James S. Stewart

“ Therefore I would urge you to preach the Resurrection as the one fact above all others which vitally concerns, not only the life of the individual Christian, but the entire human scene and the destiny of the race. It is the break-through of the eternal order into this world of suffering and confusion and sin and death. It is much more than the dramatic reanimation of One who had died: it is the vindication of eternal righteousness, the declaration that the heart of the universe is spiritual. It is the Kingdom of God made visible. ”

“ Enshrined at the heart of the faith are facts of such perennial vitality and incalculable force that you will never, to your dying day, tell more than a fraction of the truth that God has blazed across your sky. "We preach always Him," declared Luther, "the true God and man. This may seem a limited and monotonous subject, likely to be soon exhausted, but we are never at the end of it." Why should you imagine that the stimulating atmosphere of expectation which surrounds you at the opening of your ministry must inevitably give way sooner or later to a sultry air of tedious disenchantment? ”

“ Is it legitimate, is it convincing, for a Church to summon men to brotherhood and solidarity, while its own ruinous divisions are manifest to all? Is it real in a day when the thrust and pressure of anti-Christian forces ought to be driving all believers to close their ranks and march together, in a day moreover when the reaction from the hyper-individualism of a bygone age is leading the younger generation to new experiments in the realm of community—is it real to maintain and perpetuate the partisan loyalties which disrupt true fellowship and drive Christians asunder? ”

“ For still to-day, as at the first, it is when the doors are shut, in the bitter hour of disillusionment, that Christ is apt to break in, and stand in the midst, and say "Peace be unto you." And then, out of the dark misery of self-despair, men begin to arise and shine, knowing that their light is come!
Don't listen to the lugubrious voices that incessantly deplore the deadness of the age, and groan about the thankless uphill task of the Christian ministry and the desolating lack of response. It is a thrilling hour in which to bear the commission of your Lord. ”

“ But do not mutilate the Gospel of the Cross by reducing it to a doctrine of subjective influence. Preach the Cross as victory. Here where the very greatness of the apparent triumph of iniquity was its own irrevocable defeat; here where evil once for all has shot its bolt, and its deadly weapon is turned against itself; here where eternal love is seen asserting its sovereignty, not just in spite of the tragic mystery of sin, but—as by a master-stroke of divine strategy—precisely through that mystery—here is the ground of all our hope. ”

“ He can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frosen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons. ”

“ Do not we, who grow so hectic often and strained and tired and overburdened, long to share the secret of Christ's peace? It was the secret known to the mountain-tops where He outwatched the stars, to the olive trees in the garden which heard His voice at midnight, to the winds and waves that were His shrine while He communed with God. How shall any man be strong to do Christ's work to-day, with the purposefulness and passion and mastery of life that shine on every page of the Gospels, if he neglects Christ's hidden secret? ”

“ But there is a further indictment of unreality in preaching. This is rooted not so much in the hard problems men and women are facing—what Whittier called this "maddening maze of things"—as in the very nature of the Christian faith itself. The Gospel is quite shattering in its realism. It shirks nothing. It never seeks to gloss over the dark perplexities of fate, frustration, sin and death, or to gild unpalatable facts with a coating of pious verbiage or facile consolation. It never side-tracks uncomfortable questions with some naïve and cheerful cliché about providence or progress. ”

“ How can preaching ever die out while these things are so? Do not listen to the foolish talk which suggests that, for this twentieth century, the preaching of the Word is an anachronism, and that the pulpit, having served its purpose, must now be displaced by press or radio, discussion group or Brains Trust, and finally vanish from the scene. As long as God sets His image on the soul, and men are restless till they rest in Him, so long will the preacher's task persist, and his voice be heard through all the clamour of the world. ”

“ If parents will sacrifice themselves for their little ones, how much more God! If a man will lay down his life for his friends, how much more God! If you will suffer for one whom you love, how much more God! Do you remember how Lacordaire once dramatized this very truth? "If you would wish to know how the Almighty feels towards us, listen to the beating of your own heart and add to it infinity" (Incidentally, there you have the whole book of the prophet Hosea—the man's personal history and his religious message to the world—in one golden sentence.) ”

“ And long after the sermon is finished, that voice will keep sounding on. Paul plants, Apollos waters; but the real issues are wrought out at levels where Paul, Apollos and every other human factor have vanished out of sight. It is not your personality that has to be impressed redeemingly upon other souls—thank heaven for that; it is not you who are to dazzle men with your grasp of the truth, or your powers as a defender of the faith; it is not you who are going to convert souls and unlock the shining gates to which only Jesus has the key. ”

“ Here is the ultimate secret of authoritative preaching—a first-hand knowledge, never inert and static, never dependent merely on remembered episodes, shining and decisive God-encounters long ago, but always dynamic and developing, always with insight added to insight, and wonder piled on wonder, from the moment when you first gird on your armour for the fray, until the last sermon is preached and the long campaign is over and your work on earth is done. ”

“ What makes your calling in the Church so urgent and so critical is the fact that human hearts, bombarded with grim perplexities and damaging shadows of despair, are crying as never before, "Is there any word from the Lord?" Men who have seen war's scourge let loose twice in a generation are not going to be put off with polite trivialities and polished essays and pulpit dialectic. They don't want our views, opinions, advice or arguments. Is there any word from the Lord? Tell us that, they demand. Has Christianity failed? Must God's hopes be wrecked for ever on the rock of man's anarchic nature? ”

“ Then, taking the big pulpit Bible bodily off its desk, clutching it in his arms and holding it aloft, he cried, "Here is the Word of God which endureth for ever." Spurgeon could dare the startling gesture, and it would be magnificently impressive: but with ninety-nine men out of a hundred the risk of an abrupt descent from the sublime to the ridiculous would be prohibitive. It is a wise rule to be sparing of gesture, and to suffer no movement which is not the natural and instinctive expression of a deeply felt mood. ”

“ It may not come to us—the great heart-piercing conviction—in any such dramatic way: but if not, then come in some more secret way it must, or we have no awakening Gospel to preach. Pray God that the truth of the Resurrection may smite you with its glory, and go through your mind and spirit with its consuming flame! Only so will you be able to lead others out of the torpor of vague half-belief to the vitality of passionate conviction. ”

“ When you have been preaching for twenty years, you will be beginning to realize how incalculably much there is to learn. There will be days when the Socratic knowledge of your ignorance will desolate and overwhelm you. Even if Providence should spare you to this work for fifty years, your thought will be, as the gloaming closes in around you, "If only I could start all over again now!" There is no vocation in all the world which has such rewards to offer of deep and satisfying joy. ”

“ Nor can it be denied that too often in the past organized religion has tended to play for safety. As Phillips Brooks once put it: "The pillars of the Church are apt to be like the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which no man might sail." It is the function of economists, not of the pulpit, to work out plans of reconstruction. But it is emphatically the function of the pulpit to stab men broad awake to the terrible pity of Jesus, to expose their hearts to the constraint of that divine compassion which haloes the oppressed and the suffering and flames in judgment against every social wrong. ”

“ When a generation has been robbed of its familiar gods of material security, progress, human self-sufficiency, or when the individual soul has found its conventional religion stolen away by the marauding forces of agnosticism, trouble and despair, then strikes God's hour to break in with His salvation. Must we not say that any weariness, unsettlement or consternation is in the last resort a blessed thing if it makes a man or an age in the mood to welcome God? ”

“ It is out of such a mood of desperate defeat and bankruptcy that there rises, like a bright and morning star, the discovery of prayer's unsearchable riches, its power to steady the staggering soul, to replenish the lost virtue and the nervous energy which the toil of the passion for souls has drained away. Day after day, year after year, you will be expending yourselves, giving out to others. ”

“ It dare not face a future in which man is his own redeemer.
Wherefore God be thanked that right down in the heart of that situation you can set the Cross! Rising out of the midnight of man's despair, smiting the darkness like a sudden dawn, comes the solving word, the divine decisive deed; and all the classic answers of Jew and Greek and Roman fade away before the glory of it.
Now when you set the Cross in the context of the world's sin, there will be three main notes in your preaching. ”

“ Thus in teaching and exposition no less than in direct evangelism, in your continual task of instructing your people in the whole counsel of God no less than in the act of appealing for decision, the message will be alive, throbbing with vital force, imbued with the redeeming energy of the Holy Spirit: "quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword." No one will doubt or question its reality. ”

“ I am not counselling you to keep harping on one string, for variety is the very breath of life in preaching. I am insisting on what is paradoxical but true—that the more resolutely and stubbornly you refuse to be deflected from the one decisive theme, the greater the variety you will achieve; while the more you seek variety by wandering from your centre, the faster the descent to bathos and monotony. God's deed in Christ touches life at every point. ”

“ It is one thing to learn the technique and mechanics of preaching: it is quite another to preach a sermon which will draw back the veil and make the barriers fall that hide the face of God. If that is not achieved the most careful craftsmanship is worthless; while on the other hand, all mannerisms can be forgiven, all violent infringing of the rules condoned, if there comes—as through the sermon which so moved Raymond and the others that night—some authentic touch of the unseen, some deep subduing sense of the eternal. ”

“ THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
"What skill doth every part of our work require, and of how much moment is every part! To preach a sermon, I think, is not the hardest part; and yet what skill is necessary to make plain the truth, to convince the hearers; to let in the irresistible light into their consciences, and to keep it there, and drive all home; to screw the truth into their minds, and work Christ into their affections ”

“ Is there perhaps no rationality anywhere? What if the spiritual interpretation of life is nothing more than the creation of pious sentiment, muddled thinking and credulity? How can the Christian evangel be relevant in a blatantly non-Christian world? Do not its basic axioms look frightfully incongruous and inapposite? Never forget as preachers that all around you to-day are men baffled and tormented by the assault of that fierce ultimate doubt.
I would have you notice, moreover, that theology itself, in certain of its aspects, has shared in the pessimistic reaction. ”

“ It is a desolating corruption of the Resurrection Gospel to regard it merely as one more argument for individual survival. The human heart indeed cries out for light beyond the grave. All through your ministry you will hear that cry; and you will seek, God helping you, to answer it. Nor can you ever point to any light more clear or steady or reassuring than that which shines from the empty tomb of Jesus. ”

“ By the coming of Christ, Paul is saying in these four passages, something has got a foothold in history which turns man's struggle into victory, his sin into redemption, his solitude into divine communion, his setting sun into the daybreak of an eternal morning. And all the way through, that trumpet-toned text will keep sounding forth the truth that God's new era for the sons of men is not mere vision and prophecy, for in Christ it has already appeared. It is not a pious dream, it is historic fact. ”

“ Always the man of God has been the watchman on the ramparts of the world. Always the preacher of the Word has known himself to be a sentinel, appointed to keep vigil over immortal souls. Always the pressure of the immense responsibility has constrained him to cry, "Necessity is laid upon me: woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel!" ”

“ It is quite fatal to embark on a sermon without having a plainly charted course to follow. How can you hope to have any freedom or conviction in delivery if there is no connecting-thread running through from start to finish, no measured march and progression of thought? Far too many sermons wander erratically from one thing to another, going off at sudden tangents, perpetrating aimless involutions, anon returning upon their own tracks, moving in circles, with divisions overlapping, heads leading to anticlimax, transitions muddy and blurred. ”