biblical preaching: a pastor’s look at homiletics hr503 ......biblical preaching: a pastor’s...

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Transcript - HR503 Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 15 of 20HR503

Characteristics of Biblical Preaching II: Authority, Sincerity, and Humility

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Father, we thank You again that You’ve called us to be ambassadors of Jesus Christ, and we commit to You our preaching ministry both today and in the future and ask that You will make us men that You can use. Make us vessels unto honor, channels of Your grace and the power of Your Spirit for the glory of Your name, amen.

Well, we’re talking yesterday and today about characteristics of biblical preaching. And yesterday we looked at the first three: accuracy, relevance, and courage. And now I want to look at three more with you, which are authority, sincerity, and humility. And I think I shall spend the largest amount of time on the first, authority, because I think it’s the most controversial. Now we already considered at the beginning of the series of lectures that strong, anti-authoritarian tides are running in the world today, that our society is a permissive society, and neither an authoritarian nor even a paternalistic society and that, therefore, in the culture in which we live, the very concept of dogmatic or authoritative preaching is out of step with the mood of the day. And yet on the other hand, we have to say that the gospel itself as truth from God is not discussable. Our calling is to declare it and not to throw it open for debate and still less to revision. The gospel cannot be debated, still less revised.

So, the true preacher always has about him something of God’s commission to Ezekiel “You shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear; for they are a rebellious house” (Ezekiel 2:7). So this is a situation that, on the one hand, we are entrusted with an authoritative message which cannot be changed and is not open to discussion; whereas, on the other, there is a culture that is hostile to the whole question of authority preaching. So the question before us is how can we commend authority preaching in an anti-authority age? And I have five suggestions to make to you.

John R. W. Stott, D. D.Experience: Founder, Langham

Partnership International



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(a) We must remember that the very people who resist authority often want it and want it sometimes badly. In P. T. Forsyth’s perceptive phrase: “Authority is something which men at once resent and crave.” Forsyth goes on in his book Positive Preaching in the Modern Mind, “It is authority that the world chiefly needs and the preaching of the hour lacks, an authoritative gospel in a humble personality.” Now this fact that men who resent authority usually crave it is certainly true, is it not, of children and of adolescents, the purpose of whose rebellion against authority is really to test the limits of their liberty. So, children and adolescents push the fences hard, not in order to demolish the fences and break loose, but in the hope that the fences will stand firm and give them some security which they feel they lack. And that’s why they’re pushing against them hoping that they will not break and give in but that they will stand firm. That’s elementary psychology. I think all of us would agree with that. Now this isn’t true of course of all adults who resist authority. But it is true of very many. Man’s mind is so made that he does crave authority.

Now I have found an interesting example of this recently from an Oxford professor of philosophy. In a printed letter from the head of a seminary in Oxford came these words: “A few weeks ago, I took part in a conference which was discussing the teaching of doctrine. We were talking about preaching. Some were expressing the view that the days of authoritarian sermons had now passed. We must present the gospel in terms acceptable to the questioning temper of our age and not simply throw texts or dogmas at people as if they were above debate.” If I may pause a moment, that is not a fair comparison or contrast; and I don’t suppose any of us agree with throwing texts or dogmas at people as if they were above debate. But I’ll let that pass. “But Professor Basil Mitchell, one of our famous Oxford philosophers, dissented from this view. When he went to church, he said, he ‘wanted to hear a word of real authority from the preacher and not just a lot of qualified propositions. The Word of the Lord is a Word from God,’ he said. ‘And it’s a Word about God. It’s not a word of human opinion; and the preacher is not doing his job if he’s failing to present to his people the great affirmations of the gospel.’” Now that’s a very interesting statement from a professor of philosophy, especially at Oxford which is very caught up in logical positivism and very unfriendly towards this kind of authority we are speaking about. So that’s my first point, something for us to remember that many people who resist authority, want it.



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(b) And my second point is we must distinguish sharply between divine authority and human authority. That is, between the divine authority that inheres in God’s Word which God has spoken; and I think one must add it to some degree in the office of the preacher and the pastor which God has appointed, and on the other hand the human authority of the man who preaches and who occupies the office, who is himself frail and fallible and under the authority of the Word he preaches. So, we must make this very sharp distinction between the authority of God’s Word and the human authority of the expositor. And I believe that the people will be much more ready to welcome authoritative preaching if it is clear beyond question that the preacher is not simply throwing his own weight about nor is he trying to exert a personal dominion nor has he an inferiority complex of which he’s compensating by his dogmatism, but that he is genuinely fired with zeal that God’s Word will be heard and God’s name honored and God’s kingdom spread and God’s will done, in other words, that he’s concerned about divine authority and not about his own authority. And this distinction must be as clear as crystal in the preacher so that if God’s glory is our supreme concern, then it will soon become the people’s also. And our whole attitude to Scripture should indicate this. For example, I think a good illustration of this can be taken from Ezekiel in chapters 2 and 3. You recall that the nation to whom Ezekiel was commanded to preach, God described as a “rebellious house” (2:5–7) and a “nation of rebels” (2:3) who’d rebelled against God, who were “impudent and stubborn” (2:4), who had a “hard forehead” and a “stubborn heart” (3:7). God paints a very vivid picture of the stubbornness and the rebellion of these people to whom Ezekiel was sent. And then God says in Ezekiel 2:8, “But you, son of man” (it’s an interesting call to be different in the Old Testament). “But you, son of man, . . . be not rebellious like that rebellious house.” That is, they reject My authority, but you must not reject My authority. You must make it plain to the people that you are under my authority, and that if you’re requiring them to come under My authority, you must make it clear that you are under My authority yourself. So, don’t be “rebellious like that rebellious house,” but “open your mouth, and eat the scroll.” In other words, receive My Word yourself, and obey it. So, this distinction you see between divine authority and human authority, and making it plain that our authority is submissive to God’s authority in His Word, is a vital distinction to make in these anti-authority days.

(c) My third word of advice is that we must also distinguish between dogmatism and dogma, because “dogma” means



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revealed truth from God while dogmatism can describe an arrogant assertion of personal opinion. I know these words can be used in different ways. But I’ll give you an example from a book published a couple of years in Britain by one of our leading liberal theologians, Canon David Edwards. It’s a brilliant book called Religion and Change surveying the whole of history and the whole of the world in a manner of astonishing competence. But he has a chapter called “The Decline and Fall of Christian Dogmatism.” He quotes dictionary definitions of dogmatism as “Sliding from postiveness in the assertion of opinion to a way of thinking based upon principles which have not been tested by reflection so that to dogmatize can mean to speak authoritatively or imperiously without any reference to argument or evidence.” And he goes on to describe the diminished authority of the Bible and of the church in Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches. And he continues, “But even now the impossibility [in his opinion, this is] of a new dogmatic system has probably not been fully appreciated. Many Christians seem to hope that the faith which will emerge from the current theological confusion will be a new kind of dogmatism. Instead,” he writes, “faith, if it is to arise now in this secular age, must arise on the ruins of certainty and must always have doubt as one of its chief ingredients.” And he concludes that “many Christians following Bultmann could say we too have had our moments of light as well as our long periods of darkness, and we too have chosen to live by that light in faith” and so on. I won’t read you all the quotations.

That’s typical liberalism; and that all we can do in these days is to share our doubts with people and not to share our faith. But I was very interested . . . (Maybe this is rather too Episcopal a quotation for you to be too interested in. But I was interested because he is a canon in the Church of England.) [I was very interested] to see that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself gave a very long review of his book when it was first published and himself drew attention to this confusion between dogma and dogmatism. “I feel,” he says, (this is the Archbishop of Canterbury) “that the discussion in this chapter suffers a little from a tendency to confuse dogmatism as an evil frame of mind and dogma as the content of a theological tradition. The decline of the one is necessarily the decline of the other. But is it possible to have a mind genuinely free in its methods of inquiry which yet concludes that theological orthodoxy may be more rational and credible than the various forms of liberal Christianity.” In other words, he’s appealing for a continuation of Christian dogma without this dogmatic temper you see, which is arrogant and imperious and isn’t open to evidence or argument.



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Now I also think that this is an important thing, a distinction between dogma and dogmatism.

(d) My fourth suggestion is that we must make yet another distinction between revelation and speculation. It’s our responsibility not only to make plain the principles by which we interpret Scripture as we saw yesterday, but to make plain the limits which Scripture itself possesses. The Scripture as God’s Word written does not claim to contain answers to every inquisitive question which we may pose. On the contrary, Scripture is essentially a book of salvation which witnesses to Jesus Christ as God’s uniquely appointed Savior through whom we may be justified, sanctified, and glorified. And this is its fundamental purpose. And Scripture is silent either wholly or partially on many perplexing problems that tease our minds today. And I believe that Jesus still says to us about some of our questions what He said to the apostles in Acts 1:7, “It is not for you to know.” In other words, shut up and mind your own business.

Now I hope all of you know Deuteronomy 29:29, which is a verse I think every Christian ought to know by heart and ought to ponder carefully which says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children, that we may do the words of this law.” For in that great verse, Deuteronomy 29:29, truth is divided into two areas: the secret things which belong to God and the revealed things which belong to us. So, if there are certain things that belong to God, we mustn’t try and wrest them from Him or steal them from Him if they belong to Him. We mustn’t attempt to trespass into the territory of the secret things but restrict our authoritative preaching to the things that are plainly revealed. So that biblical Christians are an interesting mixture, they’re like a peculiar mixture of authority, or I would almost say dogmatism in the right sense of authoritative preaching and agnosticism; authoritative or dogmatic about the things that have been revealed but agnostic about the things that have been kept secret. And in my view, many of our troubles arise from our failure to distinguish between these two territories as a result of which, our agnosticism creeps into the realm of the things that have been revealed or our dogmatism creeps into the realm of the things that remain secret.

We must keep our dogmatism, our authority to what is plainly revealed, and keep our agnosticism to the things that have been kept secret. And we must pray for discernment to distinguish between the two. And it is, I believe, as much a sign of maturity



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to say “I don’t know” as it is to say “I know,” provided you are saying them about the right things. Further, and I think I need to take this point a little bit further, there’s a difference between revelation and speculation, because these two spheres, the revealed things and the secret things, are not spheres that are entirely and absolutely distinct. If I was to draw them on the blackboard, I would draw them with an area of uncertainty where they overlap, a shaded portion. There’s one sphere of the revealed things and another called the secret things, and there is this shaded area where they overlap. It’s an area of uncertainty in which equally biblical Christians disagree with each other. That is, Christians who are equally submissive to Scripture, equally anxious to discover the will of God in the Word of God, still do not agree with one another. So, this must be the area of what the reformers called the “adiaphora,” the matters indifferent.

And this shaded portion contains matters both doctrinal and ethical, doctrinal questions for example about baptism or not about its necessity, not either about the fact that baptism is in water in the name of the Trinity. This much we can agree about. But as to whether there is a biblical doctrine of infant baptism or no, and the particular volume of water that you want to use while you’re baptizing and the cubic feet of a person’s body that has to be immersed, now these are questions in which equally biblical Christians reach different conclusions. Other matters about the nature of the ministry or whether the church should be independent or connectional or your doctrines about prophecy, your prophetic schemes, these sorts of doctrines belong in my view to the shaded portion. And then there are ethical questions in which Christians have disagreed like pacifism and war, if there is a concept of the just war in Scripture or what sometimes are called microethics, that is, the particular amount of lipstick which you may allow yourself or which movies you may attend, etcetera. Now here are the shaded portions. And this whole area becomes one of legitimate debate in which we may hold our own convictions which we are prepared to defend from Scripture while being equally prepared to give other people liberty to hold their views if they believe they can defend them from Scripture. So, we’re talking, you see, about the debate between equally biblical Christians. I’m not talking about debate with liberals who are not submissive to Scripture. I’m talking about debate between biblical Christians who don’t agree in this small shaded area. And I think it’s only 5 percent of what we hold in common, because we believe in the perspicuity of Scripture; and despite the proliferation of Protestant sects and denominations in churches that we hold



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maybe 95 percent among biblical Christians of truth in common.

Again, I hope you all know the famous quotation attributed to Rupertus Meldenius, whoever he was, but Richard Baxter gave it great credence because he quoted it often inthe seventeenth century: “In necessariis unitas, in dubiis [non-necesariis] libertas, in omnibus, caritas.” That is, in essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things charity. Now I only mention that because it is at the very least incautious to preach with the same authority about these matters in the shaded portion as it is to preach with authority in these matters in which the Scripture is plain, perspicuous, and clear. So that’s my fourth point, distinguish between revelation and speculation. And I include within that this shaded portion.

(e) My fifth suggestion to you is that we need to grasp that all true Christian preaching is dialogical in character. It involves a dialogue between the preacher and the congregation. Now there are many people who object to preaching as a means of communication today, because they say that the sermon is a monologue. Indeed, when they’re rude, they say it’s a monotonous ministerial monologue and exceeding dreary at that. Now this is not so. True preaching is not monological, it’s dialogical. Now in denying that true preaching is a monologue, I don’t mean that the congregation keep interrupting the preacher either in asking him questions or in making their comments or even in heckling him, nor am I referring to the fact that we ought to allow the congregation an opportunity to talk back afterwards on some occasions. I mean, rather, that in the preaching itself, while the preacher alone is speaking, there should be an active interplay between the mind of the preacher and the minds of the listeners. Because he is speaking to their condition and he is answering their unspoken questions. Indeed, it seems to me that it should always be one of our basic aims to make it impossible for people to fall asleep, and not only impossible for them to fall asleep but impossible to remain awake but dispassionate and uninvolved spectators. Somehow we’ve got to involve them in the debate, in the dialogue. We’ve got somehow so to speak as to engage their minds, to draw them into the dialogue, and to compel them to respond. And that is, if you like, part of the excitement, part of the adventure of preaching is the how to speak in which to prevent them doing what they want to do, which is to slumber and sleep and engage their minds. Because if they don’t sleep, they want to sit there without being forced to think. I mean it was Emerson who said that “man is as lazy as he dares to be,” and that includes



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his mental laziness.

People don’t want to be made to think. But we’ve got to stir their mind and stir their conscience. Let me give you an example of this from quite an interesting quarter, from a journalist who writes for The Guardian in Britain and who wrote an article a couple of years ago in The Guardian which was entitled “The Difficult Art of Being an Audience.” No, that was the subject. As a matter of fact, its title was “None Shall Sleep.” But he confessed to the problem. He, I imagine, is a non-Christian and secular writer. But he confessed to the problem he had in keeping awake during concerts. His earliest recollection of falling asleep in public, he said, was at the Methodist Central Hall in Slough in Buckinghamshire in England when he was about seven years old. He nodded off during the sermon, and he says, “I woke up mortified in the middle of the next hymn.” Later, however, he said, he “learned to beat the sermon problem by having mental debates with the preacher,” a technique he says “that failed in a Chopin recital since waltzes are not susceptible to argument.” Now I’m quite sure that when he said that he had mental debates with the preacher he thought that if the preacher knew what he was doing, he would be horrified. But on the contrary, the preacher should be simply delighted if he is provoking mental debates, maybe not the argument indeed of a person who is disagreeing with Scripture but of somebody who is being provoked to think and think furiously.

And the trouble with so much of our preaching is it’s too tedious to make people think at all. Hence, Käsemann in his book, which is translated into English with the title Jesus Means Freedom, who is a liberal of course himself and says he’s tired of theological controversy said, “People stay away from church not simply because there are too many higher critical theologians, but tediousness of Christian preaching,” he says, “is undoubtedly a greater danger to the church than all historical criticism put together.” Well, we might not agree with that assessment, but tediousness is certainly very dangerous to the Christian church.

Well, let me go on along this dialogical path and give you a twofold biblical warrant for dialogical preaching, first from the Old Testament, well both Testaments, and then from the New. But my first argument is that this is part of the purpose of biblical parables. The parables of Scripture not only illustrate the truth by a vivid story, they also engage the listener’s mind and oblige him to react. The best example in the Old Testament is the prophet Nathan’s parable of the rich man and the poor man with his little



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ewe lamb that he told to David after his sin with Bathsheba. And he told it, [Scripture] says, “to arouse David’s moral indignation about the rich man who’d stolen the poor man’s little ewe lamb,” you remember, when he had plenty of flocks of his own. And Nathan told this in the third person so skillfully as to arouse David’s moral anger against this rich man and so, quite unwittingly, to arouse his moral indignation against himself. So that as soon as Nathan turned on him and said, “King, you are the man,” he was saying to him in a sense, you have condemned yourself. I have so provoked your reaction that you have condemned yourself. And David was speechless. He had nothing to say.

Well similarly, Jesus told the parable of the wicked husbandman in such a way as to lead inexorably to the concluding question when He said, “What will the owner of the vineyard do to the tenants” who have, you know, killed his servants and killed his son? What will the owner of the vineyard do? You tell me, you listeners. What will he do? And they replied, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death.” Now we’re not told how Jesus reacted to that. But, of course, again what they were doing was pronouncing judgment without realizing it upon themselves. Now here I think is a method of teaching by the parable that is dialogical. It is forcing people not only to think but to pronounce moral judgments upon a situation that is being described.

My second argument is that this was a regular feature of the preaching of the apostles. One of the words that Luke uses to describe their preaching is the verb dialogesthai, from which of course we get our word dialogue. And it means to reason or to argue, and Paul was especially dialogical in his teaching or preaching of the gospel in the synagogues of the Jews. Now whether the Jews joined in vocally in the dialogue we’re not told. I think some of those occasions in the synagogue may have involved sort of seminars in which the Jews did ask questions and Paul answered them, and they were arguing with each other out of the Scriptures. But whether or not there was a vocal dialogue, we can be quite certain that the argument went on even when they were silent and Paul was the only person speaking. Because Paul knew the Jewish objections to the gospel. He knew them very well because he’d shared them, the obstacles that stood in the path to faith. Why, these were obstacles once in his own path. He knew them thoroughly, as thoroughly as any Jew in the synagogue. So he could raise these objections in his preaching to the Jews, and he could answer them; and thus he anticipated their comeback and answered that too.



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So dialogical preaching is rather like a game of chess. The really skillful chess player is several moves ahead of his opponent. And he is saying to himself: if he moves his king or his queen or his bishop in this way, then I will do that. And if I do that, he may do that. And if he does that, I’ll do the other. And if I do the other, he’ll probably do this and so on. And he’s anticipating the moves and considering what to do next. Or if you prefer methods like tactical warfare: if an army commander decides he’s going to advance or break through the enemy lines, he asks himself, what will the enemy do then? How will he counterattack? What will his response be? And if he counterattacks along the flanks, then I must be prepared for the counterattack and so on.

Now you know in England we work as a team, and sometimes our younger ministers who are learning (as all of us are learning) to preach, ask for criticism. And I find myself often talking to them—indeed, we may have done so in laboratory sessions along these lines—about the need, using military metaphors, to cover our flanks. That is, whenever you are speaking on some subject, you need so to think yourself into the mind of the listeners that you will anticipate their objection to what you’re saying. That is, I’m unfolding this particular Scripture. Yes, but the people won’t be able to receive it because they’ll have a hang up about this, or they’ll have a prejudice about that or a misconception about the other. And we need to anticipate what their response will be, what their difficulties would be, in order to answer them. And then in answering them, we may set up further objections that we need to be aware about. For example, I know some of you are in the Sermon on the Mount lectures, and I’ve tried . . . for example, only at 1:00 today I was taking the great promises, “Ask, and you shall have; seek, and you shall find;, knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Now there are some preachers who would feel able to expound these great prayer promises without mentioning the problem of unanswered prayer. They would say, you know if you ask, God will give you what you ask. You seek, you’ll find. You knock, it’ll be opened. Jesus says so. Everyone who asks receives. Everyone who knocks, it’ll be opened. Everyone who seeks, finds and so on.

And there are some preachers who would expound all this—the great promises of answered prayer—without being sensitive enough to realize that there are many people in the congregation who are deeply perplexed about the problem of unanswered prayer and who would be positively angered by such a sermon saying that either the preacher doesn’t live in my world or he’s so insensitive he doesn’t realize the problems. It simply isn’t true,



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they would say. I know it isn’t true in my experience. I’ve asked, and I didn’t get, you see. Now we must be sensitive in that sort of way. Or again, when we were in Matthew 6 on “Don’t be anxious about your food and clothing, your heavenly Father knows what you need.” He feeds the birds. He’ll feed you. He clothes the lilies of the field, He’ll clothe you. And we can’t just in a simplistic way, it seems to me, expound this and not be aware of the problems of divine providence: that there are people who are ill-clad and underfed, and how does that square with the promise of Jesus?

Let me give you an example from a secular source. If you’ve read the autobiography of Malcolm X, and if you haven’t, it’s one of the best books I know to be able to feel the burning indignation of what I suppose one would have now to call black racists against white oppression. But in it, you recall that he was on a ten-year prison sentence of burglary and other things. And he began, while he was in prison, to read voraciously books that he got from the prison library. And he began to take part in weekly prison debates. He said, “My reading had my mind like steam under pressure and some way I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face. So I decided I could do this by putting my name down to debate. Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I would track down and study everything I could find on it. I would put myself in my opponent’s place, and I would decide how I would try to win if I had the other side. And then I’d figure a way to knock down those points.” Well that is an obvious technique in debating, but it is an equally important thing in preaching. Now Billy Graham does it, you know, with great effect. You listen to him preach, you know how often he will say, “But Billy, you will say to me,” and then he voices their objection; and then he answers it. It’s a simple device, and we may not want to do it in that precise way, but it’s the same idea of dialogical preaching.

Now I must hurry on. There’s one last point on dialogical preaching that I don’t want to leave out and that is this: that although we must always seek to anticipate people’s questions, we mustn’t limit ourselves to the questions they are already asking. That is, we evangelicals are sometimes accused of irrelevance because we’re answering questions people are not asking. And that’s true. But nevertheless, it is a part of the preacher’s business to provoke people to ask the right questions. And there are many questions that people are not asking which they ought to be asking. For example, there are unbelievers who maybe they are nominal Christians in the congregation or unconverted who appear to be untroubled about sin, judgment, righteousness, salvation, these



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moral categories. They seem to be untroubled. All right, it’s our job by prayer and preaching to provoke them to ask the right questions. That is the question, what must I do to be saved? See the wonderful thing about the apostolic preaching is that it did provoke these questions.

Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, and they were so pricked in the heart that they said, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Would the people ask that of us? Well, take believers. Some believers in the congregation are so snug and smug in their self-contained pietism that they never allow their minds or consciences to be troubled by the injustices of modern society, by the call of the unevangelized millions, by the dangers of their own affluence, or by the challenge of Jesus to self-denial and self-sacrifice. They never ask questions about these things, because they’re living in their own insulated little ghetto. Now it’s our job as a preacher to penetrate their walls of defense, to arouse their interest, and to deepen it into a concern; to stimulate their mind; to disturb their conscience; and to whet their mental, moral, and spiritual appetite to get answers to questions which they had never asked before. Now all that is under authority, and it is an attempt to give you five ways in which authoritative preaching can, I think, be made more acceptable in an anti-authority age. Now I have two more subjects, and I think I may not finish today and I’ll have to go on next week.

Anyway, the fifth characteristic of biblical preaching is sincerity. Now the great cry of contemporary youth is for reality and for authenticity. It’s partly that the youth culture, fed on an ill-digested existentialism, is itself looking for reality and for authenticity. And, therefore, it regards any and every experiment or experience that it can have as legitimate—whether drugs or free sex or violence—if it is a part of this quest for authenticity and reality. Now when we are aware of this widespread quest among particularly the younger generation today, it’s obvious that those who are looking for authenticity for themselves are quick to detect its presence or absence in others, and not least in the preacher. Here’s a quotation from a newly published book called A Today Sort of Evangelism by John Poulton in Britain. He says,

The most effective preaching comes from those who embody the things they are saying. They are their message. Christians need to look like what they are talking about. It’s people who communicate primarily, not words or


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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ideas. Television has drilled us all to watch for hesitancies, to watch for the over-quick response. Television has played havoc with the politicians’ trade. It has revealed the unrealities, the case pleading, the artificial furies. Authenticity gets across from deep down inside people. And the momentary insincerity can cause doubt on all that has made for communication up to that point. What communicates [he concludes] now is basically personal authenticity.

Now I think a good example of that is Billy Graham again, for whom I have a great affection and regard as a man and an evangelist. And he first came to Britain, I expect you’ll know, in 1954 for the Greater London Crusade in the Harringay Arena. And he preached there every night for three months. He used, in those days, to have these long crusades and preached to some 12,000 people for three months. And I sat there night after night asking myself, what is it that brings these crowds? It was a phenomenon nobody had seen really in their lifetime in London: crowds of that magnitude for such a long period of time. And the answer that I gave to myself, although it may be only a partial answer, is that I believe Billy Graham was the first transparently sincere Christian minister that most of those people had ever seen or heard.

Now I thank God for this beautiful transparency. Billy Graham, whatever faults any of us may think he may have, is a man without guile. Indeed that may be one of his weaknesses, because it is one of his greatest strengths. But he is a man without guile; and I’m sure everybody sees it. Even his most vicious critics in Britain have to concede that he was sincere. How wonderful that our opponents could say that of us. Well there are two marks of this sincerity. But as my time is very nearly up, I think it’s better for me if you don’t mind to leave it, because I don’t really want to hurry over it. And I’ll finish next week. All right, thank you.

biblical preaching: a pastor’s look at homiletics hr503 ......biblical preaching: a pastor’s...

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