Heralds of God

Preacher Pick!

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I shared a helpful nudge a friend had picked up in James Stewart’s Heralds of God. Today I’d like to continue with a related thought.  What to do when you have to pick a text on which to preach.  What should we do when there is not an obvious text to be preached?

“Then open your Bible.  Do not pursue elusive texts.  Stop racking your brain for a subject.  Take a whole psalm, a complete Gospel incident, or a solid section from an epistle of St Paul.  Set yourself to interpret it faithfully.”

How simple.  How true.  The Bible is God’s Word.  We honor Him and it more by picking something and preparing well than by pursuing some mystical state in which we might discover the eureka text but have left ourselves very little time to preach it faithfully.

Some weeks the “artistic inspiration” flows freely, but other weeks we are enabled simply to graft hard.  May our graft please the Lord as much as, if not more than, the best and easiest of sermons.  And may we not waste time pursuing the elusive text when God has given us a whole canon – pick a passage, prepare and preach!

Preacher’s Block

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Years ago I read Heralds of God by James Stewart.  I just read a response paper sent to me by a friend.  It’s time I read the book again. He reminded me of Stewart’s advice regarding preacher’s block, or those times when artistic inspiration simply is not flowing, but discouragement is pouring in like a flood.

It is too easy to listen to our moods.  It is too simple to await the great thoughts before we begin.  Stewart quotes Quiller-Couch, “These crests [of inspiration] only arise on the back of constant labour.”  How true it is that moments of inspiration tend to reflect hours of perspiration.

I have a lot of preparation to do this week.  How easy it is to allow the flesh to control the process and wile away the hours with relatively meaningless tasks while awaiting some flash of divine enablement.  Can I trust the Lord to enable me as I graft at the preparation?  Bend the knee and pray.  Pick up the book and read.  Take up the pen and write.  Stretch out the fingers and type.  Simple really, but how easy to justify another path.

Appalling Responsibility

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I suppose this is the week of old quotes . . . lots from James Stewart (published in the 1940’s).  But today I am going older still.  This time Stewart, in Heralds of God (p207), quotes from the 17th century:

There is a great sermon of John Donne’s, delivered in the year 1624, in which he sets forth his conception of the awful burden on the preacher’s heart.  “What Sea,” cries Donne, “could furnish mine eyes with teares enough to poure out, if I should think, that of all this congregation, which lookes me in the face now, I should not meet one at the Resurrection, at the right hand of God!  When at any midnight I hear a bell toll from this steeple, must not I say to my self, what have I done at any time for the instructing or rectifying of that man’s Conscience, who lieth there now ready to deliver up his own account and my account to Almighty God?”  Is it to be wondered at that many a man of God besides Elijah and Jeremiah has tried to run away from a commission so crushing and intolerable?  Nothing but the grace of God can hold you to it.  The magnitude of the task is the first element in evangelical humility.

This is what Stewart calls the appalling responsibility of the minister of the Gospel.  Perhaps we would do well to ponder the burden of our calling.  We live in an age when many take the heavy things of ministry very lightly.  Yet some things have not changed.  Not least the impending reality of the judgment facing humanity after death.  It’s hard to justify levity in light of that.

Vast Trouble

/ Peter Mead / 4 Comments

Permit me to persist in quoting from James Stewart’s, Heralds of God, although only briefly this time (p190):

“Preaching,” inquires Bishop Quayle, “is the art of making a sermon and delivering it?” – and he answers his own question: “Why, no, that is not preaching.  Preaching is the art of making a preacher and delivering that.  It is no trouble to preach, but a vast trouble to construct a preacher.”

I suspect this is a tension every homiletics instructor feels deeply.  It is possible to instruct the method of passage exegesis, sermon formation and effective delivery.  But what does it take to form a preacher?  Surely that is a lifetime work of God Himself.  A couple of comments to ponder:

Are you a preacher, or do you just preach? That is to say, does your life live up to the ministry you give from the pulpit?  Are you continuing to grow, to be shaped, to pursue maturity while resting in God’s work to shape you into the image of His Son?  Have you been so committed to studying preaching and ministry and hermeneutics and theology, but lost direction in your personal spirituality?

Are you pouring into the lives of other potential preachers, even long before they ever preach? Again I raise the issue of mentoring.  How can we claim to be involved in biblical ministry if we do not actively pursue opportunity to mentor others?  A preacher is not made in the course of a training course, although I affirm the value of good training as a good steward seeking to fan into flame the opportunity and gifting God has given.  A preacher is made in the course of a lifetime.  Let’s look with a long-term, strategic view . . . how can we invest ourselves into others?  It’s not ultimately about skill formation, but character formation, spiritual formation, life.

Let me encourage all of us to look for ways to help others develop in the necessary skills required for preaching.  But let’s also look with a greater goal, for ways to help shape the lives of those who can then minister (in whatever form) to others.  This is the vaster trouble, but surely the greater goal.

Tragedy

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I’d like to quote from James Stewart’s classic, Heralds of God (p20).  After this quote, I will only have the briefest of comments to share:

If you as preachers would speak a bracing, reinforcing word to the need of the age, there must be no place for the disillusioned mood in your own life.  Like your Master, you will have meat to eat that the world knows not of; and that spiritual sustenance, in so far as you partake of it daily, will strengthen your powers of resistance to the dangerous infection.  Surely there are few figures so pitiable as the disillusioned minister of the Gospel.  High hopes once cheered him on his way: but now the indifference and the recalcitrance of the world, the lack of striking visible results, the discovery of the appalling pettiness and spite and touchiness and complacency which can lodge in narrow hearts, the feeling of personal futility – all these have seared his soul.  No longer does the zeal of God’s House devour him.  No longer does he mount the pulpit steps in thrilled expectancy that Jesus Christ will come amongst His folk that day, travelling in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save.  Dully and drearily he speaks now about what once seemed to him the most dramatic tidings in the world.  the edge and verve and passion of the message of divine forgiveness, the exultant, lyrical assurance of the presence of the risen Lord, the amazement of supernatural grace, the urge to cry “Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel” – all have gone.  The man has lost heart.  He is disillusioned.  And that, for an ambassador of Christ, is tragedy.

Amen.

Demand

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I’ve really been encouraged by reading James Stewart’s classic book, Heralds of God, again.  Here’s a quote that might be relevant before tomorrow’s message:

If you are wise, you will not in your preaching mask or minimize the overwhelming, absolute nature of Christ’s demand.  Men are ready for a Leader who will unhesitatingly claim the last ounce of His followers’ courage and fidelity.  Field-Marshal Wavell has told, in his notable lectures entitled Generals and Generalship, the story of how Napoleon, when an artillery officer at the siege of Toulon, built a battery in such an exposed position that he was told he would never find men to man it.  But Napoleon had a sure instinct for what was required.  He put up a placard – “The battery of men without fear”: and it was always manned.  This is no time to be offering a reduced, milk-and-water religion.  Far too often the world has been presented with a mild and undemanding half-Christianity.  The Gospel has been emasculated long enough.  Preach Christ today in the total challenge of His high, imperious claim.  Some will be scared, and some offended: but some, and they the most worth winning, will kneel in homage at His feet.

In the 63 years since this was published it is not just the length of sentence and complexity of punctuation that has changed.  I suppose it is almost impossible to write something like that today without being vilified from various sides.  Still, does he not have a point here?  From one side we hear that Christian preaching is too full of male dominated illustrations.  From the other side we hear that church is lacking in anything to attract men.  But actually, the calling on a life implicit in the gospel and biblical teaching is not a male versus female issue.  It is a captivated passionate pursuit of God versus a comfortably self-obsessed issue.  Whatever the terminology, let’s not preach a milk-and-water religion.