assertion
from the materials of the New Testament, I then suggested that
that biblical concept of a herald involves at least five predominant
characteristics—integrity, authority, boldness, seriousness, and unction,
and that as we read the history of those men whom God has used
with power in the work of preaching, it is relatively easy to discern
that fundamental characteristic and its attendance in all of
their ministries. There was great diversity of
native gift, great diversity of preaching style, many respects
in which they differed from one another as much as night from
day, but this was the one fundamental common denominator. They spoke
as the appointed heralds of God. And now, in this hour, I want
to direct your attention to what I have called the secondary characteristics,
plural, of true preaching. and everything said with respect
to this second division, we must continually remember is said
within the context of those principles established under the first heading. These four elements that constitute
the characteristics of true preaching, if divorced from that one fundamental
characteristic singular, become nothing more than some of the
elements of secular rhetoric. But because God works not only
sovereignly but wisely, and in terms of means suited to given
ends, it can be demonstrated in the history of preaching that
has been owned of God for the reviving of his church, for the
advancement of vital religion, that these four characteristics,
almost without exception, have always been present in that preaching. And the first of those secondary
characteristics is what I am calling simplicity and clarity
of presentation to the mind. True preaching will always involve
simplicity and clarity of presentation to the mind. We are all agreed
that the great instrument in the work of God in the soul is
His truth, His truth as embodied in the scriptures of the Old
and the New Testaments. But that truth does not operate
in the accomplishment of God's saving designs, whether in calling
the sheep of Christ to Himself or being instrumental in their
maturation and development. I say that truth does not work
magically or mystically, but mysteriously and powerfully by
the operation of the truth upon the mind and the understanding
of the hearer. And so we are not embarrassed
as those who believe in the strictest monergism, that is, that the
impartation of divine life is wholly the work of God, we are
not embarrassed by such text as James 1.18. Of his own will
begat he us by the word of truth. of his own will, he begat us. There is the sheerest, purest
form of monergism. He brought us forth, but he did
so by the instrumentality of the word of his truth. Or the
language of 1 Peter 1.23, having been born again, not of corruptible
seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God which liveth
and abideth forever. And so fundamental is this perspective
that Paul is not at all embarrassed to call himself the spiritual
father of men. In 1 Corinthians 4 and verse
15 he says, I have begotten you through the gospel. And if there
is any brother amongst us who has allowed himself to be enmeshed
in the sophistry of the whole notion that God's ordinary method
in regenerating men has no connection with the gospel, I trust that
sophistry will be blasted and shown for what it is. For as
Professor Murray so powerfully demonstrates in his treatment
of the subject of the new birth, the immediate and first reflexive
response of the impartation of divine life is faith and repentance,
and faith and repentance must have an object and therefore
the only context in which the divine beginning occurs is the
context of the proclamation of the truth. And it is precisely
because of that principle that true preaching is concerned that
the truth shall make an entrance to the mind of the listener.
because we know that until the truth enters the mind, it will
not become effectual in transforming the heart. And though we are
convinced that God alone can dispose the mind to receive the
truth, we do not expect God to perform a second miracle in sorting
out the complicated gibberish of the preacher so that the content
of the message can only be understood by a miracle of bringing some
rationality out of a formless mass of religious verbiage. And
so the kind of preaching that God has owned with power in the
history of His Church is preaching that has been marked by simplicity
and clarity of presentation to the mind. In that choice work
that the Banner has recently reproduced, and if you do not
have it, may I urge you to obtain it and read it as soon as possible
on the leaders of the 18th century evangelical life and ministry
Speaking of some of the common denominators of the preaching
of these men whose lives are sketched out by Bishop Ryle,
he says, they preached simply. They rightly concluded that the
very first qualification to be aimed at in a sermon is to be
understood. They saw clearly that thousands
of able and well-composed sermons were utterly useless. because
they are above the heads of their hearers. They strove to come
down to the level of the people and to speak what the poor could
understand. To attain this, they were not
ashamed to crucify their style and to sacrifice their reputation
for learning. To attain this, they used illustrations
and anecdotes in abundance, and like their divine master, borrowed
lessons from every object in nature. they carried out the
maximum of Augustine. A wooden key is not so beautiful
as a golden one, but if it can open the door when the golden
one cannot, it is far more useful. They revived the style of sermons
in which Luther and Latimer used to be so eminently successful. In short, they saw the truth
of what the great German reformer meant when he said, No one can
be a good preacher to the people who is not willing to preach
in such a manner that seems childish and vulgar to some. Now all this
again, Ryle says, was a hundred years ago. Now this whole matter
of simplicity and clarity of presentation to the mind obviously
brings within its orbit such matters as vocabulary, the choice
of our words, it brings into its orbit this vital element
of structure. And I'm amazed at the lack of
willingness to expend labor in the structure of sermonic exercises,
which results in this inability to be clear. Structure is vital
to clarity. The connectives within a sermon
You may see how one heading of truth is connected to another
because you've lived with that. Perhaps, I trust, for days and
in some cases for weeks, and in a sense your general and constant
interaction with the scriptures and theology and preaching means
that you are living with the connecting elements of truth
continually, but many of your people are not. And I have sat
and listened to many a sermon and scratched my head and wondered
how in the world that arm was attached to the body. Now the
arm was substantial flesh and bone in terms of biblical materials,
but it hung out there like some kind of a hand in the book of
Daniel that appears out of nowhere and begins to write upon the
wall. It is attached to nothing and has no relationship in terms
of overall symmetry. And so brethren, if we in our
praying that God would use our preaching, and if in our praying
there is this renewed concern that was set before us so vividly
in the previous hour, that we may preach out of the experience
of a felt Christ, that our mouths, as it were, may be watering in
the very act of preaching as they feed upon the bread of life,
in all of that, There must be a constant commitment to labor
at simplicity and clarity of presentation to the minds of
our hearers. What is elegance of style? What
is loftiness of thought? What is profundity of insight
if there is no grip, no penetration, no stickability in our sermons? The substance of our sermons,
though at times exegetically accurate, and in many senses
perhaps profound in their insight, are like a greased pig. A person
could not take hold of that if his life depended upon it. There
is no glue, there are no burrs, there is no stickability, and
it is to be found at this point. there is not that simplicity
and clarity of presentation to the mind. Now we forget often
that Whitefield and Spurgeon were vilified as much for how
they spoke the truth of God as for what they spoke as the truth
of God. When you look at some of the
caricaturing that was done in terms of the cartooning in Spurgeon's
early days, It pointed to the fact that this man dared to speak
of high Calvinism in the language of the costumonger and the man
in the street. Who is this young Cairo to come
taking these lofty, high things and speak of them in such a way
that a man with a second-grade education sits riveted to his
seat by the sheer power of its clarity and its simplicity? But
they were simply following the pattern of their master, that
one in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge were
hid. And yet it is said of him, the
common people heard him, not with pain, in the fulfillment
of their Sabbath duties, but they heard him gladly. heard him gladly. And I have a sneaking suspicion
that the two great reasons for our deficiencies in this dimension
of simplicity and clarity are, number one, our failure truly
to understand and be masters of our A man will be simple and clear
in direct proportion to his mastery of his subject. It is the undigested
concepts of our minds that are the mother of the unclear pronouncements
of our pulpits. Until a man perceives an issue
in bold relief and sees it in all of its angles and dimensions
with twenty-twenty vision, he cannot speak with clarity and
simplicity concerning that subject. How often we were reminded of
this some years ago when we had a brilliant young man in our
assembly, had his master's degree in computer technology, and he
just had more learning in his head than he ought to have had
and still be seeing. And he had none of the kookishness
of the typical academic egghead. And one of his delights was to
go off every summer to a children's camp, at that time a boy's camp.
And the class that everyone loved above all else was Mr. Emmerich's
class in astronomy. Because he could take things
that were so confusing when they heard them in school and make
them so simple and plain that they loved them. And the reason
was he had a mastery of his subject. And I'm convinced the second
great reason as to why we are deficient in this area is ministerial
laziness. Having sabbed our consciences
that our sermonic exercises reflect carefulness of exegesis, We are
then unprepared to go on to that next step of the labor of reducing
the fruit of that exegesis to its most simple and clear form. And as I pass from this head,
may I urge you, if you have not read ever or have not read for
some time, Bishop Ryle's excellent essay, Simplicity in Preaching,
found now in the collection of his essays entitled The Upper
Room. Please obtain that book, read that essay, and reread it
periodically. I quote just a part from it to
whet your appetite. The next thing I say by way of
prefatory remark is that to attain simplicity in preaching is by
no means an easy matter. No great mistake can be more
than to suppose to make hard things seem hard, to use the
substance of the saying of Archbishop Usher's, is within the reach
of all, but to make hard things seem easy and intelligible is
the height attained by very few speakers. One of the wisest and
best of the Puritans said two hundred years ago that the greater
part of preachers shoot over the heads of their people. This
is true also in 1882 when Ryle was writing, I fear a vast proportion
of what we preach is not understood by our hearers any more than
if it were Greek. Now our brother Theo would have
no problem if we spoke in modern Greek, but most of our people
would. So I urge upon you, my brethren,
to join with all of your prayers and entreaties for the outpouring
of the Spirit, for greater dimensions of a felt Christ in preaching. I urge and exhort you to labor
to attain simplicity and clarity of presentation to the mind,
and to attain it at any cost. But then in the second place,
another secondary characteristic that is marked true preaching
is what I am calling vividness of exhibition to the imagination. Vividness of exhibition to the
imagination. Bridges quotes an old Arabian
proverb which states, he is the most effective speaker who can
turn men's ears into eyes. He is the most effective speaker
who can turn men's ears into eyes. Those who have been used of God
in the work of preaching, to some degree, regardless of whatever
element of native gift was present, labored at cultivating this ability
of making the truth come home to the imagination with vividness. And again, in doing this, they
were simply reflecting biblical truths in a biblical manner.
It is my own firm conviction, which deepens with each passing
week as I must wrestle to prepare lectures to the men in our academy
on the subject of preaching and the work of the ministry, that
we must hammer out a theology of preaching from the kind of
preaching recorded in the Scriptures. Now, what are the prophets? without
their vivid imagery, which made truth, as it were, leap into
the imaginations of the minds of the hearers, constantly using
personification, analogy, metaphor, parable, object lessons, and
doing so under the direct impulse of the Spirit that was given
to them as prophets. God did not speak to His people
through the prophets in simple, bland, unadorned, unimaginative
language. And when, of course, we turn
to the New Testament, what is the ministry of our Lord? Without
little narrow turnstiles and people squeezing through to get
on a compressed and narrow way, What would the teaching of our
Lord be without the picture of a farmer going forth with his
seed bag over his shoulder and casting his seed upon the field,
and the vivid imagery of the various responses in terms of
the soil? What would our Lord's teaching
be without travailing women who from the pain and intensity of
birth pangs rejoice as the little one is laid upon her breast? What would our Lord's teaching
be without lost coins and lost sons and lost sheep, without
wedding feast and householders and vine keepers and vine dressers,
servants and masters in their interaction, good and bad trees? Why, you go through the recorded
sermons of our Lord, and those sermons ooze with this element
of vividness, of exhibition to the imagination, of the hearers. Likewise, this is true in the
preaching of the apostles, what little bit we have, and even
in the most intense didactic portions of the epistles, there
is this constant use of analogy, metaphor, simile, parable, and
what I want to call the abandonment of descriptive freedom. in which the preacher himself,
in the very act of preaching, has the truth, as it were, so
etched upon the screen of his own mind that he describes what
he sees. He has no visions. I'm not speaking
of direct revelation. but he has so abandoned himself
to the concept that it stands out in bold relief in his own
imagination and in a sense he then describes what he sees. Now not all possess this gift
to the same degree by nature. I'm very much aware of that.
not all will cultivate the same degree by the most prayerful
employment of all the legitimate means. But, brethren, my appeal
is this. If the Holy Spirit has conveyed
His truth in this manner in the Scriptures, Can we lay any claim
to being Bible preachers, preaching the Bible in its own literary
form, if we do not seek to cultivate the ability to preach with vividness
of exhibition to the imagination of our hearers? Now, if you do
this, your congregation will never have a hankering for drama
in the pulpit. They'll never have a hankering
to have drama as a substitute or supplement to preaching. Now who has made man so that
there is at the level of his aesthetic sensitivity both the
longing for that vividness of exhibition to the imagination
and that delight in that very exercise? Did God or the devil
make us that way? It is God who has given us our
aesthetic sensitivity. The devil has perverted it. But
when a man could go and hear Whitfield preach of real things,
of heaven, of hell, of blood, the everlasting covenant of the
substantial things of the world of the Spirit, but preach them
with such vividness of exhibition to the imagination that eternal
and spiritual things, as it were, became concrete in His words. Why go to the local theater?
to hear and see false things and unreal things of unreal stories
of unreal people. I am convinced that one of the
reasons there is this lack of appreciation for preaching and
this hankering on the one hand for drama and the so-called liturgical
revival is because there is something in the totality of the humanity
of man that cries out that imagination as a God-given faculty shall
neither be ignored nor raped in preaching, but shall be brought
to the service of the sanctuary. There is nothing, nothing worse
in the world than dull preaching, unless it is the preaching of
error. And brethren, we ask too much
of our people to expect that they will come with that eagerness
that was mentioned yesterday, with that sense of thirst and
anticipation. If they cannot come with the
expectation that the truth will come not only with simplicity
and clarity of the mind, but with vividness of exhibition
to the imagination. I know it will embarrass him
to use the illustration, but it's current, so I'm going to
use it. I almost got sick to my stomach when we were pulling
out the muck from the wells. That first session when Pastor
Chantry was talking to us about pulling out the muck from the
wells, this work that's been going on, what was he doing?
He could have said in simple unadorned language, we are seeking
to clear away dimensions of error that have clogged spiritual blessing.
That would have been true. But by turning that same concept
into the matter of clearing out the muck from the sweet wells
of truth, you could see it! Now, is that just a trick of
rhetoric? No! God has maimed us! so that
that essential truth impinges with much greater power upon
the totality of our humanity when the imagination is brought
to its service. Well then, I hasten on to the
third characteristic of true preaching at the secondary level,
I remind you, brethren, only within the larger context of
a herald whose substance comes from the Word of God, who speaks
in the name and the authority and under the unction of God.
Don't divorce these things from that larger context. The third
element at the secondary level is what I am calling directness
of application to the conscience. Not only simplicity in addressing
the mind, vividness in exhibition to the imagination, but directness
of application to the conscience. And here again, when we turn
to the Scriptures for a theology of preaching, this principle
stands on the very face of the Word of God. In the Old and in
the New Testaments, The preaching that is recorded is preaching
that not only records the great redemptive acts of God, records
the great propositional truths about God, the precepts and the
promises that flow from the heart of God, but application is woven
through the fabric of it all. Now, for the man who's taken
up with the redemptive historical approach, I would not have too
much gripe if they would do it the way Moses did. When Moses
recounts the history of the nation, it always leads to a, When ye
come into the land, and when the blessings of God come, beware,
lest ye forget your God." And then he takes that whole history
of redemption, and he makes it a lever by which to seek to pry
them loose from the cursed sins of presumption and carelessness
with respect to the grace of God. And surely this is the pattern
of the preaching of the prophets. They did not traffic in vague
generalities concerning covenantal disobedience. They did not traffic
in innocuous pronouncements about apostasy. We have the specimen
preaching in a man called Amos for three sins, yea for four,
and he names the cardinal sins of the nations and then turns
to Israel and Judah and names their sins. It is precisely this
thing that caused the prophets such opposition. This matter
of directness, of application to the conscience, and when we
turn to the New Testament, we see it again and again in our
Lord. In the Sermon on the Mount, He
is not content simply to give a generic expansion of the true
meaning of the commandments that He deals with in Matthew 5, but
He takes and applies that principle in a concrete situation. He does not simply say, God's
law which says thou shalt not kill, forbids not only the positive
taking of life wrongfully, but even the attitude of hatred.
No, he says, it goes much further. It involves the absence of any
desire to retaliate. Therefore, he that would smite
you upon the one cheek, turn the other cheek also. What is
he doing? He is making specific, concrete application of broad
moral principles. And then, of course, we see this
so much in our Lord that it is said on some occasions, He perceived
that they speak of them. And certainly in the apostolic
preaching, Peter dared to stand and say, You people, by wicked
hands, have taken Him and crucified Him. And on through the history
of the church, these men were concerned to cause their hearers
to know that they were not merely saying nice and true things in
their hearing, but weighty and necessary things to their very
hearts. Bridges, in his classic work
on preaching, and again recognizing so many new faces and many of
you relatively younger brethren, let me urge you, if you do not
possess Bridges, buy him and if you can't buy him come to
a few of us and beg a few bucks to get him and then constantly
go over the section the entire book is of great worth but in
this connection go over the section on preaching and in this particular
chapter on applicatory preaching he sums up the whole witness
of scripture in these words personal application formed the nerve
of the preaching of the Jewish prophets and of our Lord's public
and individual addresses. His reproofs to the scribes and
Pharisees, to the Sadducees and Herodians, had distinct reference
to their particular sins. In his treatment of the young
ruler and of the woman of Samaria, he avoided general remarks to
point his instructions to their besetting and indulged sins. talking to their thoughts, as
a sensible writer has observed in the case of the young man,
as we do to each other's words. Peter's hearers were pricked
to the heart by his applicatory address. Even the hardest heart,
the most stubborn sinner, is made to smart under the point
of the two-edged sword. Preaching, in order to be effective,
must be reduced from vague generalities to a tangible individual character
coming home to every man's business and even to his bosom. What would you think if, upon
returning home, you opened up your local newspaper, and there
in the section where the various men's stores and department stores
put out their weekly specials, you saw this sign, Special Sale
on Men's Suits. Half price, one size fits all. Now, how many of you would even go
and take a look at that suit? Would you be enticed by the fact
that it said seventy-five percent off? No limit on the number you
may buy? Now, you'd laugh at the ad, one
suit that fits all fits none. May I say that that could be
written over many a sermon. One suit fits all, and in reality
fits none. In a sense, in our work of exposition
and announcement as a herald, we are constructing that suit
made of the fabric, and I trust, of unmixed fabric of divine truth,
but it is in application that we move from this construction,
this tailoring of this suit to fit all, and we come to every
man in his place, and we custom adjust that suit to his case. And Bridges has some most helpful
and practical suggestions at this point. We do it not only
with reference to men's sins, but with reference to their struggles,
with reference to the experiences of the child of God. We move
from the generic into the specific. But this is the great genius
of the richest of the Puritan writings, and my heart is pained
with these neophytes who are making their sweeping accusations
against the Puritans and so disaffecting many young men who have never
drunk of those wells. When someone says in a cavalier
way with pseudo-scholarship that sacralism and defective views
of the principles of the inwardness of religion permeates all the
Puritan writings, that's rubbish! I have read and reread volumes
of Owen in which I have not found one reference to a political
issue. I have found my heart opened up and laid bare. And
I have found my Savior set before me until I have been ravished
with the sight of His glory. That which makes that writing
breathe with such unction over three hundred years from the
time it was written is that there is this constant descent from
generic pronouncement to specific, pointed, detailed application. I shall never forget. The glorious
trauma is the only way I can describe it. It sounds like a
mixture of words. But the glorious and blissful
trauma of the first time I went through volume six of Owen. And
the only way I could describe it is I felt as though God had
brought Owen back from the dead, made a little Lilliputian out
of him, opened up my heart, stuck him in there with a notebook
and a flashlight and said, go to work for three weeks. And
I felt as though this man had gone through every nook and cranny
of my heart with a flashlight and then had taken notes. And
his notes were the treatise on indwelling sin, temptation, and
mortification. I understood as I never understood
before the language of the psalmist, thou hast searched me and known
me. But he did not only search me. With that same light, he took
another book and he opened it up and he shined it on those
texts that spoke of the mighty power and efficacious grace of
my Savior. Brethren, no little part of that
is in the matter of specificity of application. Because it was
in what is now an ancient edition of the Banner of Truth magazine,
anything that goes back into the 60s is ancient history for
some of you, I know. There is that moving incident
taken from the life of Gilbert Tennant. Some of you may be familiar
with it, but I believe it bears repeating. Oh, my. Well, I'm going to give
it anyway. I'll try to condense it. But
Tennant was ministering in an area very close to where I am
privileged to live and minister. And in that area, there were
a number of Dutch immigrants. And a colleague in the ministry
by the name of Frelinghuysen was also ministering there. In
fact, they would often use the same building. Frelinghuysen
preaching to the Dutch and Tennant preaching to the English speakers.
then an amazing thing happened. The Spirit of God began to move
powerfully upon the Dutch community. Now, contrary to the view of
some of our Hollanders, it is not that they are more susceptible
to the Spirit, or that they are less depraved, and that there
is something less to overcome in efficacious grace. God was
sovereignly moving upon the Hollanders. And Tennant observed this. Preaching
essentially the same doctrines as Friedenheisen, But in the
same geographical area, in the same building, some coming under
deep distress and through to glorious deliverance in Christ,
others left unblessed. For the Lord put Tenet on his
back, and while he was on his back with illness, God dealt
with him in terms of the matters we heard of in the last hour.
God had dealings with his heart, and there was impressed upon
Tenet with renewed power the reality of the world of the Spirit. and the great issues of eternity. And in the midst of those dealings
with God with him, a letter came from his dear brother and colleague
in the ministry, Freeming Heisen. And the substance of the letter
was an exhortation to Tenet. to the effect that he was dealing
too much in generalities, that he ought to descend in his preaching
to specific thrust at the consciences of men, that he ought to begin
to discriminate between true faith and false faith, between
stony ground hearers and those who receive the word into good
soil. And thank God, unlike so many ministers who are so full
of their own self-importance that they cannot receive an admonition
from a colleague in the ministry, Tennant received the admonition
of his brother Freeminghuis. And when God raised him off his
bed and he went back to preaching, he had no new doctrinal perspective. He did not claim any qualitatively
new spiritual experience. There was an intensification,
a greater nearness. There was that peculiar drawing
near. But preaching the old truths,
now the Spirit of God began to smite, and the slain of the Lord
were many. And from the human standpoint,
the only difference was right here. He began to preach with
directness of application to the conscience. Brethren, this is one of the
greatest demands of true preaching. For unless you would put yourself
on the high road to apostasy, You cannot engage week by week
in the close discriminating application of the Word to the hearts and
consciences of your hearers, both for conviction and comfort,
unless in the secret place you are experiencing that powerful
application of the Word to your own conscience. And it is the
staleness and the sinness and the bland quality of our own
life in the closet that is the cursed mother of the bland, pointless
ministry of our pulpits. And for this wickedness, may
God forgive us. Then, finally, the fourth characteristic
of true preaching at the secondary level is that which I'm calling
earnestness of solicitation to the heart and to the will. Earnestness of solicitation to
the heart and to the will. No one holds, I don't believe,
more firmly than I to the clear teaching of Scripture that sinners
are spiritually dead They can do nothing to affect their own
generation, or in the language of the old standards, to prepare
themselves thereto. But the same Bible which teaches
this truth gives us the example of the preaching of men who understood
that truth, and that preaching is suffused with earnestness
of solicitation to the hearts and wills of the hearers. A couple
of examples to illustrate. We open up to the prophecy of
Isaiah, and we read that graphic, that vivid description of the
sin of Jerusalem under the picture of that man who is sick from
the top of his head to the sole of his feet. And then the prophet
says, Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though
your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though
they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. The same prophet
speaking in the name of the Lord says, Seek ye the Lord while
he may be found. Call ye upon him while he is
near. Let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts. And let him return unto the Lord,
for he will have mercy upon him. And to our God, for he will abundantly
pardon. the language of Ezekiel, who
cries out, Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die, O house of Israel? Ah, but you say, Brother Martin,
that is simply Ezekiel writing what he said in the name of the
Lord. Yes, but I ask this question. When Ezekiel preached those words,
for those prophecies came, first of all, in the context of living
oral communication, for the most part. Did Ezekiel represent the
heart of God by standing and saying, I have no pleasure in
the death of the wicked, but that he turn and live? Turn ye,
turn ye, why will ye die, O house of Israel? Is that how he represented the
heart of Jehovah? who though constrained by righteousness
and fidelity to the terms of His ancient covenant, that turning
from Him would result in judgment and captivity. And yet the same
God under the constraint of fidelity to the terms of the covenant
is the God of heart, the God whose bowels yearn for His people
When he says to the prophet, I have no pleasure in the death
of the wicked, but that he turn and live, surely the prophet
sought, albeit dimly and with great limitations, but nonetheless,
ruly and vividly, to have his whole demeanor be a reflection
of the heart of God. God does not say, I have no pleasure
in the death of the wicked, turn ye, turn ye. God speaks it with
all the yearning of His holy heart. If we speak in such a
way as not to reflect something of that yearning, we misrepresent
God in the very speaking of His words. And we turn to our blessed Lord,
and I'm sure all of us have those things that in our hours of reverie
we say, I wish I could see, I wish I could hear. And one of mine
is, I wish I could have been in the temple on that day, that
great day of the feast. Where we read in John chapter
7, on that last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood
and he cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto
me and drink. Oh, the earnestness of solicitation. the earnestness of entreaty. And we see it in his pathetic
plea, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how oft would I have gathered
you as a hen gathereth her chicks and ye would not. And in the
Apostles we see it again, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade
men, we beseech you in Christ's stead, be reconciled to God. And all the language that we
would call sentimental and gushy to the Corinthians, O Corinthians,
our mouth is opened, our hearts are enlarged to you. The language
of the text read by Mr. Dunkley in our hearing. We were
willing to impart unto you not the gospel of God only, but our
very souls, our very lives, because ye were become dear to us. And so in the history of the
church, someone was asked, who had heard McShane regularly,
what was the secret of his preaching. What was the great dominant characteristic? And this person answered, he
preached as if he were dying to have you converted. He preached
as if he were dying to have you converted. My brethren, how long
has it been since that unconverted four-year-old, that unconverted
teenager, that unconverted adult in the congregation, though he
may have left the doors impenitent and unmoved as to his heart,
could say with truth that man preached as though he were dying
that I should be converted. And of course, having read any
of you the biography of Whitefield, tears were an integral part of
his preaching. Not the tears of the actor, who
by so identifying with his false person, his imaginary character,
he can in that psychological manipulation open up his tear
ducts at the right spot every night in the theater. But a man
who in the midst of preaching was so imbued with something
of the compassion of Christ that that compassion that was finding
a vent in the free offers of mercy and in the entreaties and
overtures of free unfettered gospel invitation just automatically
opened up the tear ducts until they flowed in his preaching. You see, brethren, it is precisely
at this point that perhaps we manifest our greatest deficiency
in preaching. And I have longed to see emerging
out of the resurgence of Reformed truth some holy pleaders, men
who, standing unequivocally and unembarrassed upon a platform
of definitive doctrinal commitment, And I've chosen my words carefully,
a definitive doctrinal commitment that is not only explicitly articulated
in the preaching, but is everywhere pulsing through the preaching,
to see such men who by the grace of God cultivate the art of holy
preaching. who preach as if they were dying
to have men converted, because they are dying to have them converted. And they feel an inward death
if they have no shields upon their ministries. This whole
notion, I'm reformed, I have the truth, I give it out, I leave
it with God. You misrepresent the God whose
truth you're announcing. He doesn't feel that way. When
his truth goes forth and his people do not respond, God yearns
and God grieves and God entreats. And if that's not true, then
I've got to tear out page after page in my Bible. Now, some of you who have followed
the pattern of what I've sought to lay before you have already
drawn the conclusion What I am saying, and now I conclude, in
this matter of the secondary characteristics of true preaching,
you can sum it all up in this way. I am saying that out of
the context of a man legitimately occupying the place of conducting
himself as a herald, preaching that is true preaching, is in
essence the whole man the herald, communicating to the whole man,
the listener. We talked of the mind, the imagination,
the affections, the will. True preaching involves the whole
man who preaches, engaging the whole man who is under that preaching. And I don't like to use the term
listen because there is a dimension that makes it more than listening.
There is that triangular dimension of true preaching, when in the
act of preaching, the divine Lord who has given the Word Himself
comes in that Word to the heart of His servant, making him to
feel and taste the power of that which he preaches, so that everything
from heart and eye and mouth reflect that the power of that
truth is finding an outlet in his total humanity. And in that
context, when God is present, the same God engages the whole
humanity of the listener, so that mind and imagination and
affections and will are caught up in the power of truth. And though men may not repent
and believe in the language of Hebrews, they will taste the
powers of the world to come. They will know even if they never
repent, that when Paul says we look on the things that are not
seen, that these are substantial realities. We do not traffic
in notions and ideas and in God words. We traffic in the substantial
realities of the world of the Spirit in terms of the language
and words and thoughts of the Bible. And brethren, if we ever preach,
it will be costly. It will be costly, as was said
of our Lord, that virtue went from him. This frail human constitution
in its weakened, sinful condition, every time it must bear the current
of the energy of the Almighty. Conveying his everlasting word,
there is the sense in a much lesser way and in ways that have
no parallel with our Lord, but nonetheless real. Virtue goes
out of us. I've heard good, orthodox, reformed
preachers, who, I trust, I'm not overcritical. And I don't
believe I am. But I wondered if there was much
difference between them and a computer. Feed the information into the
computer, press the right button, and out comes the response. But
you know, in all of the so-called language of the computer, what
is the predominant element? I, the computer, am talking to
you and giving you an answer to the question which was programmed
into me. The answer is that on such and
such a day. You see, there is a flatness
that indicates it's a purely mechanical process. The computer
has no heart, has no imagination, it has no faculty to feel the
impress of the information being programmed in and now being passed
through it. But as the heralds of God, we
do not speak as computers, but as men. And as the heralds of
God, the message in passing through us engages the totality of our
humanity. and in conveying it to others,
it addresses the whole of their humanity. Now let me emphasize
again, the variations in style, in the degree of animation, in
the measure of volume and pace and all of these factors, God
help us, if we have a conscious or unconscious stereotype. The ways of the Spirit are like
the wind, and I have sat under ministries that were very soft
and almost laborious in pace and tone, but I have sensed God
came to me in the preaching. O may God make us preachers who,
imbibing more and more of the self-conscious identity as will
be marked by simplicity and clarity as we address men's minds, who
will be marked again and again by that vividness of address
to the imagination, will be marked by directness of application
to the conscience and earnestness of solicitation to the heart
and will. Now you may get accused of being
some bad things if you do that. There's a young woman who's recently
been converted under our ministry from a hyper-Calvinistic background,
whose mother has thrown herself upon the threshold of her door,
crying like a little child, don't go to that church and hear that
freewill Arminian preacher who will damn your soul if you listen
to him. It's because, it's because there has been the earnestness
of solicitation to heart and and you'll be labeled. That's
all right. What are men's labels when the master smiles? May God
help us for his name's sake. Amen.