The Length of Sermons
Nothing is more nauseating to contemporary youth than hypocrisy, and nothing more attractive than sincerity. In this, moreover, they reflect the mind of Christ, who reserved his most scathing denunciations for hypocrites. Young people hate our adult shams and subterfuges. They have a very sensitive nose with which they can smell the faintest odor of religious humbug from a considerable distance. They are especially suspicious of us preachers and of our loud pretensions; they sniff round us to see what inconsistencies they can discover, like dogs after a rat which has gone to ground. Not that they are invariably honest and consistent themselves; what fallen human being has ever been? Nevertheless, they are right to expect high standards of integrity in us. For preachers are not lecturers, who may discourse on topics remote from their own experience, concern, and belief, but are personally committed to their message. So preachers must of all people be sincere.
The sincerity of a preacher has two aspects: he means what he says when in the pulpit, and he practices what he preaches when out of it. In fact, these things belong inevitably together since, as Richard Baxter put it, “he that means as he speaks will surely do as he speaks.”
The very first and most elementary application of this principle to the preacher is that he who proclaims the gospel must himself have embraced the gospel, and he who preaches Christ must know Christ. What shall we say, then, of the oddity of an unconverted preacher, or unevangelized evangelist? With customary forcefulness Spurgeon portrays him. “A graceless pastor is a blind man elected to a professorship of optics, philosophizing upon light and vision . . . while he himself is absolutely in the dark! He is a dumb man elevated to the chair of music; a deaf man fluent upon symphonies and harmonies! He is a mole professing to educate eaglets; a limpet elected to preside over angels.” We smile at his graphic imagery, but not at the grotesque anomaly he describes. Yet such people are still found in the pulpits of some churches.
No more remarkable instance can be cited than that of the Rev. William Haslam. Ordained into the Church of England ministry in 1842, he served conscientiously in a parish of North Cornwall. He was a Tractarian clergyman with a hearty dislike for dissenters, and an authority in things antiquarian and architectural. But he was not satisfied, having no spring of living water within him. Then in 1851, nine years after his ordination, while preaching from the gospel of the day on the text, “What think ye of Christ?,” the Holy Spirit (in answer no doubt to many prayers) opened his eyes to see the Christ of whom he was speaking, and his heart to believe in him. The change which came over him was so obvious that a local preacher, who happened to be in church, jumped up and shouted, “The parson is converted! Hallelujah!,” at which his voice was drowned by the praises of 300 or 400 of the congregation. As for Haslam himself, he “joined in the outburst of praise, and, to make it more orderly . . . gave out the Doxology . . . and the people sang it with heart and voice, over and over again.” The news spread like wildfire “that the parson was converted, and that by his own sermon, in his own pulpit!” His conversion was the beginning of a great revival in his parish, which lasted for nearly three years, with a vivid sense of God’s presence and conversions almost daily, while in later years God called him into the most unusual ministry of leading many of his fellow clergy to a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Church members have a right to expect, however, that the Holy Spirit has done more in the life of their pastors than bring them to conversion. They naturally look for the fruit of the Spirit as well, that is, the ripening of Christian character. Paul told Timothy and Titus to be models of Christian behavior (1 Tim. 4:12; Titus 2:7). Peter similarly instructed the elders, instead of domineering, to be “examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:3). The emphasis is plain. Communication is by symbol as well as speech. For “a man cannot only preach, he must also live. And the life that he lives, with all its little peculiarities, is one of two things: either it emasculates his preaching or it gives it flesh and blood.” We cannot hide what we are. Indeed, what we are speaks as plainly as what we say. When these two voices blend, the impact of the message is doubled. But when they contradict each other, even the positive witness of the one is negatived by the other. This was the case with the man Spurgeon describes as a good preacher but a bad Christian: he “preached so well and lived so badly, that when he was in the pulpit everybody said he ought never to come out again, and when he was out of it they all declared he never ought to enter it again.”
It is at this point that a practical problem presents itself to us. Pastors are told to be models of Christian maturity. The congregation tend, to view us as such, to put us on a pedestal, and to idealize, even idolize us. We know, however, that the reputation they give us is at least partly false, because, although indeed the grace of God has been and continues to be at work in us, we are not the paragons of virtue they sometimes seem to think. So what should we do? Does not the very sincerity we are discussing require us to destroy the myth they have created and to divulge the truth about ourselves? What degree of self-disclosure is appropriate in the pulpit? My response to these important questions is that once again we should avoid extreme reactions. On the one hand, to turn the pulpit into a confessional would be inappropriate, unseemly, and helpful to nobody. Yet, on the other, to masquerade as perfect would be both dishonest in us and discouraging to the congregation. So certainly we should admit the truth that like them we are human beings of human frailty and fallenness, vulnerable to temptation and suffering, struggling with doubt, fear and sin, and needing continuously to depend on God’s forgiving and liberating grace. In this way the preacher can remain a model—but a model of humility and truth.
From all this it is again evident that preaching can never be degraded into the learning of a few rhetorical techniques. A whole theology lies beneath it, and a whole lifestyle behind it. The practice of preaching cannot be divorced from the person of the preacher.
Hence the New Testament emphasis on the self-discipline of the pastor. “Take heed to yourselves” was the admonition Paul addressed to the presbyters of the Ephesian church, before adding “and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers” (Acts 20:28). He wrote similarly to Timothy: “take heed to yourself and to your teaching” (1 Tim. 4:16). The order is vital. We pastors have God-given responsibilities both to the congregation we serve and to the doctrine we teach, for both have been committed to us. Yet our prior responsibility is to ourselves, to guard our personal walk with God and our loyalty to him. Nobody can be a good pastor or teacher of others who is not first a good servant of Jesus Christ. Disciplined habits of pastoral visitation and counseling on the one hand and of theological study and sermon preparation on the other, become barren exercises unless they are supported by disciplined habits of personal devotion, especially in biblical meditation and prayer. Every pastor knows how exacting his ministry is. We may encounter misunderstanding and even opposition; we shall certainly grow weary in mind and body; we may also have to endure loneliness and discouragement. Even the strongest personalities collapse under the weight of these pressures, unless the power of God is being revealed in our weakness, and the life of Jesus in our mortal bodies, so that “inwardly we are being renewed day by day (2 Cor. 4:7–11, 16).
The indissoluble link between preacher and preaching is reflected in many of the definitions of preaching. One of the most widely known was given by Phillips Brooks, who for twenty-two years was rector of Trinity Church in Boston (1869–91), delivered the 1877 Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale Divinity School, and for the last two years of his life (1891–1893) was bishop of Massachusetts. His first lecture was entitled “The Two Elements in Preaching,” and in it he gave this definition:
Preaching is the communication of truth by man to men. It has in it two essential elements, truth and personality. Neither of those can it spare and still be preaching. . . . Preaching is the bringing of truth through personality. . . . The truth is in itself a fixed and stable element; the personality is a varying and growing element.
Perhaps Phillips Brooks was consciously echoing Henry Ward Beecher, who gave the first Yale lectures in 1872 in memory of his father. “A preacher,” he said, “is, in some degree, a reproduction of the truth in personal form. The truth must exist in him as a living experience, a glorious enthusiasm, an intense reality.”
A somewhat similar emphasis may be discerned in the definition of preaching offered by the Congregational layman, Bernard Lord Manning (1892–1941), namely “a manifestation of the Incarnate Word, from the Written Word, by the Spoken Word.” He went on to say that preaching is “a most solemn act of worship, in which the thing given—the Gospel of the Son of God—overshadows and even transfigures the preacher by whom it is declared.” It is certainly inconceivable that a preacher could remain unmoved by what he preaches. It is the message which makes the preacher, controlling his thoughts and inspiring his deeds. Hence James Black’s exuberant definition: “To us, preaching is the natural overflow of our religion. We have received good news, and we long to tell it to others. Our religion is like joy we cannot suppress or contain. It bubbles over like a brimming cup. . . . Preaching is not a duty in any sense, but a sheer, inevitable joy. It is a spontaneous passion, like the coming of love into a young man’s heart.” These four definitions all emphasize that there is an indispensable link between the preacher and the act of preaching.
To most people sincerity is a self-evident virtue; it hardly needs to be commended. Yet the ease with which all of us decline from strict honesty and slip into some degree of pretense or hypocrisy suggests that we shall be wise to arm ourselves with arguments. They are not far to seek; the New Testament deploys at least three.
First, it warns us of the dangers inherent in being a teacher. To be sure, teaching is a spiritual gift, and its ministry a great privilege. At the same time, it is a ministry fraught with peril. For teachers who instruct others cannot plead ignorance of their own curriculum. As Paul wrote of a Jewish rabbi, “if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth—you then who teach others, will you not teach yourself?” (Rom. 2:17–21). The reason why hypocrisy is particularly unpleasant in teachers is that it is inexcusable. Hence the harshness of Jesus’ judgment on the Pharisees, “for they preach but do not practice” (Matt. 23:1–3). Hence also James’s surprising advice, “let not many of us become teachers, my brethren.” Why not? “For you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness” (Jas. 3:1).
Secondly, hypocrisy causes great offense. Without doubt many people have been alienated from Christ by the hypocritical behavior of some who claim to follow him. Paul knew this, and was determined not to be a stumbling block to other people’s faith: “we put no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way” (2 Cor. 6:3–4). He then proceeded to list his endurance and his character as evidence of the reality of his faith. There was no dichotomy between his message and his behavior.
With other preachers it is different. We make great claims for Christ and his salvation while up in the pulpit, but when we descend from it we deny him and give no more evidence of being saved than anybody else. Then our message lacks credibility. People will no more accept our Christian message if our life contradicts it than they would take a cold cure recommended by a salesman who coughs and sneezes between each sentence. We greatly hinder our own work, says Baxter, if for an hour or two on Sunday we build up with our mouths, and then during the rest of the week pull down with our hands:
It is a palpable error in those ministers that make such disproportion between their preaching and their living, that they will study hard to preach exactly and study little or not at all to live exactly. All the week long is little enough to study how to speak two hours; and yet one hour seems too much to study how to live all the week. . . . We must study as hard how to live well as how to preach well.
William Golding is a contemporary novelist who has vividly illustrated the negative power of hypocrisy. In his book Free Fall, he tells the story of Sammy Mountjoy, an illegitimate child brought up in a slum, who became a famous artist. During his school days he was torn between two teachers and between the two worlds they represented. On the one hand there was Miss Rowena Pringle, a Christian who taught Scripture, and on the other Mr. Nick Shales, an atheist who taught science. Hers was the world of “the burning bush,” of supernatural mystery, his of a rationally explicable universe. Instinctively, Sammy was drawn to the burning bush. Unfortunately, however, the advocate of this Christian interpretation of life was a frustrated spinster who had her knife into Sammy because he had been adopted by the clergyman she had hoped to marry. She took her revenge by being cruel to the boy. “But how,” Sammy later asked himself, “could she crucify a small boy . . . and then tell the story of that other crucifixion with every evidence in her voice of sorrow for human cruelty and wickedness? I can understand how she hated, but not how she kept on such apparent terms of intimacy with heaven.” It was this contradiction which kept Sammy from Christ.
Miss Pringle vitiated her teaching. She failed to convince, not by what she said but by what she was. Nick persuaded me to his natural scientific universe by what he was, not by what he said. I hung for an instant between two pictures of the universe; then the ripple passed over the burning bush and I ran towards my friend. In that moment a door closed behind me. I slammed it shut on Moses and Jehovah.
The third argument for sincerity concerns the positive influence of being a real person. This was evident in the case of Paul. He had nothing to hide. Having decisively “renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways,” his policy was to make an “open statement of the truth” and so commend himself “to every man’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 4:2). Guile and deception were abhorrent to him. He exercized his ministry in the open, and could appeal to both God and man as his witnesses (e.g. 1 Thess. 2:1–12). His personal conviction, consistency of conduct, and rejection of all subterfuge provided a strong base for his whole ministry. There was nothing in his life or lifestyle which hindered his hearers from believing or which they could have made an excuse for not believing. They believed him because he was believable. What he said and what he was were all of a piece.
A strangely fascinating power is exerted by those who are utterly sincere. Such believers attract unbelievers, as with the case of David Hume, the eighteenth-century British deistic philosopher who rejected historic Christianity. A friend once met him hurrying along a London street and asked him where he was going. Hume replied that he was going to hear George Whitefield preach. “But surely,” his friend asked in astonishment, “you don’t believe what Whitefield preaches, do you?” “No, I don’t,” answered Hume, “but he does.”
I am convinced that in our day simple sincerity has not lost any of its power to appeal or to impress. It was in 1954 that Billy Graham first hit the headlines in Britain with his Greater London Crusade. Approximately 12,000 people came to the Haringay Arena every night for three months. Most nights I was there myself, and as I looked round that vast crowd, I could not help comparing it with our half-empty churches. “Why do these people come to listen to Billy Graham,” I asked myself, “when they don’t come to listen to us?” Now I am sure that many answers could have been justly given to that question. But the answer I kept giving myself was this: “There is an incontrovertible sincerity about that young American evangelist. Even his fiercest critics all concede that he is sincere. I really believe he is the first transparently sincere Christian preacher many of these people have ever heard.” Today, twenty-five years later, I have found no reason to change my mind.
Sincerity has become an even more vital quality in the television age. John Poulton has written about this in his perceptive little book A Today Sort of Evangelism:
The most effective preaching comes from those who embody the things they are saying. They are their message . . . Christians . . . need to look like what they are talking about. It is people who communicate primarily, not words or ideas. . . . Television has drilled us all to watch for the hesitancies, the over-quick response. . . . Television has played havoc with the politician’s trade. It has revealed the unrealities, the case-pleading, the artificial furies. . . . Authenticity (on the other hand) gets across from deep down inside people. . . . A momentary insincerity can cast doubt on all that has made for communication up to that point. . . . What communicates now is basically personal authenticity.
Thus, hypocrisy always repels, but integrity or authenticity always attracts.
One of the chief evidences of authenticity is a willingness to suffer for what we believe. Paul spoke of his afflictions as his credentials (e.g. 2 Cor. 11:21–33; 1 Thess. 2:1–4; 2 Tim 3:10–12). The insincere preacher soft-pedals the gospel of free grace in order that he “may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ” (Gal. 5:11; 6:12). The true servant of God, on the other hand, commends himself by his endurance of opposition (2 Cor. 6:4–5). His sufferings may be internal too. For the preacher is particularly vulnerable to doubt and depression. It is often through a dark and lonely struggle that he has emerged into the light of a serene faith. His hearers can discern it and will give heed to him the more attentively. Colin Morris has expressed this well:
It is not from a pulpit but a cross that power-filled words are spoken. Sermons need to be seen as well as heard to be effectual. Eloquence, homiletical skill, biblical knowledge are not enough. Anguish, pain, engagement, sweat and blood punctuate the stated truths to which men will listen.
Personal sincerity is probably the best context in which to mention the practical matters of voice production and gesture, which cause anxiety to most young and inexperienced preachers. It is understandable that they should be apprehensive about their speech (“what do I sound like?”) and their bearing (“what do I look like?”). In consequence, some determine to find out. They stand before the mirror, strike a variety of poses and watch themselves gesticulate; they also listen to themselves on a cassette recorder. Indeed, nowadays sight and sound have been combined in the video recorder, which is already in regular use by American seminarians who are learning to preach, and in some other countries. Well, I do not want to rule out altogether the use of these devices, for I do not doubt their helpfulness. And certainly audio- and video-tape are preferable to the mirror, since before the mirror one is bound to be acting, whereas tape permits the later and objective evaluation of a sermon which during its actual delivery was entirely artless. Nevertheless, I still want to warn you of the dangers. If you look at yourself in the mirror, and listen to yourself on tape, or do both simultaneously on video-tape, I fear you may find that you continue to look at yourself and listen to yourself when you are in the pulpit. In that case you will condemn yourself to the cramping bondage of preoccupation with yourself just at the time when, in the pulpit, it is essential to cultivate self-forgetfulness through a growing awareness of the God for whom and the people to whom you are speaking. I know actors make use of glass and tape, but preachers are not actors, nor is the pulpit a stage. So beware! It may be more valuable to ask a friend to be candid with you about your voice and mannerisms, especially if they need correction. An Indian proverb says “he who has a good friend needs no mirror.” Then you can be yourself and forget yourself.
I can myself testify to the great value of having one or more “lay critics.” When I began to preach at the end of 1945, I requested two medical student friends to act as mine. (Medical people are excellent because they are trained in the art of observation!) Although I remember being devastated by some of the letters they wrote me, their criticisms were always salutary. Both are now eminent medical men. A preacher who belongs to a team ministry should certainly ask his colleagues for their comments. Indeed, an occasional group evaluation, either by the staff team or by a specially convened group which includes lay people, has proved immensely valuable to preachers. The evaluation will then go beyond speech and gesture, manner and mannerisms to the content of the sermon, including our use of Scripture; our dominant thought and aim; our structure, words and illustrations; and our introduction and conclusion.
Spurgeon has two lectures in his second series on “Posture, Action and Gesture” in the delivery of sermons, illustrated by cartoons of grotesquely gesticulating clerics. These lectures contain a lot of sensible and amusing advice, yet he is obviously concerned lest he make his students too self-conscious. He would prefer them to be clumsy and even eccentric rather than start “posturing and performing.”
I hope we have foresworn the tricks of professional orators (he writes), the strain for effect, the studied climax, the prearranged pause, the theatric strut, the mouthing of words, and I know not what besides, which you may see in certain pompous divines who still survive upon the face of the earth. May such become extinct animals ere long, and may a living, natural, simple way of talking out the gospel be learned by us all; for I am persuaded that such a style is one which God is likely to bless.
“Gentlemen,” he said to his students in another lecture, “I return to my rule—use your own natural voices. Do not be monkeys, but men; not parrots, but men of originality in all things. . . . I would repeat this rule till I wearied you if I thought you would forget it: be natural, be natural, be natural evermore.”
Such naturalness is the twin of sincerity. Both forbid us to ape other people. Both tell us to be ourselves.
Earnestness goes one step beyond sincerity. To be sincere is to mean what we say and to do what we say; to be earnest is, in addition, to feel what we say. Earnestness is deep feeling, and is indispensable to preachers. “No man can be a great preacher without great feeling” wrote James W. Alexander of Princeton. For “it is a matter of universal observation that a speaker who would excite deep feeling must feel deeply himself.”
Not that the need for earnestness is restricted to Christian communication, or even to speech. Every serious attempt to communicate requires us to put feeling into it. This is certainly true of music. As an example, let me take Jose Hernandez’ classic nineteenth-century poem The Gaucho, the name given to an Argentinian descendant from the original Spanish settlers who earns his living by raising cattle and horses. It is a long ballad which tells the story of a gaucho called Martin Fierro, his varied experiences, and the injustices done to him. In the penultimate chapter he gives fatherly advice to his sons. They must trust in God, be wary of men, work hard, not quarrel, and avoid drink. Then he goes on to their music-making by guitar and song:
If you want to be singers, feel it first –
And you won’t have to watch your style:
Don’t ever tune up your strings, my boys,
Just to hear yourselves, and to make a noise,
But get in the habit, that when you sing,
It’s always of things worth while.
It sounds obvious that worthwhile song and worthwhile speech will both give expression to deep feeling. Yet it has been a regular complaint in many Christian traditions that the pulpit offers preaching without feeling. “We have loud and vehement, we have smooth and graceful, we have splendid and elaborate preaching, but very little that is earnest.” Mark Twain gave a graphic account of a Sunday morning service: “The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod—and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone, and thinned the predestined elect to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.” Young Tom Sawyer found it so boring (despite the solemnity of the subject) that he produced a large black beetle from his pocket, whose adventures both with Tom and with a vagrant poodle dog created a hilarious diversion. At last, however, the sermon and the service ended. “It was a genuine relief to the whole congregation when the ordeal was over, and the benediction pronounced.”
It is true that the amount of feeling we either have or express is due to a large extent to our natural temperament. Some have a more lively disposition, others a more lethargic. Nevertheless, to handle issues of eternal life and death as if we were discussing nothing more serious than the weather, and to do so in a listless and lackadaisical manner, is to be inexcusably frivolous. “We must not talk to our congregations,” said Spurgeon to his students, “as if we were half asleep. Our preaching must not be articulate snoring.” For one thing is certain: if we ourselves grow sleepy over our message, our listeners can hardly be expected to stay awake.
It should not be necessary to develop an apologetic for earnestness. Yet I fear that it is. Earnestness is the quality of Christians who care. First and foremost, they care about God, about his glory and his Christ. When Paul in Athens was “provoked” because he saw the city smothered by its idols, he was feeling indignant over Athenian idolatry and jealous for the honor of the one, living and true God (Acts 17:16). He cared about the glory of God. And when he told the Philippians that many were living “as enemies of the cross of Christ,” he could do so only “with tears” (3:18). To think that people were contradicting the purpose of Christ’s death by trusting in their own righteousness instead of his, and by living in self-indulgence instead of holiness, made him weep. He cared about the glory of Christ. So should we.
We should also care about people and their lostness. Jesus wept over the impenitent city of Jerusalem because its inhabitants were resistant to his love and ignorant of their true welfare (Matt. 23:37; Luke 19:41–42). In the evangelistic ministry of the apostle Paul as well, preaching and weeping went hand in hand. For three years in Ephesus he “did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears” (Acts 20:31; cf. v; 19 and v. 37). We must not imagine, however, that weeping died out with the New Testament. To be sure, Anglo-Saxon inheritance and contemporary British culture would frown, even scowl on any such outward display of emotion. But what does this say about our ability to care? Authentic Christian evangelists, bearing the good news of salvation and fearing that some may reject it and so condemn themselves to hell, have never been far from tears. George Whitefield is a good example. People always sensed that he loved them, writes his biographer John Pollock.
His tears—and he could seldom manage a sermon without weeping—were totally unaffected. “You blame me for weeping,” he would say, “but how can I help it when you will not weep for yourselves, although your immortal souls are on the verge of destruction, and for aught I know, you are hearing your last sermon and may never more have another opportunity to have Christ offered to you?”
D. L. Moody is a yet more modern example. We are told that Dr. R. W. Dale, who for thirty-six years was pastor of Carr’s Lane Congregational Church in Birmingham, was inclined at first to look on Mr. Moody with disfavor. But then “he went to hear him, and his opinion was altered. He regarded him ever after with profound respect, and considered that he had a right to preach the gospel ‘because he could never speak of a lost soul without tears in his eyes.’”
I constantly find myself wishing that we twentieth-century preachers could learn to weep again. But either our tear-springs have dried up, or our tear-ducts have become blocked. Everything seems to conspire together to make it impossible for us to cry over lost sinners who throng the broad road which leads to destruction. Some preachers are so preoccupied with the joyful celebration of salvation that they never think to weep over those who are rejecting it. Others have been deceived by the devil’s lie of universalism. Everybody will be saved in the end, they say, and nobody will be lost. Their eyes are dry because they have closed them to the awful reality of eternal death and outer darkness of which both Jesus and his apostles spoke. Yet others are faithful in warning sinners of hell, but do so with a glibness and even a sick pleasure, which are almost more terrible than the blindness of those who ignore or deny its reality. To these intolerable attitudes the weeping of Jesus and Paul, of Whitefield and Moody, provides a healthy alternative.
The Puritans also shared this perspective, notably Richard Baxter. What Broadus aptly terms “his tremendous earthshaking earnestness” was due to his sense of urgency in the face of approaching death and eternity. He expressed it in his poem “Love Breathing Thanks and Praise”:
This called me out to work while it was day;
And warn poor souls to turn without delay:
Resolving speedily thy Word to preach,
With Ambrose I at once did learn and teach.
Still thinking I had little time to live,
My fervent heart to win men’s souls did strive.
I preached as never sure to preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men!
O how should preachers men’s repenting crave
Who see how near the Church is to the grave?
And see that while we preach and hear, we die,
Rapt by swift time to vast eternity!
More eloquent still are those passages in The Reformed Pastor (1656) in which Richard Baxter both bemoaned his own lack of earnestness and exhorted his fellow-pastors to bestir themselves. He wrote of himself in the following terms:
I marvel how I can preach . . . slightly and coldly, how I can let men alone in their sins, and that I do not go to them and beseech them for the Lord’s sake to repent, however they take it, and whatever pains or trouble it should cost me. I seldom come out of the pulpit but my conscience smiteth me that I have been no more serious and fervent. It accuseth me not so much for want of human ornaments or elegance, nor for letting fall an uncomely word; but it asketh me: “how could’st thou speak of life and death with such a heart? Should’st thou not weep over such a people, and should not thy tears interrupt thy words? Should’st not thou cry aloud and show them their transgressions, and entreat and beseech them as for life and death?”
Because he was thus critical of his personal failings in this area, Baxter was well-qualified to exhort his colleagues in the pastorate to greater earnestness:
How few ministers do preach with all their might?. . . Alas, we speak so drowsily or gently, that sleeping sinners cannot hear. The blow falls so light that hardhearted persons cannot feel it. . . . What excellent doctrines some ministers have in hand, and let it die in their hands for want of close and lively application. . . . O Sirs, how plainly, how closely and earnestly should we deliver a message of such nature as ours is, when the everlasting life or death of men is concerned in it. . . . What! speak coldly for God and for men’s salvation?. . . Such a work as preaching for men’s salvation should be done with all our might—that the people can feel us preach when they hear us.
So far I have concentrated on the appropriateness of deep feelings to grave subjects. How can we deliver a solemn message in a flippant manner, or refer to the eternal destinies of men and women as if we were discussing where they will spend their summer holidays? No, topic and tone, matter and manner must match one another, or the anomaly will be deeply offensive. A congregation learns the seriousness of the gospel by the seriousness with which their pastors expound it. But this fact leads to a further aspect of the subject, namely that earnestness of manner is one of the surest ways of arousing and holding people’s attention.
The ninth address in Spurgeon’s first series of Lectures to My Students has the arresting title Attention! It concerns “how to obtain and retain the attention of our hearers,” and contains that combination of common sense and good humor which we have come to associate with this giant of a man. His first piece of advice could hardly be more practical: “The next best thing to the grace of God for a preacher is oxygen. Pray that the windows of heaven may be opened, but begin by opening the windows of your meeting-house. . . . A gust of fresh air through the building might be to the people the next best thing to the gospel itself; at least it would put them into a fit frame of mind to receive the truth.” Next after oxygen “the first golden rule” he establishes is “always say something worth hearing,” and moreover something which the people recognize to be of importance to themselves. Mourners do not fall asleep while the will is being read, if they expect to be beneficiaries of it, nor do prisoners go to sleep while the judge is summing up and their life or freedom are at stake. “Self-interest quickens attention. Preach up on practical themes, pressing, present, personal matters, and you will secure an earnest hearing.”
Spurgeon’s next counsel is “be interested yourself and you will interest others.” He quotes William Romaine, the eighteenth-century evangelical leader, that it is infinitely more important to know the heart of preaching than its art, by which he meant putting one’s whole heart and soul into it. “Have something to say, and say it earnestly, and the congregation will be at your feet.” By contrast,
nothing will avail if you go to sleep yourself while you are preaching. Is that possible? Oh, possible! It is done every Sunday. Many ministers are more than half-asleep all through the sermon; indeed, they never were awake at any time, and probably never will be unless a cannon should be fired off near their ear: tame phrases, hackneyed expressions and dreary monotones make the staple of their discourses, and they wonder that the people are so drowsy: I confess I do not.
Sleepy preaching sounds so ludicrous, and is such a contradiction in terms, that we need to enquire into its origins. Why is it, for example, that the pulpit tradition of the Episcopal Church, particularly in England, is to exhibit a gentle sweet reasonableness and never to show any emotion? I suspect it is because Anglicanism has always valued scholarship and cherished the ideal of the educated minister, and then supposed that any kind of emotional display is incompatible with them.
I choose Parson James Woodforde as my example, who has delighted generations of English readers by the five volumes of his Diary of a Country Parson 1758–1802. Ministering for nearly thirty years in the village of Weston in Norfolk, the keynote of his life was “tranquility.” He loved sport, animals, country life, and above all good food and drink. Searching his five volumes I learned a great deal about his favorite dishes and wines, but nothing at all about his favorite texts. Some years ago, however, Professor Norman Sykes gained access to forty of Woodforde’s unpublished sermons and was thus able to look behind the “laconic entries” in the diary. He discovered that James Woodforde preached from the Bible, and that reasonableness was the hallmark of his exposition. In one sermon he warned his flock “against the contemporary bugbear of ‘enthusiasm,’” against “religious phrensy, by which men have been led into the greatest and wildest extravagancies.” True, he went on to warn them against the opposite danger of “a culpable languor and insensibility of spirit in matters of religion.” Nevertheless, it is evident that Parson Woodforde was more frightened of “enthusiasm” than of barren orthodoxy.
This was certainly the prevalent fear of eighteenth-century ecclesiastical leaders, who made sweeping generalizations about the excesses of “Methodism,” had refused to come to terms with the evangelical revival, and were relieved that the Methodists had taken themselves outside the established church. “Enthusiasm” was to them a dirty word, and it is typical of those days that a church bell could be inscribed (or so it is said) with the paradoxical doxology “Glory to God and damnation to enthusiasts.” Hence the stir created by Charles Simeon when in 1782 he became vicar of that church and began preaching his expository sermons with much emotion. Hugh Evan Hopkins, his latest biographer, writes,
Abner Brown remembers sitting next to a married undergraduate and his family in Trinity Church and overhearing their small daughter, intrigued by the antics of the demonstrative man in the pulpit, whispering to her mother, “O Mama, what is the gentleman in a passion about?”. . . As his curate Carus wrote in his Memoirs, “The intense fervour of his feelings he cared not to restrain; his whole soul was in his subject, and he spoke and acted exactly as he felt.”
Simeon himself, when toward the end of his life the gout limited his activity, wrote to Thomas Thomason, “I compare myself to bottled small beer; being corked up, and opened only twice a week, I make a good report; but if I were opened every day I should soon be as ditch-water.”
Simeon’s influential ministry at Holy Trinity, Cambridge, which lasted for fifty-four years, offers us a model of the reconciliation of emotion with reason in preaching. He was certainly emotional, as his hearers have testified, but nobody could accuse him of the kind of “enthusiasm” which denigrates the intellect or despises theology. On the contrary, a perusal of his collected sermons in Horae Homileticae reveals his painstaking thoughtfulness in analysis, exegesis, and application. In fact, his outlines look a little dull today, and one sometimes wonders what he got himself into a passion about.
Nevertheless, the combination of mind and heart, the rational and the emotional, was obviously present in Simeon’s preaching, and for this combination there is ample precedent in the New Testament. I have already alluded to Paul’s tears. But what about his mighty intellect which has kept scholars studying his thoughts ever since? The same apostle who reasoned with people out of the Scriptures, and sought to convince them by the power of argument and of the Holy Spirit, also wept over them like his Master before him. Consider how exposition and exhortation blend with one another in his letters. For example, he gives at the end of 2 Corinthians 5 one of the major explanations of the doctrine of reconciliation in the New Testament. He handles the tremendous themes that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, that he determined not to count against sinners their sins, but that for our sake he actually made Christ to be sin who knew no sin in order that in him we might become God’s righteousness. Here are tightly packed assertions about God and his initiative, about Christ and his cross, and about sin, reconciliation, and righteousness, which commentators are still struggling to unpack and explain. Yet Paul is not content with a profound theological statement. He goes beyond the fact of reconciliation to the ministry and message of reconciliation, beyond what God did in Christ to what he now does in us, beyond the affirmation of Christ’s apostles that “God was in Christ reconciling” to the appeal of Christ’s ambassadors “be reconciled to God.” If he did not stop with the exposition but went on to the appeal, he equally did not issue the appeal until he had first given the exposition. In his ministry affirmation and appeal were inseparable.
The contemporary church urgently needs to learn Paul’s lesson and follow his example. To be sure, some preachers have no fear of enthusiasm. In evangelistic preaching they make interminable appeals for decision or conversion.
Their sermons are sometimes nothing but one, long, protracted appeal. Yet their listeners are bewildered, because they have not grasped (or even been helped to grasp) either the nature or the ground of the appeal. The request for decision without doctrine is an offense to human beings, for it is little less than a mindless manipulation.
Other preachers make the opposite mistake. Their exposition of the central biblical doctrines of the gospel is impeccable. They are faithful to Scripture, lucid in explanation, felicitous in language, and contemporary in application. It would be hard to find fault with their content. Yet somehow they appear cold and aloof. No note of urgency is ever heard in their voice, and no suspicion of a tear is ever seen in their eyes. They would never dream of leaning over the pulpit in order to beg sinners in the name of Christ to repent, come to him and be reconciled with God. They resemble the preacher of whom Spurgeon wrote, “It is dreadful work to listen to a sermon, and feel all the while as if you were sitting out in a snowstorm, or dwelling in a house of ice, clear but cold, orderly but killing.” No wonder he pleaded instead for “much heavenly fire,” and declared that “even fanaticism is to be preferred to indifference.” “Give us more of the speech which comes of a burning heart,” he cried, “as lava comes of a volcanic overflow.”
What is needed today then is the same synthesis of reason and emotion, exposition and exhortation, as was achieved by Paul. Writing of Isaac Barrow, the seventeenth-century professor of Greek at Cambridge, whom he describes as “a traveller, a philologist, a mathematician and a divine,” J. W. Alexander goes on to call him “the eloquent reasoner” and adds that “he abounds in high argument, which is . . . inflamed by passion.” Earlier in his book Alexander has made a plea for “theological preaching.” What interests people, he says, is “argument made red-hot,” for “argument admits of great vehemence and fire.”
A British preacher of this century who made a plea for the same combination was Dr. George Campbell Morgan, 1917 and again from 1933 to 1943. At Cheshunt College, Cambridge, which trained men for the Congregational ministry and of which he was president from 1911–1914, he lectured on preaching. The three essentials of a sermon, he said, are “truth, clarity and passion.” On “passion” he told a tale of the great English actor, Macready. A preacher once asked him how he could draw such crowds by fiction, while he was preaching the truth and not getting any crowd at all. “This is quite simple,” replied the actor. “I can tell you the difference between us. I present my fiction as though it were truth; you present your truth as though it were fiction.” Then Campbell Morgan added his own comment. Given the preacher with his Bible, he said, “I cannot personally understand that man not being swept sometimes right out of himself by the fire and the force and the fervour of his work.”
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Campbell Morgan’s successor in the pulpit of Westminster Chapel, shared his conviction that truth and passion are essential ingredients of Christian preaching. In his moving book Preaching and Preachers, he asks “What is preaching?” and then supplies his own definition.
Logic on fire! Eloquent reason! Are these contradictions? Of course they are not. Reason concerning this truth ought to be mightily eloquent, as you see it in the case of the Apostle Paul and others. It is theology on fire. And a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology, or at least the man’s understanding of it is defective. Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire.
Moreover, he elaborates this theme in The Christian Warfare, his exposition of Ephesians 6:10–13, with reference to the work of the Holy Spirit:
Do not quench the fire, do not quench the Spirit. . . Christianity means warmth, it means a glow. . . . “Yes, of course,” you say, “but if you have true scholarship you will not be animated; you will be dignified. You will read a great treatise quietly and without passion.” Out with the suggestion! That is quenching the Spirit! The Apostle Paul breaks some of the rules of grammar; he interrupts his own argument. It is because of the fire! We are so decorous, we are so controlled, we do everything with such decency and order that there is no life, there is no warmth, there is no power! But that is not New Testament Christianity. . . . Does your faith melt and move your heart? Does it get rid of the ice that is in you, the coldness in your heart, and the stiffness? The essence of New Testament Christianity is this warmth that is invariably the result of the presence of the Spirit.
I think Dr. Lloyd-Jones has put his finger on a crucial point. Fire in preaching depends on fire in the preacher, and this in turn comes from the Holy Spirit. Our sermons will never catch fire unless the fire of the Holy Spirit burns in our own hearts and we are ourselves “aglow with the Spirit” (Rom. 12:11). A story is told of W. E. Sangster of Westminister Central Hall which is not in Dr. Sangster, the biographical sketch written by his son Paul, but which I believe and hope is true. He was once a member of a selection panel who were interviewing applicants for the Methodist ministry, when a rather nervous young man presented himself. Given an opportunity to speak, this candidate said he felt he ought to explain that he was rather shy and was not the sort of person who would ever set the River Thames on fire, that is, create a stir in the city. “My dear young brother,” responded Dr. Sangster with consummate wisdom, “I’m not interested to know if you could set the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this: if I picked you up by the scruff of your neck and dropped you into the Thames, would it sizzle?” In other words was the young man himself on fire? That was the important question.
How, then, can we remarry what should never have been divorced, namely truth and eloquence, reason and passion, light and fire? Some preachers serve out excellent theology from the pulpit, but it seems to have come out of the freezer. There is no warmth, no glow, no fire. Other pulpits catch fire all right, and threaten to set the church ablaze, but precious little theology goes with it. It is the combination which is almost irresistible in its power, namely theology on fire, passionate truth, eloquent reason. But how? What is the secret of this blend? Two answers may be given. First, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of both. Jesus called him “the Spirit of truth,” and he appeared on the Day of Pentecost in “tongues of fire.” Since the two are not separated in him, they will not be in the Spirit-filled Christian either. Once we allow him his freedom, both in the preparation and in the delivery of our sermons, the light and the fire, the truth and the passion, will again be reunited.
The second secret was learned by the two disciples with whom Jesus walked to Emmaus on the first Easter afternoon. When he had vanished, they said to one another, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). There can be no doubt that the heartburn they felt was an emotional experience. They were deeply moved. Fire had broken out inside them. When did it begin? It began when he talked to them and opened up the Scriptures to them. It was when they glimpsed new vistas of truth that the fires began to burn. It is still truth—Christ-centered, biblical truth—which sets the heart on fire.
The acknowledged need for earnestness in our preaching inevitably prompts the question whether it is ever appropriate for the preacher to make the congregation laugh. At first sight seriousness and laughter appear to be incompatible, and we find ourselves in agreement with Richard Baxter when he wrote, “Whatever you do, let the people see that you are in good earnest. . . . You cannot break men’s hearts by jesting with them.”
The issue is not so simply settled, however. For “there is . . . a time to weep and a time to laugh” (Eccl. 3:4). We have seen that weeping is not necessarily to be banned from the pulpit; so maybe laughing should not be banned either?
The place to begin our enquiry is the teaching of Jesus, for it seems to be generally agreed that humor was one of the weapons in the armory of the Master Teacher. Dr. Elton Trueblood, professor of philosophy at Earlham College, the distinguished American Quaker, wrote his book The Humour of Christ in 1965. He tells us that the germ of the idea was planted in his mind when he was reading Matthew 7 (about specks and logs in people’s eyes) at family prayers, and his four-year-old child starting laughing. So he lists thirty humorous passages in the Synoptic Gospels and challenges “the conventionalized picture of a Christ who never laughed,” but was always somber, dull, and gloomy. At the same time, Professor Trueblood is at pains to show that the commonest form of humor used by Jesus was irony (“a holding up to public view of either vice or folly”), not sarcasm (which is cruel and wounds its victims).
It is very important to understand (he writes), that the evident purpose of Christ’s humour is to clarify and increase understanding, rather than to hurt. Perhaps some hurt is inevitable, especially when . . . human pride is rendered ridiculous, but the clear aim is something other than harm. . . . Truth, and truth alone, is the end. . . . The unmasking of error and thereby the emergence of truth.
Another scholar who clearly demonstrated the humorous element in the teaching of Jesus was T. R. Glover in his best-selling The Jesus of History. A good example is Jesus’ caricature of the scribes and Pharisees who were conscientious in minute duties while altogether neglecting “the weightier matters of the law.” Their lack of proportion was like people drinking, who would “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” (Matt. 23:23– 24). Glover gets us laughing by making us imagine a man attempting to swallow a camel:
How many of us have ever pictured the process, and the series of sensations, as the long hairy neck slid down the throat of the Pharisee—all that amplitude of loose-hung anatomy—the hump—two humps—both of them slid down—and he never noticed—and the legs—all of them—with the whole outfit of knees and big padded feet. The Pharisee swallowed a camel and never noticed it.
Even if Jesus only used the expression and attempted no description, he must have had his listeners in fits of laughter.
Because of the precedent set by Jesus, it is hardly surprising that the use of humor in preaching and teaching has had a long and honorable tradition. It particularly flourished during the sixteenth-century Reformation, for both Martin Luther on the continent and Hugh Latimer in England used their earthy descriptive powers to the full. They drew cartoons with words which still have the power to make us laugh today.
So humor is legitimate. Nevertheless, we have to be sparing in our use of it and judicious in the topics we select for laughter. It is always inappropriate for finite and fallen human beings to laugh about God, whether the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. It is equally unfitting for sinners to laugh about the cross or resurrection of Jesus by which their salvation has been achieved, or about the solemn realities of the last things, namely death, judgment, heaven, and hell. These topics are not in themselves amusing, and are trivialized if we try to make them funny. People may also stop taking us seriously. Our ministry then will be as ineffective as Lot’s who urged his sons-in-law to escape from Sodom because the Lord was about to destroy it, but “he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting” (Gen. 19:14). Phillips Brooks was entirely justified in his Yale lectures in expressing contempt for “the clerical jester” who “lays his hands on the most sacred things, and leaves defilement upon all he touches.” An irresponsible buffoon like that, he says, has never grasped that “humour is something very different from frivolity.”
What, then, is the value of humor if used in the right places and about the right things? First, it breaks tension. Most people find it hard either to maintain mental concentration or to endure the build-up of emotional pressure for a prolonged period. They need to relax for a few moments, and one of the simplest, quickest, and healthiest ways to secure their relaxation is to tell a joke and make them laugh.
Secondly, laughter has extraordinary power to break down people’s defenses. A man comes to church in a stubborn and rebellious frame of mind. He is determined not to respond to a missionary appeal or to change his mind over some issue. You can tell it from his face. See those pursed lips and that furrowed brow; they are symbols of his unyielding resistance. Then suddenly he laughs, in spite of himself, and his resistance collapses. James Emmau Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927) knew this power of humor. Born in what used to be known as the Gold Coast, he was educated in the United States, became the first vice-principal of Achimota College, and was deeply concerned for racial harmony. When he helped to make an educational survey of West, South and East Africa, people were afraid that his outspokenness might provoke antagonism. But they need not have feared. “I get their mouths open in a laugh,” he said, “and then ram the truth down.” Or, as Christopher Morley aptly expressed it, “after the mirth-quake the still small voice.”
The third and greatest benefit of humor is that it humbles us by pricking the bubble of human pomposity. I know no better elaboration of this than the first chapter in Ronald Knox’s Essays in Satire. Called by Horton Davies “The Merry Monsignor, a fountain of gaiety and grace,” he sought in his introduction to distinguish between wit, humor, satire, and irony.
The sphere of humor is, predominantly, Man and his activities, considered in circumstances so incongruous, so unexpectedly incongruous, as to detract from their human dignity. . . . A man falling down on a frosty day is funny, because he has unexpectedly abandoned that upright walk which is man’s glory as a biped. . . . There is nothing at all funny about a horse falling down. . . . Only Man has dignity; only Man, therefore, can be funny. . . . In all humor there is loss of dignity somewhere, virtue has gone out of somebody. For there is no inherent humor in things; wherever there is a joke it is Man, the half-angel, the half-beast, who is somehow at the bottom of it.
So then, to laugh at somebody’s foibles is a back-handed compliment. It recognizes the innate dignity of human beings. It cannot take seriously their deviations from authentically human behavior, their pride, pretense, and pettiness. These things are funny because they are incongruous. Moreover humor can be directed against oneself; one laughs at one’s own idiosyncracies, at one’s ludicrous lapses from humanness.
“Satire,” however, Ronald Knox continued, “. . . is born to scourge the persistent and even recurrent follies of the human creature as such. . . . Laughter is a deadly explosive which was meant to be wrapped up in the cartridge of satire, and so, aimed unerringly at its appointed target, deals its salutary wound.”
To sum up Knox’s point, laughter—especially of the satirical variety—by poking fun at our human eccentricities bears witness to our fallenness and shames us into repentance. So we preachers ought to use satire more skilfully and more frequently, ensuring always that in laughing at others we are also laughing at ourselves within the solidarity of human pomp and folly. Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger has Satan himself reminding us that the human race in its poverty “has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter.” How, for example, can some “colossal humbug” be destroyed? “Only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms in a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
One of our contemporaries who uses this weapon to great effect is Malcolm Muggeridge. As a former editor of what he dubs “an allegedly humorous magazine called Punch,” he has had good reason to meditate on the meaning of laughter which, “next to mystical enlightenment is the most precious gift and blessing that comes to us on earth.” More than that, he has come to see laughter as “the converse face of mysticism,” since the mystic reaches upwards toward God, while the humorist recognizes our human inability to find him. This paradox he sees illustrated in the great cathedrals of medieval Europe which have both “a steeple climbing into the sky” and “a gargoyle grinning down at the earth.” For these are not ill-assorted but complementary, “the steeple straining to reach up to the glories of eternity in heaven” and “the gargoyle laughing at the antics of mortal men.” Together they help us to define humor as “an expression, in terms of the grotesque, of the inexorable disparity between human aspiration and human performance.” Some readers of Malcolm Muggeridge have found his rather caustic criticisms of others upsetting, but we need to remember that he does not spare himself. The steeple and the gargoyle exemplify his own life, for he confesses the gulf he finds between his heavenly vision and his earthly attainment. He seeks to be true to the reality of Christ he has perceived, but adds with melancholy, “I hate to think how many hundreds of thousands of miles this ridiculous carcass of mine has been carted about the world for one reason and another.”
So humor should definitely not be prohibited in the pulpit. On the contrary, provided that we are laughing at the human condition, and therefore at ourselves, humor helps us to see things in proportion. It is often through laughter that we gain clear glimpses both of the heights from which we have fallen and of the depths to which we have sunk, leading to a wistful desire to be “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.” Thus humor can be a genuine preparation for the gospel. Since it can contribute to the awakening within human hearts of shame over what we are and of longing for what we could be, we should press it gladly into service in the cause of the gospel.
The Length of Sermons
I have often been asked how long I think a sermon ought to be. It is an impossible question to answer because there are so many imponderables. It depends on the occasion and the topic, on the preacher’s gift and the congregation’s maturity. Yet it seems right to raise the issue in this chapter on sincerity and earnestness because, at least in principle, I think every sermon should last just as long as the preacher needs in which to deliver his soul. Basically, it is not the length of a sermon which makes a congregation impatient for it to stop, but the tedium of a sermon in which even the preacher himself appears to be taking very little interest. “The true way to shorten a sermon,” said H. W Beecher, “is to make it more interesting.”
The apostle Paul remains a permanent warning to wordy preachers because of the fate of that poor young man Eutychus who first fell asleep and then fell out of the window and was taken up dead. On that occasion Paul’s sermon was in two parts, the first lasting from sundown until midnight, and the second from midnight until daybreak (Acts 20:7–12). Even that is not a record. According to the 1980 Guinness Book of Records, the longest sermon ever preached lasted twenty-three hours. It was preached between 18 and 22 September 1978 by the Rev. Donald Thomas of Brooklyn, New York. Leaving aside that rather meaningless competition, there have been many instances of sermons lasting several hours. John Wesley notes in his journal on 19 October 1739 how he preached at the Shire Hall of Cardiff with “such freedom of speech” as he had seldom experienced. “My heart was so enlarged,” he added, “I knew not how to give over, so that we continued three hours.” The first sermon preached by Jonathan Edwards in Princeton Chapel after his appointment as president in 1758 was on “the unchangeableness of Christ.” “It was upwards of two hours in the delivery; but is said to have been listened to with such profound attention and deep interest by the audience that they were unconscious of the lapse of time, and surprised that it closed so soon.” Richard Channing Moore (1762–1841), who later became bishop of Virginia and presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church, drew vast congregations when he was rector of St. Andrew’s, Staten Island.
At the close of a Sunday afternoon service a member of the congregation rose and said, “Dr. Moore, the people are not disposed to go home; please give us another sermon.” He complied. Still they remained hungry for the Word of life. A third sermon followed, at the close of which the preacher said: “My beloved people, you must now disperse—for, although I delight to proclaim the glad tidings of salvation, my strength is exhausted, and I can say no more.”
I give these three examples—John Wesley’s three hours, Jonathan Edwards’ two hours and Richard Channing Moore’s three consecutive sermons—partly because they belong to the same leisurely century and partly because they were all responses to the unusual spiritual hunger of particular congregations. Although in the Victorian era forty-five minutes was the norm, and often the full hour which it took for the hour glass to empty, only the most mature congregations would endure, let alone welcome, such long sermons today. Besides, even in those days some congregations grew restless. Spurgeon tells of a farmer who bitterly complained to him of a young man who went on for too long:
“Sir, he ought to have given over at four o’clock, but he kept on till half-past, and there were all my cows waiting to be milked! How would he have liked it if he had been a cow?” There was a great deal of sense in that question (commented Spurgeon). The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ought to have prosecuted that young sinner. How can farmers hear to profit when they have cows-on-the-brain?
It is sad, however, that in reaction against Victorian expansiveness many preachers have reduced their sermons to a ten-minute homily. Congregations will not grow spiritually healthy on an inadequate diet like that. “Sermonettes breed Christianettes,” as both Campbell Morgan of Westminster Chapel and Stuart Holden of St. Paul’s, Portman Square, who were contemporaries, have been credited with saying. P. T. Forsyth commented similarly, “Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the preacher is not a wit. . . . A Christianity of short sermons is a Christianity of short fibre.” I am thankful that this is being increasingly recognized. In an article in The Times on 6 August 1977, Bishop R. P. C. Hanson of Manchester University complained about “an absence of depth and seriousness” in the church, and attributed it largely to short sermons. “The angel Gabriel himself,” wrote the bishop, “could not convert anyone in ten minutes.” The sermons of Bishop William Connor Magee were described as “sustained exercises in the practice of clear thinking on religious matters,” but “no sermon lasting only ten minutes could be called a sustained exercise in anything: this lack of attention to the preaching of the Word is a sign of superficiality in religion.”
No hard and fast rules can be laid down about the length of sermons, except perhaps that ten minutes are too short and forty minutes too long. It has been wisely said that every sermon should “seem like twenty minutes,” even if it is actually longer. On arrival at a new church, a preacher will be well advised to begin by giving the congregation what they have been accustomed to. Gradually, however, as the Word of God quickens their appetite, they will ask for more.
* * *
This has been a somewhat subjective chapter, but necessarily so, for preaching can never be isolated from the preacher. Ultimately it is who he is that determines both what he says and how he says it. He may glimpse the glory of preaching and grasp its theology. He may study hard and prepare well. He may see the need to relate the Word to the world, and genuinely desire to be a bridge-builder. Yet still he may lack the vital ingredient (for lack of which nothing can compensate) of personal spiritual reality. Sincerity and earnestness are not qualities which can be attached to us from the outside, like the decorations we tie to our Christmas trees. They are the fruit of the Spirit. They simply describe a person who believes and feels what he says.
As E. M. Bounds wrote at the beginning of the century, “the man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man.” James Black put it similarly, “the best preaching is always the natural overflow of a ripe mind and the expression of a growing experience. A good sermon is never worked up but worked out.”
I like those two words “outflow” and “overflow.” They express succinctly that true preaching is never a superficial activity; it wells up out of the depths. Jesus himself laid much emphasis on this principle. Without the perennial spring of the Holy Spirit’s life within us, he said, the rivers of living water can never flow forth from us. Again, it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. (See Matt. 12:34 ; John 4:14; 7:37–39.)