1.B 01. Show-Sermons
Show-Sermons. A good many young men, beginning to preach, feel that they don’t know what to do. They naturally fall hack upon their note-hooks, upon the development of some system of truth. They undertake to present to their people topic after topic based upon great gospel themes. And of course they can do no better than that in the beginning. Still, that is rather preparing to preach than preaching. It is like a man who is practising with his rille at a target that he does not see, who hits by accident if he hits, rather than by deliberate aim. You cannot expect a man to do better until he has learned. It is no easy thing for one to be in such familiar pos session of the great moral truths revealed in the Bible, and in such familiar knowledge of men’s natures and dispositions, that he can take of the one and lit it to the other almost by intuition. But in tuition is only a name for superior habit. No one should be discouraged in the beginning of his ministry, therefore, if he finds himself running short of subjects; preaching a great deal and accomplishing but very little; having comparatively a light hold upon truths, and not being able by these truths to grapple men effectually. Every one has an ideal in his mind. He thinks of Whitefield; and of Jonathan Edwards, with the man pulling at his coat-tails and trying to stop that terrible burst of statement and denunciation that was crushing the congregation. Every young man who is aspiring wants to do great things, and to preach great sermons. Great sermons, young gentlemen, ninety-nine times in a hundred, are nuisances. They are like steeples without any bells in them; things stuck up high in the air, serving for ornament, attracting observation, but sheltering nobody, warming nobody, helping nobody. It is not these great sermons that any man should propose to himself as models. Of course, if now and then in legitimate, honest, and manly work, you are in the right mood, and are brought into a state of excitement of which a great sermon is the result, preach it, and don’t be afraid. But great sermons will come of themselves, when they are worth anything. Don’t seek them; for that of itself is almost enough to destroy their value.
I do not say this for the purpose of abating one particle of your studiousness, or the earnestness with which you labour. I do not undertake to say that there may not be some indulgence at times in that direction; that is to say, if you have written a sermon that has done good, it may do good again. But I do say that, generally speaking, show-sermons are the temptation of the devil. They do not lie in the plane of common, true Christian, ministerial work.
They are not natural to a man whose heart is moved with genuine sympathy for man, and who is inspired in that sympathy by the fire of the Spirit of God.
There is a false greatness in sermons as well as in men. Vanity, Ambition, Pedantry, are demons that love to clothe themselves in rhetorical garments, like angels of light!