Cross to Crown Blog

Part of my Saturday night preaching prep routine involves listening to sermons online. Usually, I choose messages on texts other than the one I am preaching because the goal is not to gain more data for my sermon, but to be reminded of the power and importance of preaching. As I listen, my soul is fed, my mind is stirred, my passion is kindled. I realize afresh that when the Word of Christ is proclaimed boldly and accurately, His Spirit works in the hearts of those who hear it. This realization encourages me to preach boldly and accurately the next morning.

Pastors, I commend the practice to you. Sit under someone else's preaching and receive inspiration for your ministry for tomorrow.

It seems to me a curious piece of absurdity, if not a specimen of blasphemy, for a preacher to ask the help of the Holy Spirit in his preaching, and then to pull his manuscript out of his pocket! Where is the room for the Holy Spirit to work? Have they not bolted and barred the door against Him? What thoughts can He suggest? What emotions can He excite? The paper is the guide of the hour. Why, then, should they mock the Holy Spirit by asking for His assistance—an assis- tance which they will not follow? Or, if I shall have committed every word to memory and prepared every sentence, and then shall come into the pulpit and ask to have an anointing from the Holy One to help me to speak, what do I but ask Him to do what I do not want Him to do, since I can do quite as well without Him as with Him, and should be thrown out of my course if He did assist me?

It seems to me that after due study of the Word, if the preacher—if you, dear Friend, the teacher—will cast yourself upon the teaching of the Spirit of God, though distractions may occur, though in the congregation or in the Sunday school class there may be much to throw you off track and to make you lose the thread of your discourse. If you can rest upon the Spirit of God, He will enable you to speak with power, point, propriety, and personality. It is better to be taught of the Holy Spirit than to learn eloquence from the rules of oratory or at the feet of masters of rhetoric. The Spirit of God needs to be honored in the Church in this respect. I am quite sure that if He were more glorified we should find more who spoke with power—because we should find more who spoke with the Holy Spirit. Let this first remark stand with you for what it is worth, and I am persuaded that there is far more in it than some will care to see.

[From Spurgeon's sermon, Stephen's Martyrdom.]

Doug Wilson quotes a wonderful statement by John Stott on the power of illustrations in sermons:

"We human beings find it very difficult to handle abstract concepts; we need to convert them either into symbols (as in mathematics) or into pictures. For the power of imagination is one of God's best and most distinctive gifts to mankind . . . Illustrations transform the abstract into the concrete, the ancient into the modern, the unfamiliar into the familiar, the general into the particular, the vague into the precise, the unreal into the real, and the invisible into the visible" (Stott, Between Two Worlds, pp. 238-239)

Good preachers will follow their Lord in not only telling their content, but also showing it to the mind's eye of their hearers.