The Preacher Among Snares
Ne of the mysteries of chemistry is neutralization, the process whereby the peculiar properties of one substance are, by another, destroyed or rendered inert or imperceptible. Thus, acids and alkalies more or less completely neutralize each other. Combinations may, from harmless elements, produce poisons, or may render poisons harmless. Hydrogen, that most combustible gas, and ox’gen, that great feeder of combustion, unite to form water, the foe of combustion; while nitrogen, the “lazy giant,” and oxygen, the very spirit of energy, hold each other in check in the atmosphere.
So it is possible to render neutral and ineffective even the vital truths of redemption. Paul would not preach the gospel “with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be viciiic of none effeet!’ Even the gospel may be neutralized by foreign mixtures; matter is not independent of manner. Christ crucified may be preached in a way that prevents spiritual power.
Two great questions arise as to preaching: How shall it be made attractive, and How shall it be made effective. We must draw and hold, before we can win and mold men. Paul touches a vital point, when he hints that in seeking attractiveness we may sacrifice effectiveness, mixing with God’s medicine, to make it more palatable, what destroys its corrective and curative properties.
The apostle was naturally vain and ambitious, and had a double culture in Hebrew and Greek schools, and yet he successfully resisted a subtle temptation which has proved to many a preacher the fatal fruit’of a forbidden tree. Men of great powers have often veiled the homely gospel message behind the golden and silver tissyes of ornate speech, corrupting the wisdom of God with the wisdom of man; or dazzled men by a show of genius, and robed spiritual truth in the scholastic gown of secular learning, as though it were but a higher school of human philosophy.
The preaching that lacks simplicity makes the cross of none effect, by lifting it above the level of the average man. To robe the gospel in unsanctified rhetoric, diverts attention from the Christ to the “Chrysostom,” the golden-mouthed orator. Such preachers, like the Pharisees, ‘’have their reward; “. they call forth a cold intellectual assent, awaken an aesthetic pleasure, kindle a sentimental glow, perhaps even an enthusiastic ardor and fervor; but they fail to pierce the heart with the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. That sword proves living and powerful, not when worn in the sheath of scholarly culture, or when swung in air to show the flashing gems with which learning decks it, but when drawn from its scabbard and thrust naked into the hearer’s heart. Nettleton slowly repeated the text, “I thought on my ways, and turned my feet unto Thy testimonies,” and before he “began to speak,” the sword of the Spirit had already pierced his audience.
When the sermon is the unfolding of a Scripture ^rr/;/, it will naturally take largely even a Scripture fonn. To the sprouting seed of His own truth God giveth its own body — “which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth.” ‘Paul conceived of the gospel as having its own dialect. Effective preaching gets not onlyits form of thought, but its form of speech, from above. Unction implies a vital insight into truth, in advance of an utterance which is of the Spirit; first, the anointed eyes and then the anointed tongue.
Paul not only confined himself to themes which have their root in Christ crucified, but even those themes he would not present with wisdom of words, lest by the human rhetorician or scholastic philosopher displacing the divine ambassador, the cross be made of none effect. When we give divine truth its own celestial body, the glory is not terrestrial, but celestial; men hear heaven’s message in heaven’s dialect and give honor to God alone.
Much of the ineffectiveness of modern preaching finds an explanation in our attempt to make it attractive and effective by savoring it with Attic salt — wisdom of words. The pulpit of to-day is thought to be largely loyal to the truth, and that probably at no time since the Reformation Christ has been ‘I Cor. ii. 13. more generally preached. But how often the fashion of the message fails to fit its form and feature; the truth itself being robed in a “garment spotted by the flesh.” We grieve the Spirit when we lack faith in the power of God’s Word and of God’s Spirit to convert and transform. We forsake exposition and exegesis for philosophy and apologetics. Drawn down by the challenge of cultured critics and scientific skeptics, we vainly seek to cope with these “Syrians” upon the plain, and to fight them with human weapons on their own level. But the whole history of preaching shows that opposers are not so won. Theremin is right; “Eloquence is a virtue;” and the virtue that prevails against the foes of the truth is not found in the wisdom of the scholar or the magnetism of the orator, but in the simple witness of one who speaks what he knows and testifies what he has seen; whose power to convince and persuade is the fact that he is himself convinced and persuaded.
It is a noteworthy fact that the master dialecticians and rhetoricians have never been the greatest soul-winners. A preacher died a half-century ago, whose pulpit orations outshone any others of his day; yet, though
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masterpieces of argument and analysis, they were not fruitful in conversions; while the seraphic Whitefield, wielding the simple truth of God with the power of the Spirit, warmed even the cold, calculating Franklin, and the philosophical, skeptical Hume. An evangelist of our own day — a man of one Book, of whom men say, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” who takes no pride in either his grammar or his rhetoric, and whose refined pastor once counseled him to keep silence — has been moving two continents by simply holding up the cross!
The very training of ministers largely tends toward a false standard of pulpit power. Students are told to cultivate a high literary style, to aim at eloquence. Such counsel has a worldly savor and flavor. The pulpit is no place for literary display. God would have the “unhewn altar,” that men may look only at the slain lamb upon it. Men may praise Ahaz, when he brings into God’s courts the elaborate, carved, Damascene altar, but the Shechinah will grow dim. Preaching is a divine vocation, and its power is of God. The preacher’s style, like that of Atticus, “when unadorned is most adorned”; ti8 7y/£” DIVINE ART OF PREACHING.
like a maiden, sweeter without paint and perfumery. Buffon said, “Le style! C’est I’homme!” We would go further: style, in the true preacher, is God speaking through him; it is what he is, as a man of God, an anointed messenger of God, who is guided to utter His message.
Pascal doubted whether preaching presents a proper field “for eloquence” save in the sense of speech that is thrilled by the power of a supernatural conviction and persuasion. This cultivation of style, this aspiration after eloquence, tend to self-consciousness. Instead of being absorbed in the truth and in passion for souls, the preacher becomes hypercritical. A slip of pen or tongue, an ungrammatical or unrhetorical blunder or blemish, annoys and disconcerts him; while, on the other hand, a musical sentence, decorously wrought and sonorously uttered, a figure ingeniously elaborated, an original thought flashing its brilliance — all this pleases his carnal nature, and awakens self-complacency. Such vexation and such satisfaction alike divert the mind of the ambassador of God from his divine vocation and grieve the Holy Spirit; such pride and such humiliation are equally unseemly, and, like a godless repentance, need to be repented of.
Moreover, there is a certain nameless charm, a mysterious power, that invests the anointed preacher, which is known as unction. Its nature is a mystery; but one thing is sure, unction and self-conscionsncss never go together. He whom God fills forgets himself, and whatever recalls him from this self-unconsciousness hinders the free flow of God’s power through him; and, seeing that this is so, the godly preacher habitually cultivates this holy engrossment, for the sake of the divine endowment and enduement.
In fact, the sense of the awful responsibility of preaching is itself enough, when truly awakened, to lead to self-oblivion.
“It is curious,” said Prof. George Wilson, “this feeling of having an audience, like clay in your hands, to mold for a season as you please. It is a terribly responsible power.” Responsible indeed! “Probation” is that period of the soul’s life when as yet the final decision has not been made, either for or against God: to choose one way is salvation; to choose the other way is damnation. Hence, zvJiile the man of God is preaching, a hearer s probation may practically end and his salvatioji or damnation begin. “Who is sufificient for these things?” While the preacher turns aside to indulge a flight of poetic fancy, elaboiate a figure, indulge a pleasantry, or create a diversion, he is giving way to Satan, who stands at every priest’s right hand to resist him; and in that fatal moment he loses his grip upon a soul almost persuaded; his hand lets up its pressure just as the scale is turning for God!
When a preacher gets such a conception of preaching it lifts him above criticism; it inspires that fear of God which makes him fearless of man, intrepidly indifferent to either compliment or censure. It becomes irreverent impertinence in the hearer to pull out his watch when the half-hour is up, as though a discourse born of God, and having a definite end, could be arbitrarily cut off at the expiration of thirty minutes while as yet the argument and appeal are incomplete. The true preacher does not bow to the caprice of his hearer, nor yield to the senseless clamor for short sermons. A crystal of truth, like any other crystal, must be cleft according to its scams; a sermon that has an end to reach, and stops short of it, is a failure as truly as a sermon that reaches its true end and highest impression, and then grows weaker by going beyond its proper close.
Let all those who preach this gospel go into the darkness where God dwells and get his whispered message; then, what they have heard in the darkness, in the ear, in the closet, let them proclaim in the light, in the ears of many, from the housetops. Let us cultivate a divine self-oblivion. He who aims at wisdom of words may hear the shouts of the multitude praising the beauty of his bow and arrows and the grace with which he handles them; but it is only when we lose ourselves in God that we hear the groans of the wounded, which are the supreme test of the archer’s skill, and which remind us of the fabled shrieks of the mandrake when it is pulled up by the roots. He who is to plead with men to be reconciled to God should come out of God’s Pavilion with that chrism of a celestial presence which makes even the face to shine.
There is a way of preaching that carries power; but it is not an invention of human oratory. Rhetoric and logic, poetry and
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philosophy, genius and culture, cannot in their best combination assure that kind of power. It must be gotten waiting upon God in the silence, secrecy, solitude, of the Holy of Holies where God dwells.