Growing Sermons
A GREAT many sermons are made, and very bunglingly made, too; but the best sermons grow. The seed, or root, of them is lodged in the preacher’s mind, and often by the direct agency of the Holy Spirit. It should always be a passage from God’s inspired and infallible Word. Your divine commission is to “preach the Word,” and whatever topic or subject should be revolving in your mind, yet the sermon on that topic should have a root in the Bible. The men who draw from God’s inexhaustible reservoir of truth are commonly the men who hold out; for human brains often run dry, but the Bible never does. Spurgeon was always a closely textual preacher, and that was one great secret of his perennial power. The brilliant Theodore Parker, of Boston, sometimes took his text from Shakespeare; he concocted therefrom bright essays, but they did not contain gospel enough to save a mouse.
It has always been my custom to keep a little memorandum-book in which I noted down any Bible passage that seemed especially adapted to the pulpit, and so I always had by me a supply to draw from when I sat down to work on my sermon on Tuesday morning; for I seldom left the choice of my theme any later than that day in the week. Be on the lookout for themes all the time and everywhere. As I happened to meet a man one day, and mentioned to him the fact that a criminal was to be hanged on that day, he replied, “Yes, poor creature, the wages of sin is death.” That old, familiar passage so impressed me at the moment that I went home and began a discourse on it immediately. It is a happy thing for you when some out-of-the-way passage that is seldom preached from opens itself to you in a fresh and striking way; for then you can present to your people something that they had probably never heard before, and the very novelty of the text excites curiosity and enchains attention. Sensational preachers often hit upon odd texts, and handle them grotesquely; as when one of this tribe preached on the words, “Let her drive!” and another one founded a discousre against the practice of immersion on the words, “Beware of divers.” While clowns in the pulpit perpetrate such follies, there is still a legitimate argument in favor of novel texts, when handled wisely and devoutly; for such presentations of sacred truth give your hearers a new idea of the inexhaustible wealth and wide applications of God’s Word.
When you have selected your passage from the Bible, let your sermon grow legitimately out of it. The connection between every good sermon and its text is just as vital as the connection between an apple-tree and its roots. Sometimes a lazy minister endeavors to palm off an old sermon for a new one by changing the text; but this artifice should soon expose itself, for the change would be like the decapitation of “a man, fatal to life. The text ought to spring up as the root of your discourse, and send its trunk towering aloft as the central idea of that discourse. All the arguments, instructions, and exhortations are but as the boughs branching off from this central truth, giving breadth, vigor, and spiritual beauty to the whole organic production. The unity of your sermon — yes, and the spiritual power of it, also — will commonly depend upon its adherence to the great divine truth contained in the inspired text. Remember that your text is God’s part of your sermon; and from that should sprout out manifold vital and vigorous thoughts, like the fruit-laden limbs of a Bartlett pear-tree. Be careful that you do not tie on the trunk a lot of dead sticks that have no organic connection with the trunk, and only disfigure its comeliness. The more thoroughly you get your text into your very soul, the more you will get it into your sermon. Very often you may introduce the results of your own personal experience into your preaching; and, if you live close to God, he will be pouring his Spirit into your heart; and these experiences will be among the most richly profitable portions of your pulpit instructions. If you water your text with prayer, it will assuredly grow into a goodly tree, and “the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon.”
As to what may be called the mechanical process of sermonizing, you must follow your own instincts. There lias been, and probably will ever be, an endless discussion about the comparative merits of written and of extemporaneous preaching. No rule is the best rule. Find out by practice which method you can use to the best advantage, and then pursue it. No man ever fails who understands his forte, and no man succeeds who does not. Some ministers cannot extemporize effectively, if they try ever so hard; there are others who, like Gladstone, can think best when they are on their legs, and are inspired by an audience. Probably the two greatest British preachers of this century were Chalmers and Spurgeon. Chalmers wrote every line of his magnificent discourses, and delivered them with such tremendous vehemence that he made the rafters roar. Spurgeon was a prince of extemporaneous orators. When I once asked him whether he ever wrote any of his sermons, or even any portion of them, his reply was, “I had rather be hung.” His method was to fill up the cask all through the week by diligent study of God’s Word and of all nutritious books; and then, when Saturday evening came, he selected his particular text, and on Sunday morning he just turned the spigot, and out flowed the pure, sweet gospel in an abundant stream. No man could preach after that fashion who was not a close student of books and of human nature, and who had not a great gift of ready, fluent speech. Young brother, if you find that your sermons are running out, or furnish only a thin, scanty stream, fill up your cask.
The great danger of extemporaneous preaching is that it may lead you into disconnected rambling, or mere effusive gush. Therefore you ought to form your style, at the outset, by careful and systematic writing. When Spurgeon was a youth, he wrote most of his sermons.
34 TEE TOrXG PREACHER.
Dr. Richard S. Storrs is by all odds the most elegant and affluent extemporaneous orator in America; but for twenty years he carefully wrote all his discourses. Henry Ward Beecher was in the habit of writing about half of the sermon; and then, turning away from his notes, he interjected the thoughts that came to him in the heat of the moment, and presently returned to his manuscript. This has been my own method of sermonizing, until about fifteen years ago, when I adopted the plan of preparing a short brief and tucking it into a Bagster’s Bible. Dr. John Hall writes carefully, and leaves his manuscripts at home. So does Dr. Alexander McLaren, of Manchester, who is to-day the most splendid sermonizer in Great Britain. The eloquent Guthrie of Scotland committed his discourses to memory, and delivered them in a torrent of godly emotion. Without citing any further cases, let me exhort you to study your sermons most thoroughly, conscientiously, and prayerfully, whether you commit them to paper or not. The most slipshod and abominable of all methods is that of extemporaneous thinking, or attempting to shake a sermon out of an empty sleeve. It is this style of offhand pulpit chatter that has brought extemporaneous preaching into discredit. If you are careful to plant a text in your mind, water it with prayer, and let it grow all the week, and branch out into fruitful boughs of practical spiritual truth, you will never be ashamed to look at your people from your pulpit, or to look at yourself when you go home from church.