THS-09-9. Topical Sermons

9. Topical Sermons My experience with young men through the years tells me that many of them by this time are irked by this insistent demand to work out intricate outlines according to precise forms. They have known a few preachers--outstanding men, some of them who do not seem to worry about these finicking details. Which is probably true. They have also known of brilliant pianists who, so far as their public performances reveal it, do not have to worry about five-finger exercises. They have seen capable typists at work in city offices who do not have to worry about the use of their fingers on the machine, who indeed look neither at their fingers nor the machine. They also know, probably, some people who are not good pianists, who began to study music and hated the five-finger exercises, and did not persevere. They know typists--they may be among the number who could not be bothered to master the touch system on the typewriter, and who will be muddling typists all their lives. And with regard to preaching, the same principles are eternally true, except in the case of geniuses, and this book is not written for them. Even men who come to great distinction in music never get away from painstaking drill.

Drill

Paderewski said that if he stopped practicing at the piano one day he noticed the difference, if he stopped two days his family noticed it, three days and his friends were aware of the difference, and if he stopped for a week the musical world noticed the difference. It is likely that behind much great preaching there is much meticulous drill in sermon preparation which the public does not see and the uninitiated do not realize, so let us to work to master our technique. "Enter ye in by the strait gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to dull and ineffective preaching, and many be they that enter in thereby. For narrow is the gate and straitened the way that leads to great preaching such as people in these fastidious days are willing to listen to, and few be they that find it." A modern translation, you will recognize, and I doubt if we should use versions in modern English too much in our pulpit work, though they have their uses.

Texts for Topical Sermons

We have now formed a very good idea of the nature of the topical sermon, but it will be well for us to realize the variety of subjects that will call for treatment in this way. Some of them are definitely related to texts. As examples, examine these:

1. Parallel passages expressing one idea. For instance, Psalms 103:12, "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us." You may analyze it, textually, of course, but you would not get very far in the sermon by a geographical discussion of the distance of the east from the west. It is far better to treat it as a great statement of God’s pardoning love--that is, as a topic, and bring to it all your resources of knowledge and experience of that great theme.

2. Short texts, like "Jesus Wept," "God is Light," may be better treated topically than textually. They are capable of textual treatment, of course, as in the following outline, which will serve for either text: (1) The Person Mentioned; (2) The Fact Declared. That is very trite, and ordinary, as is shown by the fact that it suits either text equally well. The sermons would be richer if you treated them as topics: The Sympathy of Christ, and The Light of God.

3. Great texts, rich and full of teaching, which would lend themselves fully for textual treatment, may yet sometimes be better treated as a topic. Perhaps in this case it is more common to select the topic first, and you seek a picturesque text to introduce it, and to remain as a permanent seed thought. You are to speak on "God’s Wonderful Love" as it has been revealed to you in your experience of His grace, and John 3:16 may be your text, not only a motto text for a topical sermon, but the highlight of your presentation.

Subjects for Topical Doctrine The extensive range of Christian, and the wide-reaching Sermons privileges, duties and perils of the Christian Life, offer themselves as topics. We must needs preach on these subjects, for this is an ignorant age concerning the content of the Christian faith. You will do well to preach on the principal doctrines, and proclaim your convictions concerning the Word of God, the Fatherhood of God, the Savior Christ Jesus, the Holy Spirit the Comforter, Man, Sin, Salvation, and the Future Hope. There are the festivals of the Church year--Easter, Harvest Thanksgiving, Christmas. There are the rich experiences of the Christian life--cleansing, guidance, adventure, fellowship. Time would fail to indicate the extent of the topics which offer themselves to our eager minds. We need never be at a loss for a theme.

No, our burden will not be the lack of a subject, but of a living approach to it. A textbook written in the days when preaching was a simpler proposition than it is now suggested the following type of outlines for such subjects as we have in mind:

I., Its Meaning; II., Its Proofs; III., Its Effects.

I., Its Lines; II., Its Limitations; III., Its Lessons.

I., The Duty Explained; II., Exemplified; III., Enforced.

Probably that kind of thing may still go over once or twice, but it is a pedestrian movement introduced where we need to mount up with wings as eagles. True, we must walk before we can fly, and it may be that in the beginning you cannot improve on the formal approach suggested. But keep your mind alert for the more vital approach. You want to speak on Christ and what he means to the world. Dr. Jowett had a sermon on "If Christ had not Come," pointing out the alternatives--what our situation would be in such a case. J. Fort Newton once used a sentence in a sermon which arrested me immediately. I quote from memory, but he spoke of Paul as walking down the corridors of time turning out the lights of faith. That was Paul’s way of showing how valuable faith is. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised, and if Christ hath not been raised!" "If Christ hath not been raised your faith is vain; you are yet in your sins." That sentence gave me a sermon on the essential nature of faith. In all your study you need to be on the watch for the striking phrase, the arresting thought--some living word that will give you an idea and an inspiration in preaching the great doctrines of the gospel.

Bible personalities often make peculiarly interesting topics for the presentation of a message. You may, as we found in examining Hebrews 11:24-26, discover a text that by analysis will give you the most significant portions of a man’s life. Only rarely, however, will you find single texts that do more than suggest a single line of thought on such a subject, and you must therefore use the synthetical or topical method of treatment. You are attracted by the life of Abraham, and you seek a way to handle it. You examine with the aid of your concordance the word "Abraham." You come to Isaiah 41:8, "Abraham my Friend." You go on to James 2:23, where the apostle, speaking of the patriarch, says: "He was called the friend of God." Dr. Alexander Maclaren had a sermon on that subject, and he outlined it with a number of affirmations which were illustrated by Abraham’s relationship with God:

1. Friends trust and love one another.

2. Friends have frank, familiar intercourse with one another.

3. Friends delight to meet each other’s wishes.

4. Friends give gifts to each other.

5. Friends stand up for each other.

If you know the life of Abraham (and you must know the life stories of these men if you would preach about them) you will see how simply it was done, and how beautiful a survey of the life of Abraham it is.

I have found that students as a rule prefer to preach topical rather than textual sermons. The reason no doubt is that a topic gives more freedom and provides more scope for the use of the stored resources of knowledge that one may have. I insist with my students that a certain proportion of their sermons, during their college days, must be textual--I would not do them the disservice of permitting them to imagine that the meanderings of their immature minds could ever be a complete substitute for the diligent painstaking analysis of a great passage of Scripture. Even the textual sermon will need the stored treasures of the mind to clarify and apply it, and this matter of acquiring useable material for sermon making is a very important one.

"How long each week should we spend in the preparation of a sermon?" asked a student this week. That depends. There are subjects already more or less mature in your minds, upon which an hour or two of good solid work will produce a good result. Others that are new to your habits of thought will need many hours of study before they are ready for the pulpit. This is important, however: while you are preparing your next Sunday’s sermon you are also preparing for sermons to be preached ten or twenty years hence. And that not merely because you are informing your mind, but because you are definitely registering articles, illustrations, quotations, etc., which will be made available in the future by some sensible method of reference. You may use scissors and paste, and compile a scrap book. You may use separate large envelopes for different subjects, as D. L. Moody did. Better still, you may use a box file, properly indexed, to hold all the scrap material you think may have a future use. The Permanent Notebook

You will also find much material in books which you cannot mutilate, and hence must record in some other way. Here comes the notebook, one of the most useful articles in a preacher’s study. If a fire should destroy my own study, my greatest loss would be the records and references compiled through many years, which give me ready access to a vast variety of subjects. This is the way it grows.

You secure a notebook sufficiently large to contain all the references you are likely to make for many years, and sufficiently well bound to endure years of careful handling. You keep it on your desk, ready for use. You are preparing a sermon, let us say, on the power of Christ in the world, and you are perusing E. Stanley Jones’s "The Christ of the Indian Road" for information. You come to this statement:

"Now the cross never knows defeat, for it is itself Defeat, and you cannot defeat Defeat. You cannot break Brokenness. It starts with defeat and accepts that as a way of life."

You say, "That is a striking thought. I shall be preaching on The Cross some day, and I’ll want that reference. "You take your thumb-indexed notebook and pencil, and under "C" you write a title, "The Cross." Under that you write "The Cross never knows defeat. Stanley Jones. 189,55." The figures mean, first the number of the book in your library (for you number your books for ready reference: 189 is the number of this book in my own library) and the page of reference. A few days later you read an arresting article on "The Last Full Measure." You of the paper to keep it. It has to do with the Cross. You put it in your box file (in my file it happens to be the 68th clipping under "P"). In your notebook you make this entry "The Cross": The Last Full Measure. File P, 68.

You must not make heavy work of the compilation of your notebook--it just grows, reference by reference. You will not try to think up a lot of subjects upon which you hope you will be able to compile references. You wait till something strikes you which you would like to keep, and you give it a title, and record the reference. The first reference in my notebook under the title "Christ" is simply Book 2, 89 A.B. The reference is to a scrap book which I began to compile about forty years ago. (The scrap book method has long been abandoned for the more adaptable box file, but the old scrap books are kept). On page 89 of this book are two excellent extracts of an illustrative nature that would adorn any sermon that followed the particular line of thought. In years to come you will have thousands of references. Many of them you will have forgotten altogether, except as they may be registered in your unconscious mind where you cannot reach them. But through your notebook you will reach them, and you will bless the patient diligence which through the years provided you with such a fund of rich sermonic material. For Review:

Prepare sermon outlines, one textual and the other topical, using Acts 17:30 as a text.