Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, at the end of his Westminster Chapel ministry, was disturbed at the extent to which
ministers were beginning to act as though giving ‘a running commentary’
on a passage was the same as preaching.
"People say it is biblical.
It is not. It is biblical to bring out a message. A mechanical
explanation of the meaning of words, etc. is not preaching. Scripture has
to be fused into a message, with point and power—a sermon has to be something
that is moving and which sends people away glorying in God. We have got
to bring a message and deliver it ‘in demonstration of the Spirit
and of power’. M’Cheyne did not just prepare sermons. He had the
burden of the people on his soul and he came from God with a message.
This was the glory of a man like C. H. Spurgeon. His sermons had form and
thrust and made an impact. This whole notion of a message needs to
be recaptured. The hardest part of a minister’s work is the preparation
of sermons. It is a trying process. There is an agony in it, an act
of creation. That is why I feel so well at the moment, I do not
prepare three sermons a week."
Such effective preaching is bound up
with experience of the Holy Spirit. "The main trouble of
evangelicalism today, apart from its slipping away from truth, is its lack of
power. What do our people know of ‘joy in the Holy Ghost?’"
No comments:
Post a Comment