LECTURE I EXPOSITORY PREACHING A YOUTH, who nearly thirty years ago sat where you now sit, found himself again and again haunted by the misgiving that he would never have enough to preach to keep him ministering to a congregation week in and week out. He had not spoken in public for more than ten or fifteen minutes on any theme. He had found himself barely able to fill five minutes with ideas on even the greatest subject. How would it be possible for him, twice on a Sunday, forty odd weeks every year, to preach interestingly and enrichingly for half an hour? During his course in divinity he received much useful counsel on how to preach; but he would return to his room to be tormented by the old perplexity what to preach, so as to be supplied with arresting and informing and nourishing material for these relentlessly recurring Sundays. He forefancied appalling weeks, when no inspiration would visit him, and Saturday evening would arrive to find him still sermonless. This youth had his theological training at a 11 time when the prophets of Israel had been recently rediscovered, and the prophetic element in religion was stressed almost to the exclusion of every other. It was said, as indeed it is still said, that preaching must be prophetic. A minister was to enter his pulpit and speak as Amos did at Bethel, or Isaiah at the royal court in Jerusalem. The preacher was to stand upon his watchtower or to enter into a secret place and wait, and then declare the oracles of God. But this embryonic divine felt that no utterance of his had been or was ever likely to be oracular. Occasionally he had things to say which he wished to say very much, and he could usually say them in a very few minutes, but they were not in the habit of coming to him periodically at seven-day intervals, nor in such measured abundance as to furnish him with a twenty-five- or thirty-minute sermon Sunday morning and evening, not to mention fragments that remained over to be served up at the weekly prayer-meeting. The prophetic office of the Christian preacher has been grossly exaggerated. A preacher may prophesy on occasion; but Elijah, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were not parish ministers. None of them preached statedly to the same congregation; most of them handled a very few aspects of truth. A Greater A than they was usually called Teacher, and it would be wiser for Christian preachers to strive to be worthy of that title. It would have helped the divinity student, of whom I have been speaking, had he been told that instead of seeking to exercise a prophetic ministry, he was to fit himself to be a teacher of religion. A teacher plans a course of instruction; he does not select his subjects from day to day. He has an ideal of a man educated in his discipline. He asks himself what elements must enter into his teaching, what appreciations he must awaken, what information he must impart, what questions he must provoke, what purposes he must seek to instil. A preacher who would minister in the same pulpit for a quarter of a century, or for at least a decade, and would train a congregation in convictions and ideals, in methods of intercourse with the Unseen and in ways of serving the commonweal, must follow a similar educational system. This is not to say that a preacher will not be visited by unexpected and compelling inspirations, and given messages which must forthwith be delivered. Such visitations of the Spirit come-come with crises in the world's affairs or in the nation's life, come in an event that startles a community or in a happening to some of his people which burdens the minister's heart, |