You are reading an entry from 28th June 2012 in Church Matters, a blog by our general editor, Paul Beasley-Murray. If you wish to leave a comment, please visit paulbeasleymurray.com.
I have just finished preparing a sermon. If the truth be told, I thought I had prepared it yesterday. I had worked hard on what had been a difficult text, and I thought I had made a pretty good ‘fist’ of expounding it and applying it to the world of today. It was all written out – five sides of A4 – and ready for preaching. Or so I thought. But then I had another look at it – and realised that there was still work to do. My first draft, dare I say it, was without doubt interesting and stimulating; indeed, if I may be even more immodest, it would have come over as a fresh and original approach to a well-known Scripture passage. And yet as I reflected on how I might frame my prayer of response, I suddenly realised it lacked bite, it lacked challenge. The fact is that preaching is not about God and about twenty minutes. Every sermon should have a definite purpose in mind. Preachers, like barristers, should be seeking a verdict.
In the words of R.W. Dale, the great Congregational preacher:
'To carry the vote and fire the zeal' of our congregations, this, gentlemen, is our true business. If we are to be successful, there must be vigorous intellectual activity, but it must be directed by a definite intention to produce a definite result.
Or to quote HH Famer, the scholarly Anglican Oxford don, H.H. Farmer:
Preaching is a knock on the door...It is a call for an answer... Yet how many sermons I have heard which lack this summoning note almost entirely. They begin, they trickle on, they stop, like the turning on and turning off a tap behind which there is no head of water.
To return to the first draft of my sermon – if the truth be told, it lacked punch. So, for instance, at one point I spoke about ‘the immense value of the Gospel’ without inviting my listeners to discover the good news for themselves. True, my text was not a natural spring-board for preaching an evangelistic sermon – indeed, one might well wonder how the words of Jesus about not throwing your pearls before swine (Matt 7.6) could ever be the basis for good news. For Jesus was primarily urging his followers to be discerning when it came to sharing the good news of the Kingdom with others. And yet should a preacher ever speak of Jesus without encouraging people to discover the difference that Jesus makes to living?
In the end on the basis of this strange text I developed a three-fold challenge.
In the light of those three challenges I then wrote the following prayers of response:
Preaching, which is true to Jesus, surely always demands a response!
You are reading an entry from 28th June 2012 in Church Matters, a blog by our general editor, Paul Beasley-Murray.
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