03.04. The Preacher in his Study

LECTURE IV THE PREACHER IN HIS STUDY "A wise master-builder”

I am to-day to ask your consideration to the subject of "The Preacher in His Study." What manner of man must the preacher be when he enters his workshop, and what kind of work shall he do? A little while ago I was reading the life of a very distinguished English judge, Lord Bowen, and in an illuminating statement of the powers and qualities required for success at the bar he used these words: "Cases are won in chambers." That is to say, so far as the barrister is concerned, his critical arena is not the public court but his own private room. He will not win triumph by extemporary wit, but by hard work. Cases are not won by jaunty "sorties" of flashing appeal, but by well-marshaled facts and disciplined arguments marching solidly together in invincible strength. "Cases are won in chambers." And if a barrister is to practically conquer his jury before he meets them, by the victorious strength and sway of his preparations, shall it be otherwise with a preacher, before he seeks the verdict of his congregation? With us, too, "cases are won in chambers." Men are not deeply influenced by extemporized thought. They are not carried along by a current of fluency which is ignorant where it is going. Mere talkativeness will not put people into bonds. Happy-go-lucky sermons will lay no necessity upon the reason nor put any strong constraint upon the heart. Preaching that costs nothing accomplishes nothing. If the study is a lounge the pulpit will be an impertinence.

It is, therefore, imperative that the preacher go into his study to do hard work. We must make the business-man in our congregation feel that we are his peer in labor. There is no man so speedily discovered as an idle minister, and there is no man who is visited by swifter contempt. We may hide some things, but our idleness is as obtrusive as though the name of sluggard were branded on our foreheads. As indeed it is! And here we must most vigilantly guard against self-deception. We may come to assume that we are really working when we are only loafing through our days. The self-deception may arise from many causes. I have noticed that some people assume they are very generous, but it is simply because they have no system in their giving and no record of their gifts. You will find, when you get into your churches, that some people confuse the number of appeals they have heard with the number of times they have given; and the mere remembrance of the appeals makes them sweat under the burdened sense of their bounty. Their self-deception is not intentional: it is only consequential: they have very poor memories, and they use no system to aid them. And so it is in respect to labor. If we have no system we shah come to think we were working when we were only thinking about it, and that we were busy when we were only engaged. And, therefore, with all my heart I give this counsel,--be as systematic as a business-man. Enter your study at an appointed hour, and let that hour be as early as the earliest of your business-men goes to his warehouse or his office. I remember in my earlier days how I used to hear the factory operatives passing my house on the way to the mills, where work began at six o’clock. I can recall the sound of their iron-clogs ringing through the street. The sound of the clogs fetched me out of bed and took me to my work. I no longer hear the Yorkshire clogs, but I can see and hear my business-men as they start off early to earn their daily bread. And shall their minister be behind them in his quest of the Bread of life? Shall he slouch and loiter into the day, shamed by those he assumes to lead, and shall his indolence be obtrusive in the services of the sanctuary when "the hungry sheep look up and are not fed "? Let the minister, I say, be as business-like as the business-man. Let him employ system and method, and let him be as scrupulously punctual in his private habits in the service of his Lord, as he would ’have to be in a government-office in the service of his country. And to regularity let him add proportion. Let him estimate the comparative values of things. Let first things be put first, and let him give the freshness of his strength to matters of vital and primary concern. Gentlemen, all this will pay, and the payment will be made in sterling good. You will win the respect of your people, even of the most strenuous of them, and when they see that you "mean business" some of your obstacles will be already removed, and you will find an open way to the very citadels of their souls.

Now if this large, honest road is to be followed we shall go into our workshops for systematic study. We shall not be desultory or trifling. We shall not waste time in looking for work, but we shall begin to work at once. We shall not spend the early hours of the day in raking for texts, but in comprehensive visions of truth. We must be explorers of a vast continent of truth, and the individual texts will find us out as we go along. Our very insight into particular truths depends upon our vision of broader truth. Our perceptiveness is determined by our comprehensiveness. Men whose eyes range over the vast prairies have intense discernment of things that are near at hand. The watchmaker, whose eyes are imprisoned to the immediate, loses his strength of vision, and soon requires artificial aid to see even the immediate itself. The big outlook makes you lynx-eyed: telescopic range gives you also microscopic discernment. We must study truth if we would understand texts, as we should study literature to understand the significance of individual words.

How could you seize the significance of such a phrase as "rejoicing in hope," or "bless them which persecute you," found in the twelfth chapter of Romans, unless you see it drenched in the morning splendor of grace, and set in the radiant vistas of the sanctified life? We cannot preserve the real life of these things if we cut them out, and detach them, and regard them as having no vital and infinite relations. The fact of the matter is, these practical counsels of the Apostle Paul are not added to his letters as though they were an unrelated appendix, casually bound up with matter with which they have no critical relation. Every counsel has blood-relation-ship to all that has preceded it. We require the entire letter for the understanding of only one of its parts. A duty in chapter twelve shines with a light reflected from chapter five, and it pulses with a motive and constraint which is born in chapter eight. The unveiled truth interprets and empowers the practical duty. This is what I mean when I say that we are to be explorers of broad fields of revelation, and that we are to find our texts in these wide domains. I would, therefore, urge upon all young preachers, amid all their other reading, to be always engaged in the comprehensive study of some one book in the Bible. Let that book be studied with all the strenuous mental habits of a man’s student days. Let him put into it the deliberate diligence, the painstaking care, the steady persistence with which he prepared for exacting examinations, and let him assign a part of every day to attaining perfect mastery over it. You will find this habit to be of immeasurable value in the enrichment of your ministry. In the first place, it will give you breadth of vision, and, therefore, it will give you perspective and proportion. You will see every text as colored and determined by its context, and indeed as related to vast provinces of truth which might otherwise seem remote and irrelevant. And you will be continually fertilizing your minds by discoveries and surprises which will keep you from boredom, and which will keep you from that wearisome gin of commonplaces in whose accustomed grooves even the most stalwart grows faint. Wide journeyings and explorations of this kind will leave you no trouble about texts. Texts will clamor for recognition, and your only trouble will be to find time to give them notice. The year will seem altogether too short to deal with the waiting procession and to exhibit their wealth. Yes, you will be embarrassed with your riches instead of with your poverty. I know one minister who, as he walked home from his church on Sunday nights, would almost invariably say to a deacon, who accompanied him, and say it with shaking head and melancholy tones, "Two more wanted! Two morel" He would send the eyes of his imagination roving over the thin little patch which he had gleaned so constantly, and he was filled with doleful wonder as to where he should gather a few more ears of corn for next week’s bread! "Two more wanted! Two morel" He had no barns, or, if he had, they were empty! We must cultivate big farms, and we shall have well-stocked barns, and we shall not be moody gleaners searching for thin ears over a small and ill-cultivated field. In your study you will, of course, take advantage of the best that scholarship can offer you in the interpretation of the Word. Before preaching upon any passage you will make the most patient inquisition, and under the guidance of acknowledged masters you will seek to realize the precise conditions in which the words were born. And here I want most strongly to urge you to cultivate the power of historical imagination: I mean the power to reconstitute the dead realms of the past and to repeople them with moving life. We shall never grip an old-world message until we can re-create the old-world life. Many of us have only a partial power, and it leaves us with maimed interpretations. To a certain extent we can refashion the past, but it is like Pompeii, it is dead. We get a setting, but not the life. Things are not in movement. We cannot transpose our; selves back with all our senses, and see things in all their play and interplay, and catch the sounds and secrets in the air, and touch the hurrying people in the streets, or nod to the shepherd on the hills. We may see the past as a photograph: we do not see it as a cinematograph. Things are not alive! And to see men alive is by no means an easy attainment. We cannot get it by reverie: it is the fruit of firm, steady, illumined imagination.

How are we to preach about Amos unless we can live with him on the hills of Tekoa, and see his environment as if it were part of our own surroundings, every sense active in its own reception: and tm-less we can go. with him into Bethel, and note the very things that he sees along the road, and see the moving, tainted, insincere and rotten life which is congested in the town? How can we enter into the teaching of the Prophet Hosea unless by the power of a vividly exercised imagination we recover his surroundings? The Book of Hosea is filled with sights and sounds and scents. We must go back to his day and all our senses must be as open channels to the impressions that appealed to him. We must go with him along the streets, we must look into the houses and workshops. We must see the baker at his oven and kings and princes in their palace. We must walk with him through the lanes and among the fields at dawn of day when "the morning cloud" is beginning to lift and the grass is drenched with "the early dew." We must see Hosea’s homeland if we would intimately appreciate his speech. Or, again, how are we going to preach, say, about the Lord’s tender ministries to the leper unless we can get into the leper’s skin, and look out through his darkened windows, and shrink with his timidity, or come running with him along the highway, and in his very person kneel before the Lord? We must see that man, hear him, feel him: nay, we must be the man if we would know how to preach about the Master’s words, "I will, be thou clean."

I am urging the cultivation of the historical imagination because I am persuaded that the want of it so often gives unreality to our preaching. If we do not realize the past we cannot get its vital message for the present. The past which is unfolded in the pages of Scripture is to many of us very wooden: and the men and the women are wooden: we do not feel their breathing: we do not hear them cry: we do not hear them laugh: we do not mix with their humanness and find that they are just like folk in the next street. And so the message is not alive. It does not pulse with actuality. It is too often a dead word belonging to a dead world, and it has no gripping relevancy to the throbbing lives of our own day. And so I urge you to cultivate the latent power of realization, the power to fill with breath the motionless forms of the past. If needful, before you preach upon an old-world message, spend a whole morning in hard endeavor to recall and vitalize the old world, until it becomes so vivid that you can scarcely tell whether you are a preacher in your study, or a citizen in some village, or city, or empire of the past. Of course, you will consult other minds upon your message, not that you may immediately accept their judgments, but that you may pass them through the mill of your own meditations. Indeed it is, perhaps, not so much their particular judgments that we need as their general points of view. One of the best things we can obtain from a man is not individualized counsels on particular problems, but the general standpoint from which he surveys the kingdom of truth. I know it is necessary to have much mental fellowship with a man before you gain this knowledge. It is easier to gather his opinions than to acquire his mental attitudes and inclinations. It is easier to pick up the verdicts of his mind than to become acquainted with its pose. But it can be done. We may come to know, with sufficient accuracy, how a man would approach a subject, how he would lay hold of it. Now I think it is an exceedingly enriching discipline to seek to look at our themes from other men’s points of view. How would So-and-so look at this? By what road would he approach it? One of our English magazines has been lately propounding problems to its readers of this kind. One week the readers were asked to identify themselves with Dr. Johnson, with his mind and heart and manner, and give his probable opinions on Woman’s Suffrage! And I think some such similar discipline must be employed in relation to our interpretation of the Word. If I may give you my own experience, I have been in the habit of following this practice for many years. I ask,--how would Newman regard this subject? How would Spurgeon approach it? How would Dale deal with it? By what road would Bushnell come up to it? Where would Maclaren take his stand to look at it? Where would Alexander Whyte lay hold of it? You may think this a very presumptuous practice, and I have no doubt some of my conclusions would horrify the saintly men whose heart-paths I have presumed to trace. But here is the value of the practice, it broadens and enriches my own conception of the theme, even though I may not have correctly interpreted the other men’s points of view. I have looked at the theme through many windows, and some things appear which I should never have seen had I confined myself to the windows of my own mind and heart. But while I am advising you to consult other minds I must further advise you not to be overwhelmed by them. Reverently respect your own individuality. I do not advise you to be aggressively singular, for then you may stand revealed as a crank, and your influence will be gone. But without being angular believe in your own angle, and work upon the assumption that it is through your own unrepeated personality that God purposes that your light should break upon the world. Reverently believe in your own uniqueness, and consecrate it in the power of the Holy Spirit. Be yourself, and slavishly imitate nobody. We do not want mimic greatness but great simplicity. When we begin to imitate we nearly always imitate the non-essentials, the tertiary things that scarcely count. In my own college there was a peril of our turning out a species of dwarfed or miniature Fairbairns. We could so easily acquire the trick of his style,--that sharp antithetical sentence, doubling back upon itself, and which we fashioned like standardized pieces of machinery east in a foundry! I believe I became rather an expert in the process, and for some time I carried the Fairbairn moulds about with me, only unfortunately there was nothing in them! And so I counsel you not to borrow anybody’s moulds of experience, and not to be intimidated by any other man’s point of view. Consult him, judgments, but revere your own individuality, and respect the processes and findings of your own mind. You will find that the freshness of your own originality will give new flavor and zest to the feast which you set before your people. When your subject is chosen, and you have had the guidance of all that sound scholarship can give you, and you have had enriching communion with many minds, do not feel obliged to preach upon the theme on the following Sunday. It may be that a word will lay hold of you so imperatively as to make you feel that its proclamation is urgent, and that its hour has come. But I think it frequently happens that we go into the pulpit with truth that is undigested and with messages that are immature. Our minds have not done their work thoroughly, and when we present our work to the public there is a good deal of floating sediment in our thought, and a consequent cloudiness about our words. Now it is a good thing to put a subject away to mature and clarify. When my grandmother was making cider she used to let it stand for long seasons in the sunlight "to give it a soul!" And I think that many of our sermons, when the preliminary work has been done, should be laid aside for a while, before they are offered to our congregations. There are subconscious powers in the life that seem to continue the ripening process when our active judgments are engaged elsewhere. The subject "gets a soul," the sediment settles down, and in its lucidity it becomes like "the river of water of life, clear as crystal." Every preacher of experience will tell you that he has some sermons that have been "standing in the sun" for years, slowly maturing, and clarifying, but not yet ready to offer to the people. One of my congregation in Birmingham once asked Dr. Dale to preach upon a certain text in the epistle to the Romans, and he said he would seriously think about it. Long afterwards she reminded him of his promise, and she asked him when the sermon was coming. Dr. Dale answered her with great seriousness, "It is not ready yet!" At another time he was asked by another of his people to preach a course of sermons on some of the great evangelical chapters in the book of the prophecies of Isaiah. He made the same reply, "I am not ready yet." I came upon a similar instance in the life of Beecher. He was to preach at an ordination service in New England. He said to Dr. Lyman Abbott, "I think I shall preach a sermon on pulpit dynamics; you had better look out for it." "I did look for it," continued Dr. Abbott, "and it was nothing but a description of the incidental advantages of the ministry as a profession. When I next met Beecher I asked, ’Where is that sermon on pulpit dynamics?’ ‘It was not ripe,’ he replied." The weakness of smaller preachers is that their time is "always ready ": the mighty preachers have long seasons when they know their time "is not yet come." They have the strength to go slowly and even to "stand." They do not "rush into print," or into speech, with "unproportioned thought." They can keep the message back, sometimes for years, until some day there is a soul in it, and a movement about it, which tells them "the hour is come." Beware of the facility which, if given a day’s notice, is ready to preach on anything. Let us cultivate the strength of leisureliness, the long, strong processes of meditation, the self-control that refuses to be premature, the discipline that can patiently await maturity. "Let patience have her perfect work."

I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. I find the getting of that sentence is the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful labor in my study. To compel oneself to fashion that sentence, to dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous, to think oneself through to a form of words which defines the theme with scrupulous exactness,--this is surely one of the most vital and essential factors in the making of a sermon: and I do not think any sermon ought to be preached or even written, until that sentence has emerged, clear and lucid as a cloudless moon. Do not confuse obscurity with profundity, and do not imagine that lucidity is necessarily shallow. Let the preacher bind himself to the pursuit of clear conceptions, and let him aid his pursuit by demanding that every sermon he preaches shall express its theme and purpose in a sentence as lucid as his powers can command. All this will mean that the preparation of Sunday’s sermons cannot begin on Saturday morning and finish on Saturday night. The preparation is a long process: the best sermons are not made, they grow: they have their analogies, not in the manufactory, but in the garden and the field.

I need not, perhaps, say that in all the leisurely preparation of a sermon we must keep in constant and immediate relation to life. The sermon is not to be a disquisition on abstract truth, some clever statement of unapplied philosophy, some brilliant handling of remote metaphysics. The sermon must be a proclamation of truth as vitally related to living men and women. It must touch life where the touch is significant, both in its crises and its commonplaces. It must be truth that travels closely with men, up hill, down hill, or over the monotonous plain. And, therefore, the preacher’s message must first of all "touch" the preacher himself. It must be truth that "finds" him in his daily life, truth that lies squarely upon his own circumstances, that fits his necessities, that fills the gaps of his needs as the inflowing tide fills the bays and coves along the shore. If the truth he preaches has no urgent relation to himself, if it does no business down his road, if it offers no close and serious fellowship in his journeyings, the sermon had best be laid aside. But the truth of a sermon must also make recognition of lives more varied than our own, and in the preparation of our sermons these must be kept in mind. I know that God "hath fashioned their hearts alike," and that the fundamental needs of men are everywhere the same: and yet there are great differences in temperament, and vast varieties of circumstances, of which we have to take account if our message is to find entry into new lives, and to have both attraction and authority. Perhaps you will permit me to illustrate by mentioning my own plan. When I have got my theme clearly defined, and I begin to prepare its exposition, I keep in the circle of my mind at least a dozen men and women, very varied in their natural temperaments, and very dissimilar in their daily circumstances. These are not mere abstractions. Neither are they dolls or dummies. They are real men and women whom I know: professional people, trading people, learned and ignorant, rich and poor. When I am preparing my work, my mind is constantly glancing round this invisible circle, and I consider how I can so serve the bread of this particular truth as to provide welcome nutriment for all. What relation has this teaching to that barrister? How can the truth be related to that doctor? What have I here for that keenly nervous man with the artistic temperament? And there is that poor body upon whom the floods of sorrow have been rolling their billows for many years--what about her? And so on all round the circle. You may not like my method: it probably would not suit you, and you may devise a better: but at any rate it does this for me,--in all my preparation it keeps me in actual touch with life, with real men and women, moving in the common streets, exposed to life’s varying weathers, the "garish day," and the cold night, the gentle dew and the driving blast. It keeps me on the common earth: it saves me from losing myself in the clouds. Gentlemen, our messages must be related to life, to lives, and we must make everybody feel that our key fits the lock of his own private door. With our purpose thus clearly defined, and keeping sight of actual men and women, we shall arrange our thought and message accordingly. There will be one straight road of exposition, making directly for the enlightenment of the mind, leading on to the capture of the judgment, on to the rousing of the conscience, on to the conquest of the will. This last sentence used figures of speech that are significant of military tactics, and we do, indeed, require something of military strategy, in its vigilance and ingenuity, in seeking to win Mansoul for the Lord. How to so expound and arrange the truth, along what particular ways to direct it, so as to change foes into allies and enlarge the bounds of the Kingdom of Christ,--that is the problem that confronts the preacher every time he prepares his sermon. And it may be, it probably will be, that you will reject outline after outline, outline after outline, discarding them all as too indefinite and uncertain, until one is planned which seems to lead undeviatingly to the much-desired end. First get your bare straight road, with a clear issue: go no further until that road is made: later on you may open springs of refreshment, and you may have even flowers and bird-song along the way. But, first of all, I say, "Prepare ye the way of the people: cast up, cast up the highway: gather out the stones." When all the preliminary labor is finished, and you begin to write your message, let me advise you not to be the bondslave to much-worn phraseology, and to forms of expression which have ceased to be significant. I do not counsel you to be unduly aggressive, and still less, irreverent, in your treatment of old terminology, but you will find amazing power in the newness of carefully chosen expressions, offered as new vehicles of old truth. A famous doctor told me that sickly people are often helped in their appetites by a frequent change of the ware on which their food is served. The new ware gives a certain freshness to the accustomed food. And so it is in the ministry of the word. A "new way of putting a thing" awakens zest and interest where the customary expression might leave the hearer listless and indifferent. And in this matter of expression let me add one further word. Do not foolishly attach value to carelessness and disorder. Pay sacred heed to the ministry of style. When you have discovered a jewel give it the most appropriate setting. When you have discovered a truth give it the noblest expression you can find. A fine thought can bear, indeed it demands, a fine expression. A well-ordered, well-shaped sentence, carrying a body and weight of truth, will strangely influence even the uncultured hearer. We make a fatal mistake if we assume that uncultivated people love the uncouth. I have heard Henry Drummond address a meeting of "waifs and strays," a somber little company of ragged, neglected, Edinburgh youngsters, and he spake to them with a simplicity and a finished refinement which added the spell of beauty to the vigor of the truth. There was no luxuriance, no flowery rhetoric: nothing of that sort: but the style was the servant of the truth, and, whether he was giving warning or encouragement, making them laugh or making them wonder, the sentences were "gentlemanly,’’ a combination of beauty and strength. And as for the illustrations we may use in our exposition of a truth I have only one word to say. An illustration that requires explanation is worthless. A lamp should do its own work. I have seen illustrations that were like pretty drawing room lamps, calling attention to themselves. A real preacher’s illustrations are like street lamps, scarcely noticed, but throwing floods of light upon the road. Ornamental lamps will be of little or no use to you: honest street-lamps will serve your purpose at every turning.

Thus I conclude this consideration of "the preacher in his study." I need not remind you, after all I have said, that "a heavenly frame of mind is the best interpreter of Scripture." Unless our study is also our oratory we shall have no visions. We shall be "ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." In these realms even hard work is fruitless unless we have "the fellowship of the Holy Spirit." But if our study be our sanctuary, "the secret place of the Most High," then the promise of ancient days shall be fulfilled in us, "the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken ": and the work of the Lord shall have free course and be glorified.