1. The Importance of Preaching, and the Difficulty of Preaching Well
John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, new (23d) edition, edited by Edwin Charles Dargan (1898), Introduction, § 1, “Importance of Preaching and Difficulty of Preaching Well”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
Preaching is characteristic of Christianity. No false religion has ever provided for the regular and frequent assembling of the masses of men, to hear religious instruction and exhortation. Judaism had something like it in the prophets, and afterwards in the readers and speakers of the synagogue; but Judaism was a true religion, designed to be developed into Christianity. It is true that some heathen religious teachers, seeing the power of preaching, have at times tried to imitate Christianity in this respect. Thus the Roman emperor Julian, commonly called the Apostate, directed the pagan philosophers to preach every week as the Christians did. And in modern times there are said to have been in China, Japan, and India instances of the adoption of something like preaching. But so far as is known preaching remains, both in origin and history, a peculiarly Christian institution.
The great appointed means of spreading the good tidings of salvation through Christ is preaching — words spoken whether to the individual, or to the assembly. And this, nothing can supersede. Printing has become a mighty agency for good and for evil; and Christians should employ it, with the utmost diligence and in every possible way, for the spread of truth. But printing can never take the place of the living word. When a man who is apt in teaching, whose soul is on fire with the truth which he trusts has saved him and hopes will save others, speaks to his fellow-men, face to face, eye to eye, and electric sympathies flash to and fro between him and his hearers, till they lift each other up, higher and higher, into the intensest thought, and the most impassioned emotion — higher and yet higher, till they are borne as on chariots of fire above the world, — there is a power to move men, to influence character, life, destiny, such as no printed page can ever possess.
Pastoral work is of immense importance, and all preachers should be diligent in performing it. But it cannot take the place of preaching, nor fully compensate for lack of power in the pulpit. The two help each other, and neither of them is able, unless supported by the other, to achieve the largest and most blessed results. When he who preaches is the sympathizing pastor, the trusted counsellor, the kindly and honored friend of young and old, of rich and poor, then “truths divine come mended from his lips,” and the door to men’s hearts, by the magical power of sympathy, will fly open at his word. But on the other hand, when he who visits is the preacher, whose thorough knowledge of Scripture and elevated views of life, whose able and impassioned discourses have carried conviction and commanded admiration, and melted into one the hearts of the multitude, who is accustomed to stand before them as the ambassador of God, and is associated in their minds with the authority and the sacredness of God’s Word, — when he comes to speak with the suffering, the sorrowing, the tempted, his visit has a meaning and a power of which otherwise it must be destitute. If a minister feels himself specially drawn towards either of these departments of effort, let him also constrain himself to diligence in the other.
Religious ceremonies may be instructive and impressive. The older dispensation made much use of these, as we employ pictures in teaching children. Even Christianity, which has the minimum of ceremony, illustrates its fundamental facts, and often makes deep religious impressions, by its two simple but expressive ordinances. But these are merely pictures to illustrate, merely helps to that great work of teaching and convincing, of winning and holding men, which preaching, made mighty by God’s Spirit, has to perform.
It follows that preaching must always be a necessity, and good preaching a mighty power. In every age of Christianity, since John the Baptist drew crowds into the desert, there has been no great religious movement, no restoration of Scripture truth, and reanimation of genuine piety, without new power in preaching, both as cause and as effect.
But alas! how difficult we find it to preach well. How small a proportion of the sermons heard weekly throughout the world are really good. The dilettanti men of letters who every now and then fill the periodicals with sneers at preaching, no doubt judge most unkindly and unjustly, for they purposely compare ordinary examples of preaching with the finest specimens of literature, and they forget their own utter lack, in the one case, of that sympathetic appreciation without which all literary and artistic judgment is necessarily at fault; but we who love preaching and who try to preach are better aware than they are, of the deficiencies which mar our efforts, and the difficulties which attend our work. A venerable and eminently useful minister once remarked, as he rose from the couch on which he had been resting, “Well, I must get ready to preach to-night. But I can’t preach — I never did preach — O, I never heard anybody preach.” And yet in this work of ours, so awful and so attractive, so difficult and solemnly responsible and yet so blessed, we ought to aspire after the highest excellence. If in other varieties of public speaking, then most of all in this, may we adopt Cicero’s words with reference to the young orator, “I will not only exhort, but will even beseech him, to labor.”
2. What Effective Preaching Requires: Piety, Gifts, Knowledge, Skill
John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, new (23d) edition, edited by Edwin Charles Dargan (1898), Introduction, § 3, “Requisites to Effective Preaching”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
The requisites to effective preaching may be stated as four, namely, piety, natural gifts, knowledge, skill.
(1) Piety. Men sometimes do good by preaching who turn out to have been destitute of piety. It is one of the many wonderful ways in which God brings good out of evil. But such cases are exceptional, and as a rule, the prime requisite to efficiency in preaching is earnest piety. This inspires the preacher himself with ardent zeal, and keeps the flame alive amid all the icy indifference by which he will so often be encompassed. This gains for him the good-will and sympathy of his hearers, the most ungodly of whom will feel that devout earnestness on his part is becoming, and entitles him to respect. And to this is promised the blessing of God upon the labors which it prompts. Much false theory and bad practice in preaching is connected with a failure to apprehend the fundamental importance of piety in the preacher. As was said above on a kindred topic, just rhetorical principles, as well as other and far higher considerations, imperatively require that a preacher of the gospel shall cultivate personal piety. It is bad rhetoric to neglect it.
(2) Natural gifts. The preacher needs the capacity for clear thinking, with strong feelings, and a vigorous imagination; also capacity for expression, and the power of forcible utterance. Many other gifts help his usefulness, these are well-nigh indispensable to any high degree of efficiency. Each of these can be improved almost indefinitely, some of them developed in one who had not been conscious of possessing them; but all must exist as natural gifts.
(3) Knowledge. There must be knowledge of religious truth, and of such things as throw light upon it; knowledge of human nature in its relations to religious truth, and of human life in its actual conditions around us. It was a favorite idea of Cicero that the orator ought to know everything. There is of course no knowledge which a preacher might not make useful. We may thankfully recognize the fact that some men do good who have very slender attainments, and yet may insist that it should be the preacher’s lowest standard to surpass, in respect of knowledge, the great majority of those who hear him, and should be his sacred ambition to know all that he can learn by life-long and prayerful endeavor.
Piety furnishes motive power; natural gifts, cultivated as far as possible, supply means; knowledge gives material; and there remains —
(4) Skill. This does not refer merely to style and delivery, but also to the collection, choice, and arrangement of materials. All who preach eminently well — and the same thing is true of secular speakers — will be found, with scarcely an exception, to have labored much to acquire skill. Henry Clay, in an address to some law-students at Albany towards the close of his life, mentioned that during his early life in Kentucky, he “commenced, and continued for years, the practice of daily reading and speaking upon the contents of some historical or scientific book. These off-hand efforts were made sometimes in a cornfield, at others in the forest, and not unfrequently in some distant barn, with the horse and the ox for my auditors.” …
Any one whose good fortune it has been to be intimate with some of those noble Baptist and Methodist preachers, who beginning with hardly any education have worked their way up to the highest excellence in their calling, will have seen ample proofs, particularly in their unrestrained private conversation, that their power of clear and precise expression, and of forcible and attractive delivery, is the result of sharp, critical attention, of earnest and long-continued labor. The difference between skill and the lack of it in speaking, is almost as great as in handling tools, those, for example, of the carpenter or the blacksmith. And while no real skill can be acquired without practice — according to the true saying, “The only way to learn to preach is to preach” — yet mere practice will never bring the highest skill: it must be heedful, thoughtful practice, with close observation of others and sharp watching of ourselves, and controlled by good sense and good taste. Now in respect of skill, preaching is an art; and while art cannot create the requisite powers of mind or body, nor supply their place if really absent, it can develop and improve them, and aid in using them to the best advantage. To gain skill, then, is the object of rhetorical studies, skill in the construction and in the delivery of discourse.
3. The Preacher’s Duty to Interpret His Text Truly
John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, new (23d) edition, edited by Edwin Charles Dargan (1898), Part I, chapter II, “The Text — Interpretation”, § 1, “Obligation to Interpret Carefully and Strictly”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
To interpret and apply his text in accordance with its real meaning, is one of the preacher’s most sacred duties. He stands before the people for the very purpose of teaching and exhorting them out of the Word of God. He announces a particular passage of God’s Word as his text with the distinctly implied understanding that from this his sermon will be drawn — if not always its various thoughts, yet certainly its general subject. If he is not willing to be bound by this understanding, he ought to reject the practice which commits him to it, and preach without any text. But using a text, and undertaking to develop and apply its teachings, he is solemnly bound to represent the text as meaning precisely what it does mean.
This would seem to be a truism. But it is often and grievously violated. Not only is there much contented ignorance as to interpretation, and much careless neglect on the part of persons well able to interpret correctly, and much wild spiritualizing of plain words, but, by a violent method of “accommodation,” Scripture sentences or phrases are employed as signifying what it is well known, and perhaps even declared at the time, that the sacred writer did not mean to say, and has not at all said. “The original meaning of these words, as used by the inspired writer, is — so and so; but I propose on the present occasion to employ them in the following sense.” That is to say — honored brother, see what you are doing — you stand up to teach men from a passage of God’s blessed Word, and coolly declare that you propose to make the passage mean what it does not mean. “But the words might have that sense.” They might, but as a part of the Bible, as a text of Scripture, they do not. If we take the passage in a sense entirely foreign to what the sacred writer designed, as indicated by his connection, then, as we use it, the phrase is no longer a passage of Scripture at all. It is merely words of Scripture, used without authority to convey a different meaning; just as truly as if we had picked out words from a concordance, and framed them into a sentence.
“But I use the passage merely as a motto.” Well, if a preacher has the right to take no text but only a motto — which is questionable — he certainly has not the right to make a Scriptural motto signify what he knows it does not signify. “But the language of Scripture is so rich, its pregnant sayings often mean so much, that I think perhaps this expression may convey, among other things, the sense which I propose.” If it really does, there is no objection whatever to using it so. But a mere vague “perhaps” is a slender and tottering excuse for a preacher, who is looked up to by the people as authority in this matter, who is supposed to have studied his text and to know its meaning, and whose statements will, for that reason, be accepted by many without question. Such a man is verily guilty before God if he does not honestly strive to understand that which he interprets, and give forth its real meaning and no other.
Phillips Brooks has an admirable passage on this subject, the closing sentences of which are as follows: “Never draw out of a text a meaning which you know is not there. If your text has not your truth in it, find some other text which has. If you can find no text for it in the Bible, then preach on something else.” And to the same purport Phelps says: “That is a distorted ministry which deals in any large proportion with subjects which are not logically presented in the Scriptures. It is not a biblical ministry.”
In one direction, however, the idea of strict interpretation may be carried too far. It is certainly best, as a general rule, to confine the sermon to the precise subject and aspect of a subject, which the text in its connection sets forth. But we are not necessarily restricted to this. Some principle may be presented by the text in one application, and we may with perfect propriety make other applications of it. If this is all that is meant by accommodation, it is not a perversion of the Scripture, for the text really teaches the principle, and the new applications are avowedly made by ourselves, guided by the general teachings of Scripture. The apostle Paul often states a broad principle as bearing on some particular question of truth or duty. For example, Gal. vi. 7, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” is said with special reference to the duty of contributing to the support of religious teachers, but it is given as a general truth, and admits of many applications which it is lawful for us to make. …
It thus appears that one may preach from a text on any matter which it presents to the mind, whether directly or indirectly, by statement, presupposition, or inference, provided that in some way it really does mean what is claimed; and where this meaning is only indirectly presented it will be better, in some simple way, to point out the fact, so as not to encourage in the people loose notions of interpretation. Very different from this was the course of a preacher who once gave a missionary sermon from the words of the young ruler, “What lack I yet?” inquiring what we lack for greater success in the missionary enterprise. This is an extreme case; but thousands of sermons are preached in which the real meaning of the text is just as completely, though not often so manifestly, violated.
4. Application: The Main Thing to Be Done
John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, new (23d) edition, edited by Edwin Charles Dargan (1898), Part I, chapter IX, “Special Materials — Application”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
The application in a sermon is not merely an appendage to the discussion, or a subordinate part of it, but is the main thing to be done. Spurgeon says, “Where the application begins, there the sermon begins.” We are not to speak before the people, but to them, and must earnestly strive to make them take to themselves what we say. Daniel Webster once said, and repeated it with emphasis, “When a man preaches to me, I want him to make it a personal matter, a personal matter, a personal matter!” And it is our solemn duty thus to address all men, whether they wish it or not. The sermons of Jonathan Edwards, with all their power, show the evil of having always a regular “application,” formally announced or indicated. Often a brief and informal application is best. Often, too, it is better not to reserve the application for the latter part of the discourse, but to apply each thought as it is presented, provided they all conspire towards a common result.
The term application is, in general, somewhat loosely employed in regard to preaching, for it includes two or three distinct things. Besides the application proper, in which we show the hearer how the truths of the sermon apply to him, and besides the frequent practical suggestions as to the best mode and means of performing the duty urged, there is also commonly included all that we denote by the terms “persuasion” and “exhortation.” But if the ideas conveyed are kept distinct, it is probably better to retain the term, with which all preachers and hearers are so familiar.
(1) Application, in the strict sense, is that part, or those parts, of the discourse in which we show how the subject applies to the persons addressed, what practical instructions it offers them, what practical demands it makes upon them. Sometimes this is effected by means of what are called remarks, that is, certain noticeable matters belonging to or connected with the subject, to which attention is now especially directed. These should always be of a very practical character, bearing down upon the feelings and the will. And the remarks must not diverge in various directions, and become like the untwisted cracker of a whip, but should have a common aim and make a combined impression. In sermons upon historical subjects, it is lawful to bring out several distinct lessons, but these had better be pretty closely related.
It is obvious that while some subjects may be applied to the congregation as a whole, others will be applicable only to particular classes, or will have to be applied to distinct classes separately, as converted and unconverted, old and young. But it is not necessary, as some preachers seem to imagine, always to make some kind of application to the unconverted, or some remark to them in conclusion. A sermon addressed throughout to pious people will often specially instruct and impress the unconverted. What men apply to themselves, without feeling that it was aimed at them, is apt to produce the greatest effect. It is never judicious to make an application to any particular individual, and very rarely to a small and well-defined class. What is popularly called “hitting at” some person or some few persons will almost always do more harm than good.
Application also frequently takes the form of inferences. … This form of making application of the subject ought to be in two directions carefully limited. Nothing should be presented as an inference which does not logically and directly follow from the subject discussed. The other limit is, that no inferences should be drawn in applying a subject which are not of practical importance. It is not a preacher’s business to exhibit all the matters which may be inferred from his discussion, as if he were attempting an exercise in logic, but only to draw out those which will appeal to the feelings and the will of his hearers, and move them to action.
Again, application is often best presented in the form of lessons. This term implies that the practical teachings of the subject are more thoroughly brought out and more fully applied than would be done in mere “remarks,” while it does not restrict the application to those teachings which appear as logical “inferences” from the propositions established. This way of applying the truths of the discourse would seem, therefore, to have some advantages over the other methods. These “lessons” must, of course, be thoroughly practical, and must not be too formal, nor have a magisterial air. The preacher is not a dignitary, speaking ex cathedra to his inferiors. He had better speak, in general, of lessons which we may learn.
5. Expository Preaching
John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, new (23d) edition, edited by Edwin Charles Dargan (1898), Part II, chapter III, “Different Species of Sermons”, § 3, “Expository Sermons”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
Almost every preacher one meets, if asked whether he often makes expository discourses, will answer, “No; I have long believed there ought to be more preaching of that kind, but the attempts I formerly made in that direction were quite unsuccessful, and it seems I have no talent for it.” But comparatively few have ever fairly tried to develop such a talent. Men labor for years to acquire the power of producing a good topical sermon. All their rhetorical training, and all their practice, is directed to that end. Then they try the experiment of expository preaching, which requires a different kind of practice, and perhaps even a different method of studying the Scriptures, and wonder that their first attempts prove a comparative failure.
The advantages of expository preaching are to some extent obvious and generally recognized, and they have been admirably presented by Alexander, in his “Thoughts on Preaching.” As stated by him, they are as follows: (a) This method better corresponds with the very idea and design of preaching. (b) It is the primitive and ancient method. (c) It insures a better knowledge of the Scriptures, on the part of preacher and hearers — and of the Scriptures in their connection. (d) It causes sermons to contain more of pure Scripture truths, and scriptural modes of viewing things. (e) It gives occasion for remarking on many passages of the Bible which otherwise might never enter into one’s sermons; and for giving important practical hints and admonitions which might seem to some hearers offensively personal if introduced into a topical discussion, but which are here naturally suggested by the passage in hand. (f) And it greatly diminishes the temptation to misinterpret texts by excessive allegorizing, by “accommodation,” etc.; for men are often driven into such misinterpretation by the difficulty of finding for every sermon a short passage which will legitimately afford the requisite amount of material.
It might be more desirable to discuss the objections to this method, for these often appear more serious than they really are. There is, in many quarters, a popular prejudice against expository preaching, arising from the fact that it is so often badly managed, and from the notion that it is a labor-saving contrivance. On rainy Sundays, or on week-nights, the preacher who has no sermon prepared, or wishes to save his elaborate preparation for a more auspicious occasion, will frequently undertake to “read a passage of Scripture, and make a few remarks;” feeling that this enterprise is attended by no risk, because, as some quaint old preacher expressed it, if he is “persecuted in one verse, he can flee to another.” Hence the people rather naturally conclude that whenever one takes a long text, it is an expedient to dispense with labor. …
Others object that the expository sermon cannot present those connected arguments in which the human mind so greatly delights; but it may trace and unfold the argument of an inspired writer, which ought to be more interesting than one constructed by the preacher himself. If it be still further objected that a discourse which is mainly or largely occupied with explanation of the text, can leave but little room for application, we may answer that the impressiveness of an application depends very largely upon the interest which the hearers have been previously brought to feel in the subject applied; and that a brief, and even unexpected application or appeal is often more impressive than one which gives notice, and throws men on the defensive. … The great difficulty in the way of making it effective is not knowledge of Scripture but ignorance of it.
An expository discourse may be defined as one which is occupied mainly, or at any rate very largely, with the exposition of Scripture. It by no means excludes argument and exhortation as to the doctrines or lessons which this exposition develops. It may be devoted to a long passage, or to a very short one, even a part of a sentence. It may be one of a series, or may stand by itself. We at once perceive that there is no broad line of division between expository preaching and the common methods, but that one may pass by almost insensible gradations from textual to expository sermons. … A very large portion of the Bible consists of narrative, and in this, as in other respects, the Bible is adapted to its purpose; for narrative possesses an unfailing interest, for old and young, cultivated and ignorant, converted and unconverted.