1.Truth Through Personality

Phillips Brooks gave preaching its most famous definition: it is the bringing of truth through personality. Both halves are essential, and neither may be lost. What is preached must be God’s truth, not the preacher’s own notions dressed up as revelation. But that truth does not fall from heaven onto the pew; it comes through a person — a living, believing, consecrated man who has first received it himself.

This is why preaching can never be reduced to reciting correct words, as a machine might. The messenger and the message are joined. What the preacher is will color everything he says, for good or for ill, and the people will feel it even when they cannot name it. The same truth, from a shallow man, sounds thin; from a deep and holy man, it carries weight, because it comes soaked in a life. God has chosen to send His truth not on paper alone, but through living men, so that what they are becomes part of how His Word is heard.

This should make a preacher tremble, but it should also draw him upward. If the truth comes through the man, then the best thing a preacher can do for his preaching is to become, himself, a better and holier man — more full of Christ, more shaped by the Word, more consecrated to God. There is no separating the two: to grow as a Christian is to grow as a preacher, and the deepening of the man is the deepening of the message he carries. The improvement of the sermon begins with the improvement of the soul.

2.Take Heed to Yourself First

Spurgeon opened his famous lectures to young preachers not with sermon-craft but with “The Minister’s Self-Watch” — and he was following Paul, who charged Timothy, “Take heed to yourself and to the doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:16), putting the self before the sermon. The order is deliberate, and it is easily reversed. Most preachers give the greater part of their care to the sermon and only the smaller to the soul; Paul, and Spurgeon after him, would have it the other way.

The preacher’s private walk with God, his secret devotion, his honesty in small things, his purity of heart — these are the hidden foundation on which all his public work rests. A man may preach the truth with a golden tongue, but if his life flatly contradicts it, he pulls down with his hands what he builds with his lips. The pulpit is no place for a divided life; and a congregation, over time, is shaped far more by what its preacher is than by what he says. Who he is on Monday preaches louder, in the end, than what he says on Sunday.

This is not to say that gifts and preparation do not matter; they do, and this course has labored over them. But they are the second thing, not the first. A holy man with modest gifts will, over a lifetime, do more lasting good than a gifted man whose heart is cold; for the people receive not only his words but himself, and what he is seeps into all he does. So the wise preacher gives his first and best attention to what he is before God, knowing that everything else grows out of that root.

3.The Perils of the Preacher

R. W. Dale warned of the special dangers that stalk those who preach — perils that grow, strangely, out of the very holiness of the work. There is pride, feeding on the praise of the crowd, for the man who is often listened to and admired is in constant danger of thinking too well of himself. There is professionalism — the deadly habit of handling holy things as a mere job, until the fire goes out and only the routine remains, and a man can discuss the deepest truths without feeling any of them.

There is the temptation to preach in order to be admired rather than to save, so that the preacher’s eye is on his own reputation and not on his hearers’ souls. There is the slow loss of personal freshness with God, so that a man speaks of a fountain from which he himself has stopped drinking. And there is discouragement, which can wither a faithful heart over years of hard and often unrewarded labor. To name these perils is the first step in guarding against them; the preacher who knows where the pits lie can walk around them, while the one who never suspects them falls in.

Of these perils, professionalism may be the most quietly deadly, because it looks so much like faithfulness. A man keeps preaching, keeps studying, keeps doing all the outward work — and yet somewhere the life has drained out of it, and he handles the things of God as a clerk handles papers. The guard against it is to keep coming to the truth as a worshiper and not merely a workman: to let the passage he prepares first do its work on him, to be moved himself before he asks others to be moved, and to refuse to speak of Christ in public without seeking Christ in private.

4.Holiness Above Gifts

It is a lesson the church learns and forgets and must learn again: God uses holy men more than merely gifted ones. Gifts dazzle, but godliness bears fruit that lasts. A brilliant sermon may be admired and forgotten by the next morning; a holy life preaches on for years, and its influence outlives the man.

The young Scottish pastor Robert Murray M’Cheyne left the church a sentence worth writing on the study wall: “My people’s greatest need is my personal holiness.” A preacher’s usefulness rises and falls, in the long run, not with the brilliance of his mind but with the reality of his walk with God. Great gifts joined to a small soul are a danger to their owner and to the church — for the gifts win a hearing that the character cannot sustain, and the fall, when it comes, is the greater for the height. Better a plain man who is holy than a dazzling one who is hollow.

There is a reason holiness carries such weight, beyond the good example it sets. A holy preacher is a man in living contact with God, and something of that contact is communicated through him — a savor, a seriousness, an authority that mere technique can never produce. When a man walks closely with God in secret, his preaching comes from that nearness, and the people sense they are hearing from someone who has been with the Lord. It is not that holiness makes a man eloquent; it is that it makes him real, and reality in the pulpit is worth more than all the polish in the world.

5.Keeping the Heart

All this drives the preacher to tend his own inner life with care. He must pray in secret, and not only prepare prayers for others. He must feed on the Scriptures for his own soul, and not merely quarry them for sermons — for a man may spend all his hours in the Bible and yet starve, if he reads it only to find something to say and never to be fed himself.

He must keep short accounts with God, quick to repent, walking humbly. In a word, he must be a Christian before he is a preacher, and remain one underneath all his labors — for “out of the heart are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23), and a preacher who does not keep his own heart will soon have nothing living to give. The care of his own soul is not one duty among many for the preacher; it is the spring from which all his ministry flows, and if that spring is guarded, the stream will be clean and full, but if it is neglected, no skill will keep the water pure.

6.Grace for the Preacher

If all this feels weighty, take heart: the standard is high, but the grace is higher. No man steps into the pulpit as one who has arrived; every faithful preacher stands there as a forgiven sinner pointing away from himself to the Savior he needs as much as anyone in the room. The call to holiness is not a call to pretend a perfection we do not have, but to walk honestly with God, confessing our failures and leaning on His mercy.

The aim is not a flawless life — none of us has that — but an honest, growing, God-fearing one, and a heart that runs back to grace whenever it fails. It is this kind of man, kept and cleansed and humbled by his own gospel, whom God delights to use. Indeed, there is a peculiar power in the preaching of a man who plainly lives on the grace he offers to others — who is not a lofty saint looking down, but a rescued sinner reaching out a hand to fellow sinners, saying, in effect, “Come with me to the mercy that has held me.” So let no preacher be crushed by the height of the calling; let him rather be driven by it, again and again, to the Christ who both saves him and sends him.

This grace also keeps the whole high calling from becoming a burden of despair. A preacher who felt he had to be sinless before he could preach would never preach at all, or would preach as a hypocrite pretending a holiness he lacked. But the gospel he proclaims is for him first: he preaches as a forgiven man, kept by mercy, growing slowly, failing and repenting and rising again like every other believer. That honesty is not a weakness in his ministry but a strength, for it keeps him humble, keeps him kind toward strugglers, and keeps him near to the grace that alone makes any of us fit to speak for God at all.

And so the course that began with the shaping of a message ends with the shaping of a man — for in the end the two cannot be pulled apart. Give God your best craft; but give Him, first and last, yourself. It is holy men, kept by grace, whom He most delights to send.

7.Taking It to Heart

1.Begin with the Text

A Christian sermon begins with a text of Scripture — and the text is meant to govern the sermon, not merely to launch it. Too many sermons use a verse as a diving board: they spring off it into the preacher’s own thoughts and never come back. The verse is announced, and then forgotten, while the sermon goes wherever the preacher pleases.

But the faithful preacher’s task is to understand what his text actually means (the work of interpretation we studied in Hermeneutics), and then to preach that — the message of the passage, not a message of his own that he has hung upon it. The surest way to preach God’s Word, and not merely our own, is to let the text set the theme. When the sermon’s point is the text’s point, the preacher may speak with confidence, knowing he is handing the people bread that God Himself has baked.

This asks a real discipline of the preacher, for it is always easier to talk about our own ideas than to submit to the labor of the text. The temptation is to reach quickly for a thought that pleases us and hang it loosely on a verse, calling it a sermon. But that is to preach ourselves, not the Word; and the people are the poorer for it. The faithful preacher binds himself to the passage, asks patiently what it means, and resolves to say that and not something else — however much duller his own notions might have seemed at first.

2.One Dominant Theme

Here is the very heart of building a sermon, and the point on which the old masters were most agreed: a sermon must have unity. It should carry one main subject, one dominant thought, which everything in the sermon serves. A sermon is not a handful of scattered remarks loosely tied to a passage; it is the unfolding of a single theme.

The great and common fault is the sermon that wanders — that says many true things but leaves no single, clear impression, so that the hearer goes home unable to tell you what it was about. Ten good thoughts, with no thread to bind them, scatter in the memory and are lost; one thought, pressed home from every side, lodges and stays. Broadus and those who followed him drove this home relentlessly, and it is exactly this that WiseSpeak makes its chief mark: that the whole sermon be one. A preacher who masters this single principle has learned the better part of the craft.

Consider why one clear impression is worth so much. A hearer cannot carry home ten things; he can carry one. If a sermon leaves a single truth burning in the mind — one thing the hearer cannot shake as he walks out the door — it has done more than a sermon crowded with a dozen fine points that cancel each other in a blur. The aim is not to say everything true that could be said about a text, but to lodge one truth so firmly that it goes on working in the hearer through the week. Unity is much of what makes a sermon stick.

3.Say It in One Sentence

Unity has a wonderfully practical test. The preacher should be able to state the main truth of his sermon in a single, clear sentence — call it the proposition, the thesis, the one thing he means to say. This is not a small step to be skipped in the rush to fill an outline.

If you cannot put into one plain sentence what you are trying to preach, you are not yet ready to preach it; the fog in your statement will become fog in the pulpit, and a preacher unclear in his own mind will never be clear to his people. But once that sentence is clear, it becomes the ruler of the whole sermon: everything you include must explain it, prove it, or apply it — and everything that does none of these, however interesting in itself, must be left out. That one sentence is both the seed of the sermon and the test of every part of it; write it down, sharpen it, and let it govern all the rest.

Working to that one sentence is often the labor that turns a heap of study into a sermon. Many a preacher has gathered good material and still had no sermon, because he had not yet found the single thing he meant to say. The discipline of forcing it all down to one clear line is what brings order out of the pile: once the sentence is found, the preacher suddenly sees what belongs and what does not, what to keep and what to cut. Do not begrudge the hours it takes to find that sentence; they are often the most fruitful hours of the week.

4.Orderly Divisions

A theme this clear still needs a structure to unfold it — a plan, with main divisions that carry the one message forward in order. Arrangement is not a cage that cramps the preacher; it is a path that helps him think straight and helps the hearer follow. A well-ordered sermon is easy to follow because there is an order to follow; a shapeless one loses the hearer in its own confusion.

And the divisions must be true servants of the single theme: each one advancing the same central truth, running parallel to the others, rather than striking off into unrelated topics. A sermon whose “points” have nothing to do with each other has lost its unity even if it kept its outline. It is just here that the course’s WiseSpeak method supplies a particular tool — the keyword — by which the divisions are held together and kept parallel, each one answering to the same idea; the reading you are now studying gives the broader principle that such tools are made to serve. Structure, rightly used, is simply unity made visible.

The value of a device like the keyword is that it forces the divisions to agree. When every main point must answer to one word — when each division is, say, a “reason,” or a “mark,” or a “step” — the preacher cannot let his points wander into unrelated fields, for any point that will not fit the word plainly does not belong. In this way a simple tool guards the great principle: it keeps the sermon parallel, and therefore keeps it one. The device is never the goal; unity is the goal, and the device is only a servant that helps a preacher reach it.

5.Opening and Landing

Around the body of the sermon stand its two ends. A good introduction gains the hearer’s attention and leads him gently into the text and the theme — it opens the door, without wandering all over the yard first. It need not be long or clever; it needs only to bring the hearer, willingly, to the threshold of the message.

A good conclusion does the most important work of all: it drives the one message home to the heart and the will, pressing for a response. The conclusion is where the sermon lands, and a sermon that never lands — that simply stops, having circled the runway — has wasted much of its flight. Many a good sermon is spoiled at the end, trailing off into repetition or fizzling out for want of a clear aim. So aim, from the very first word, at where you mean to come down; know the response you are seeking, and bend the whole sermon toward it, so that when you finish, the hearer is not merely informed but summoned.

The conclusion deserves as much prayer and preparation as any part of the sermon, for it is where the whole flight comes down. Here the preacher gathers up the one truth he has been unfolding and lays it directly on the conscience and the will, calling for something — repentance, faith, obedience, comfort, action. A sermon is not given merely to be admired or understood, but to move the hearer Godward; and it is chiefly at the end that this moving is done. Preach, then, for a verdict, and let your last words press the hearer to answer God.

6.Why Order Serves Love

All this care for unity and structure is not cold mechanics; it is love for the hearer. Clear arrangement helps people to understand what is said, to remember it, and to be moved by it; a tangled sermon buries its own truth, however good that truth may be. The preacher who will not take pains with order is, in effect, making his people do the work he should have done — asking them to dig his meaning out of a heap, when he might have handed it to them plainly.

Order also guards the preacher, keeping him from wandering and from running long past the patience of his hearers. And far from weakening a sermon, it strengthens it: Broadus observed that good order is one of the greatest aids to force — that a well-arranged sermon strikes harder, not softer, than a shapeless one, because all its weight falls in one place. To take pains with structure, then, is not vanity or mere technique; it is simply to take pains that God’s people may actually receive the Word.

In the end, all these rules of unity and order come back to a single motive: love. The preacher labors over structure not to display his skill, but because he loves the people and wants them truly to hear, remember, and be changed by the truth. Careless preaching, however sincere, quietly says that the hearers are not worth the trouble of clarity; careful preaching says the opposite. So the pains a preacher takes in his study are a form of love for the flock he will face on Sunday — and the God who gave the Word is honored when it is handed to His people plainly and well.

So the young preacher need not fear that care for structure will make his preaching cold. Rightly understood, every rule in this reading serves warmth: unity so the truth lands, clarity so it is understood, order so it strikes home. Master these, then, not as ends in themselves, but as the humble craft by which a loving heart gets the Word of God into the hearts of the people.

7.Taking It to Heart

1.Letting the Bible Speak

To preach expositorily is to open up a passage of Scripture and make its meaning clear, so that the message of the sermon is the message of the text. The expositor is not the star of the sermon; the Word is. His whole aim is to let the Bible speak — to show what a passage means and to press home what it demands — so that when the people are moved, they are moved by God’s own Word and not merely by the preacher’s cleverness.

And this is where a sermon’s true authority is found. When a preacher can honestly say, “This is not my idea; this is what the text says,” he speaks with a weight that no eloquence of his own could ever supply. The authority is borrowed, not native; it belongs to the Word, and the preacher is only its herald. This is a great relief as well as a great responsibility, for it means the preacher does not have to be clever or original — he has only to be faithful, letting a passage of infinite power say what it was given to say.

This calls for a certain humility in the preacher. His task is not to display himself, his learning, or his wit, but to get out of the way so that the people see the text and not the man. The best expositors are often those you forget, because they so fixed your attention on the Word that you went away thinking of Christ rather than of the preacher. The pulpit is no place for a performance; it is a place for a servant to hold up his Master’s message and let it do its own mighty work.

2.Three Ways to Preach

Teachers of preaching have long spoken of three kinds of sermon. The topical takes a subject — say, forgiveness — and gathers what the Bible teaches about it. The textual takes a short text and draws the sermon’s divisions from its very words. The expository takes a passage, often a longer one, and unfolds its meaning by following the text’s own flow of thought.

All three can be faithful and useful, and a preacher need not choose one and forsake the others. But expository preaching carries a special value: it keeps the preacher tethered to the text, so that the people receive the actual Word of God rather than a diet of the preacher’s few favorite themes; and, practiced steadily, it feeds the church on the whole counsel of God. Where topical preaching is only as broad as the preacher’s chosen subjects, exposition is as broad as the Bible itself, and carries the congregation into passages they might otherwise never hear opened.

There is a place for each kind in a preacher’s ministry. A topical sermon may be just what is needed to gather the Bible’s teaching on marriage, or money, or prayer; a textual sermon can open a single rich verse; and there are seasons and occasions that call for one or another. But the steady staple of a healthy pulpit, most teachers agree, is exposition — the patient opening of passage after passage, book after book — for it alone guarantees that, over time, the people will be fed the whole of God’s Word and not merely the portions their preacher happens to prefer.

3.Interpretation Delivered

Expository preaching is the place where everything you learned about interpretation comes to bear. All the labor of the Hermeneutics course — reading for the plain sense, honoring the context, discerning the genre, letting Scripture interpret Scripture, and seeing how the passage points to Christ — all of it flows straight into the expository sermon. First the preacher does the patient work of the interpreter, discovering what the text truly means; then he builds his sermon upon those findings.

Exposition without sound interpretation is a house built on sand; but where the interpretive work is done well, the sermon rests on rock. This is why exposition cannot be hurried or improvised: a man may not preach faithfully what he has not first labored to understand. The study comes before the sermon, and the quality of the one determines the soundness of the other. A preacher who will not do the interpreter’s work has no business claiming the interpreter’s authority in the pulpit.

This should shape how a preacher spends his week. The most important hours of sermon preparation are not the last ones spent polishing phrases, but the early ones spent bent over the text, praying and pondering until its meaning opens. A sermon is only as good as the understanding beneath it; and understanding is not given to the lazy or the hurried, but to the one who will knock, and seek, and wait upon God over the open page. The study is the quarry from which every honest sermon is cut.

4.Structure from the Text

How does one move from a passage to a sermon? F. B. Meyer’s practical counsel still serves well. Select your passage, and then study it thoroughly — its meaning, its movement, its message — until you have grasped what it is chiefly about. From that study will rise the sermon’s central theme and its natural divisions; and here is the mark of true exposition: the structure comes out of the passage, drawn from what is really there, rather than a frame imposed upon it from outside.

Yet even here the rule of unity from our earlier reading holds firm. An expository sermon is not a verse-by-verse ramble that empties the passage of every observation that occurs to us; it still gathers the passage around one dominant theme, and lets that theme give the sermon its shape. The best exposition finds the one thing the passage is chiefly saying, and organizes everything else to serve it, so that the hearer carries away not a scattering of notes but a single, clear message that was truly in the text.

Finding that one thing is often the hardest and most important part of the work. A rich passage may contain a dozen true observations, and the temptation is to preach them all; but a sermon that says everything says nothing, and leaves no clear impression behind. So the expositor labors to discern the main point — what the passage is chiefly about, what the writer, under the Spirit, most meant to convey — and makes that the spine of the sermon, letting lesser truths serve it or wait for another day. To preach one thing well is worth more than to mention ten things in passing.

5.Explain — and Apply

Here a common danger must be named. Expository preaching can decay into a dry running commentary, or a classroom lecture that informs the head and never touches the heart. That is not preaching; it is only explanation with the life drained out. The people may learn many facts about a passage and go home unchanged, which was never the purpose of a sermon.

True exposition does two things: it explains the text, and it applies it — pressing the meaning home upon the conscience, the affections, and the will, calling for repentance, faith, and obedience. The expositor is not finished when the people understand the passage; he is finished when the passage has laid its claim upon their lives. Explanation shows what the text means; application shows what it means for them, today. Aim, then, not merely to make a text clear, but to make it burn — to bring the fire of God’s Word right down into the ordinary lives of the people who hear it.

Good application is specific, not vague. It is not enough to end with a general exhortation to be more holy; the faithful expositor asks how this particular truth touches these particular people — the tempted, the grieving, the proud, the doubting, the careless — and presses it home to each. He anticipates the objections of the heart and answers them; he shows the truth’s bearing on Monday as well as Sunday. This is demanding work, for it requires knowing both the text and the people; but it is the very point where a sermon stops being a lecture and becomes a means of grace.

6.The Discipline and the Reward

Expository preaching asks something of the preacher: it cannot be faked, for it demands real and patient study of the Word. There is no shortcut, no borrowing of another man’s outline that will do the work of sitting long with the text oneself. But what it asks, it repays many times over.

It guards the preacher from riding his hobby-horses and from running dry, forever driving him back to the inexhaustible Scriptures — so that the more he preaches, the deeper he must dig, and the richer he himself becomes. And it guards the people from a thin or lopsided diet, especially when a preacher works steadily through whole books of the Bible, and so must handle even the texts he would have avoided. In this way the flock is fed, over the years, on the full and balanced counsel of God — the comforting and the searching, the plain and the difficult — which no preacher’s private list of favorite subjects could ever provide.

Over a lifetime, this steady discipline shapes both preacher and people in ways no single sermon could. The preacher who spends his years in the text becomes, slowly, a man saturated with Scripture, whose very mind is furnished from the Word; and the congregation fed on faithful exposition grows deep, stable, and discerning, able to feed themselves and to tell truth from error. There are quicker ways to fill a room, but there is no better way to build a church. The patient opening of the Word, week by week and year by year, is the ordinary means by which God grows His people up into Christ.

So let the young preacher resolve, early, to be an expositor — to give himself to the Book, to labor at understanding it, and to spend his ministry making its meaning plain and pressing it home. He will not always be admired for it, for exposition is slower and quieter than showmanship. But he will be feeding the flock of God with the bread of life; and at the last, that is the only preaching that will have been worth doing.

7.Taking It to Heart

1.Preaching Aims at the Will

Why do we preach? Not merely to fill the mind with information, nor even only to stir warm feelings, but in the end to move the will — to persuade men and women to repent, to believe, to obey. The old teachers of preaching, taking the best of classical rhetoric and putting it to Christian use, said that a sermon must address the whole person: the understanding, to instruct it; the affections, to move them; and the will, to win a decision.

What we are after is a verdict. A sermon that leaves the hearers admiring the preacher, or even agreeing with his points, but unchanged in life, has not yet done its work. It is possible to preach a sermon that is clear, correct, and interesting, and still to have failed, if no one is moved to do anything about it. Preaching, at its heart, is persuasion in the service of God — the pressing of His truth upon the whole person until the person yields.

This does not mean the mind may be bypassed. The will is not rightly moved by whipping up feeling apart from truth; it is moved through the understanding and the affections, as light shines on the mind and warmth reaches the heart, until the person sees and feels and then chooses. So we do not despise instruction, as if only the emotions mattered; nor do we stop at instruction, as if to inform were enough. We aim at the whole person, and rest content only when the truth has done its full work — enlightening, warming, and finally winning the will.

2.Persuasion, Not Manipulation

But here we must draw a bright line, for persuasion has a counterfeit. Christian persuasion is not the trickery of the manipulator or the pressure of the crowd-worker. It does not bully the emotions, engineer false urgency, or use clever techniques to extract a response the truth itself has not produced. There is a kind of “success” in the pulpit that is really only skilled pressure, and it produces decisions that have no root and do not last.

Rather, true persuasion sets the truth plainly before the conscience, honestly and in the fear of God, and trusts the Holy Spirit to carry it home. The preacher pleads, and pleads earnestly — but with integrity, refusing to move people by any means except the truth and the Spirit. To manufacture a response by manipulation is to insult both the hearer and the God we serve; it treats people as things to be worked upon, rather than souls to be honestly persuaded. The honest preacher would rather see fewer results that are real than many that are manufactured.

This frees the preacher from a heavy and false burden. It is not his task to produce conversions by force of personality; it is his task to set the truth before people faithfully, earnestly, and plainly, and to leave the actual persuading of the heart to the Spirit of God. He may plead with all his might — and he should — but he pleads as one who knows that only God can open a heart, and so he does not stoop to tricks when the Spirit seems slow. He sows honestly, and trusts the Lord of the harvest for the increase.

3.Clarity First

No one can be persuaded of what he has not understood. So the first virtue of delivery is clarity — plain words and clear order, so that the hearer can follow without straining. Obscurity is the enemy of persuasion: a truth that never reaches the mind will never reach the will, and a sermon that must be puzzled over will simply be tuned out.

This is doubly important where the people are simple or hard-pressed. Aim always to be understood by the plainest person in the room; do not preach over their heads to impress the few, but speak so that a farmer, a laborer, and a child can follow you to the same conclusion. It takes more work, not less, to be simple — to say a deep thing plainly is harder than to say it in a cloud of long words — but it is the labor of love. Clear speech is not the mark of a shallow preacher, but of a loving one who cares more that his people understand than that he himself sound learned.

Simplicity, rightly understood, is not the same as shallowness. The deepest truths can be spoken plainly, and the greatest preachers have usually been the clearest. It is often the half-taught man, unsure of his matter, who hides behind long words and tangled sentences; the man who truly understands his subject can make it plain to a child. So the preacher should labor not to impress but to be understood — turning his hardest thoughts into his simplest words, for the sake of the people who most need them. Clarity is a discipline, and a gift to the flock.

4.Earnestness: the Fire That Persuades

Yet clarity alone is not enough, for persuasion is caught as well as taught. Cold words about a burning truth will move no one. The preacher who would persuade must himself believe and feel what he says; the truth must first have gripped him before it can grip his hearers. Fire is kindled by fire, and a heart is warmed by a heart already warm.

This is why the man and the message can never be parted, as our first reading urged: earnestness cannot be faked, and a congregation knows in a moment whether the preacher means it. People forgive many faults in a preacher who plainly believes and loves what he preaches; they forgive nothing in one who is merely going through the motions. When a man speaks as one who has seen what he describes and cannot keep silent, God is pleased to make such earnestness a mighty means of persuasion — often more mighty than the finest eloquence spoken without heart.

But earnestness is not a manner to be put on for the pulpit; it grows out of a heart that has truly met the truth. A preacher becomes earnest by dwelling on his message until it moves him — by feeling the weight of sin, the wonder of grace, and the worth of souls in his own soul, before he ever stands to speak. Where this is lacking, no amount of raised voice or forced feeling will supply it; where it is present, it will show of itself. So the way to preach with fire is not to imitate fire, but to draw near enough to the truth to be set alight by it.

5.Illustrations: Windows That Let in Light

Spurgeon likened illustrations to windows in a house, which let the light of heaven into rooms that would otherwise be dark. Our Lord Himself, the greatest of preachers, taught constantly in pictures and parables drawn from field and home — the sower, the lost sheep, the prodigal son — so that the humblest hearer could see a heavenly truth in an earthly picture. A well-chosen illustration makes an abstract truth suddenly clear, fixes it in the memory, and helps the hearer to feel it, not merely to grasp it.

Yet Spurgeon’s cautions are as valuable as his praise. Illustrations must serve the truth, never replace it — a sermon that is all stories and no substance is a house of windows with no wall, and it will not stand. They must give light, not merely amuse, and never be used to display the preacher’s cleverness or to draw eyes to himself. An illustration that everyone remembers while the truth it was meant to carry is forgotten has failed, however brilliant it seemed. Let them be fitting, clear, and in good taste — servants of the exposition, never the main course. A window is for the light it lets in, not to be admired for its own sake.

It is worth learning, then, where good illustrations come from. They are gathered by a preacher who keeps his eyes open — who watches ordinary life, reads widely, and notices how everyday things picture heavenly ones, as his Master did with seeds and sheep and coins. The best illustrations are usually simple, drawn from things the people know, and short enough not to swallow the point. And they should be true, not stretched or invented for effect, for a preacher who plays loose with facts to make a story land will soon be trusted with nothing. Homely, honest, and brief — such windows serve the light.

6.Speaking to the People

Finally, a word on delivery itself. The aim is communication, not performance. Speak to the people, and not merely read at them; look them in the eye; be natural and direct, not stiff or theatrical. The pulpit is not a stage on which to display oneself, but a place from which to reach real people with a real message.

All the arts of the voice and manner are worth having only insofar as they help the truth pass from your heart into theirs. A raised voice, a pause, a gesture — these are good if they carry the meaning further, and worthless, even harmful, if they only call attention to the speaker. Strip away every affectation that stands between the Word and the hearer, and let the whole of your craft bend to one end: to bring the message of the text, clearly, earnestly, and plainly, home to the mind, the heart, and the will of the people, for a verdict before God. That, and nothing less, is what preaching is for.

And naturalness in the pulpit is largely a matter of forgetting oneself. The preacher who is thinking about the impression he is making will always seem stiff or affected; the one who is lost in his message and in love with his people will speak simply and directly, because his mind is on them and not on himself. So the cure for a wooden or theatrical manner is not chiefly more technique, but a heart so taken up with the truth and the hearers that there is no room left to perform. Care about the people and the message enough, and much of the awkwardness takes care of itself.

7.Taking It to Heart

1.Where Does the Power Come From?

We have spent this course learning the craft of preaching — the preacher’s character, the building of the sermon, faithful exposition, and honest persuasion. All of it is good, and all of it is needful. But now we must ask the deepest question of all: where does a sermon’s real power come from? And the answer is humbling.

It does not come from eloquence, or cleverness, or technique, or even from sound structure and careful exposition. It comes from God, by His Holy Spirit. No craft on earth can produce spiritual life; only the Spirit gives it. Paul said his own preaching came “not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). The best-built sermon in the world, without the Spirit, is a body without breath — perfect in form, and dead. This is the truth that keeps a skilled preacher humble, and gives a weak one hope.

It levels the ground between them, in fact. The most gifted preacher must come as a beggar for the Spirit’s power, having no more claim on it than the least; and the least may have as much of it as the greatest, if he will seek it. This is a mercy, for it means the effectiveness of preaching is not finally shut up to the talented, but is open to any who will depend on God. The Spirit blows where He wills, and He has often willed to bless the lowly and to pass by the proud.

2.Prayer Makes the Preacher

How, then, does that power come? E. M. Bounds gave the church an answer it must never forget: through prayer. His little book returns again and again to one theme — that God’s work must be done by God’s power, and that this power flows to the preacher through prayer.

“The preacher makes the sermon, but prayer makes the preacher.”

The men God has used to shake the world were, without exception, men of prayer. Preaching that has cost nothing in the secret place will accomplish little in the public one. It is not great talents that God most needs, nor great learning, Bounds insisted, but men and women mighty in prayer — for God’s power does not run along the wires of human ability, but along the channel of humble, believing prayer. The power of the pulpit is prepared on the knees, long before it is felt in the pew.

There is a hidden arithmetic in preaching that the world never sees. Behind every sermon that comes with power lies a preacher who has been much alone with God; and behind every sermon that comes empty, however polished, lies, more often than not, a prayer closet neglected. The people see only the half-hour in the pulpit; they do not see the hours in secret that gave it life — or the lack of them that left it lifeless. What a man is in secret before God, he will be, in the end, before the people.

3.Prayer Is the Preacher’s Life, Not a Technique

We must be careful here, for prayer can be reduced to a mere formality — a hurried word before mounting the pulpit, added like a spice to a dish otherwise cooked without it. That is not what Bounds meant, nor what the Scriptures mean. Prayer is meant to be the preacher’s very life: a deep, ongoing communion with God that humbles him, fills him, and makes him earnest. Prayerlessness is the slow death of all spiritual power.

So the preacher prays over his text, that God would open it; over his people, that God would soften them; and over himself, that God would empty him of pride and fill him with the Spirit. He does not merely prepare a sermon and then ask God to bless it, as an afterthought; he seeks God until God has prepared the man. For the sermon passes through the preacher before it reaches the people, and a channel that is clogged and cold will chill the living water as it flows. The praying preacher is himself the first thing God works on, and often the sermon is only as powerful as the man behind it is near to God.

This is why prayer over a sermon is not the same as merely working on it. A preacher may study a text thoroughly and still not have prayed it into his own soul — still not have let it search him, humble him, and warm him before he carries it to others. The prayer that gives a sermon power is the prayer that first makes the preacher feel his message, so that he speaks not as a reporter of truths he has read, but as a witness of truths he has met with God. Pray the sermon into yourself before you preach it to anyone else.

4.Unction: the Anointing That Cannot Be Faked

The old preachers had a word for what they longed for: unction — a certain spiritual anointing that comes upon preaching from God, and makes the very same words suddenly alive, piercing, and full of weight. You have felt it: two men may preach the identical truth, and from one it falls flat while from the other it goes like fire to the heart. That difference is not talent; it is unction, and it cannot be manufactured by any art.

It is given by the Holy Spirit to the preacher who prays and depends on Him. Without it, the most correct sermon is lifeless; with it, the plainest words become mighty, and a simple man’s few sentences do what all the eloquence in the world could never do. No school can teach it and no effort can counterfeit it; it comes down from above, upon the humble and the praying. And it is to be sought where all spiritual gifts are sought — on the knees, in believing prayer, by a preacher who knows he is helpless without it. To preach without unction is to beat the air; to preach with it is to wield the sword of the Spirit.

Because unction cannot be earned or produced, it must be hungered for. The preacher who is content without it will go on preaching correct and lifeless sermons, and never miss what he never sought. But the preacher who longs for it — who is not satisfied to be merely clear and orderly, but aches to see the Word come with power — will seek God for it until it comes. This holy dissatisfaction is itself a gift, for it drives a man to his knees; and God has a way of filling those who are truly hungry, while the self-satisfied go empty away.

5.Do Your Best — Then Depend on God

Here is the great correction that this reading brings to all the others. We have studied preparation, structure, exposition, persuasion, and illustration — and we should study them, and labor at them, for God is pleased to work through such means, and lazy, careless preaching dishonors Him. To neglect the craft in the name of trusting the Spirit is not faith but sloth, and it robs the people.

But we must never, ever trust in our craft. All our skill is to be laid down at God’s feet, and we are to preach in utter dependence on His Spirit, pleading for the fruit that He alone can give. The constant temptation of the trained preacher is to lean on his method; the constant call is to lean on his God. Prepare as if everything depended on your work; then preach as if everything depended on the Spirit — for in truth it does. These two are not enemies but partners: diligence in the study and dependence in the pulpit, the open book and the bowed knee, together make the faithful preacher.

6.Comfort for Every Preacher

And in this lies great comfort, especially for the preacher who feels small, unlearned, or poorly equipped. From the day of Pentecost onward, through the whole long history of preaching, the sermons that saved souls and shook nations were borne on the power of the Spirit and soaked in prayer — not won by human brilliance. The Spirit has never been limited to the gifted or the trained.

This means that the humblest pastor, in the poorest place, with few books and little training, if he is a man of prayer and filled with the Spirit, may be mightily used of God — while the most gifted and eloquent preacher, if he is prayerless, labors in vain. The word of the Lord stands over every pulpit: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). Take heart, then, and pray; the power you need is not in you, and never was, and it is freely given to those who ask. What you cannot do by all your effort, God will do through a praying servant who leans on Him.

So this capstone gathers the whole course into a single charge. Learn the craft, and labor at it; give God your best study, your clearest structure, your most earnest delivery, for He is worthy of your best. But when you have done all, count your craft as nothing in itself, and go to the pulpit as a man who has nothing unless God gives it — empty hands lifted for the Spirit’s power, a heart soaked in prayer, and a quiet confidence not in yourself but in Him. Do this, and the plainest of preachers may become, in the hand of God, a mighty means of grace to the people he loves.

And so the course ends where the Christian life itself begins and ends: not in what we can do for God, but in what God does through those who trust Him. Build well, then, and preach faithfully, and depend wholly on the Spirit; and leave the harvest, as every faithful preacher must at last, in the hands of the Lord who alone gives the increase. Do your best, and trust His power; and to Him, and not to us, be all the glory.

7.Taking It to Heart