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T H E K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
August, 1940
When To Be Brief By HERBERT LOCKYER Chicago, Illinois Fifth in a Series on the A ft and Cra'ft of Preaching [All rights
POWERFUL
PREACHING Brother, have you the joy oi knowing that God’s Spirit cooper ates with you—and you with Him —every time you stand up to de clare the eternal Word ? Reckon on the presence of the Third Person of the Trinity! May the Negro minister’s pray er, in substance and earnestness at least, be upon the lips of every preacher: “ O Lawd, give Dy servant dis mawnin’ de eyes ob de eagle and de wisdom ob de owl; connek his soul wid de gospel telefoam ob de central skies; luminate his brow wid love for de people; turpentine his imagination; loose his tongue wid de sledge hammer ■ ob Dy power; ’lectricity his brain wid de lightnin’ ob Dy Word; fill him plumb full ob de dynamite ob Dy glory; ’noint him all ober wid de ker osene ob Dy salvation — and SET HIM ON FIRE.” The preacher who is thus pre pared by the Holy Spirit, the di vine Teacher, will not waste words in the pulpit, but his every utter ance will be attended with heaven ly power. H OW LONG should a sermon be? “The answer has varied with the centuries,” says T. Harwood Pattison. He continues; . “The Latin Fathers usually occu pied half an hour, although often •they limited themselves to ten min utes. The Greek Fathers, as we might expect from a comparison of the languages in which the ser mons were preached, took longer. The fashions for long sermons came in after the Reformation Charles II was willing to listen to Baxter for two hours. The delivery of one of his massive sermons occupied
reserved ] finished sometimes late at night. While brevity is a decided virtue, most writ ers agree that the length of a sermon must depend upon the subject treated. “We should preach according to our subject and not according to the clock,” declares James Black. Necessary Condensation We should try to leave our people with an appetite for more, not “stodged,” as the schoolboy puts it, but decently hun gry. Remember, in any case, that a sermon seems longer to the man in the pew thaji to the man in the pulpit. Take your sermon and boil it down, preacher. “Better leave them longing than loath ing,” said John Wesley to his preach ers—longing for more, rather than loathing from overfullness of diet. Prolixity is an intolerable quality: .“ Give us an address in Liebig’s-Extract- of-Meat style,” was an invitation once extended to a preacher, and he knew that it was another way of saying, “Give us concentrated truth, not a long- winded sermon, please.” Of a verbose preacher, it was said: “He has worn out the subject—yes— and his audience, too.” Eloquence may be silver, but reti cence is sometimes golden. The prov erb of Cecil carries a good deal of truth with it: “It requires as much wisdom to know what is not to be put into a sermon, as what is.” Archbishop Whately was wont to say: “ You know the good things we have kept back.”
Charnock for not less than three hours and a half.” The present disposition is to demand short sermons. At a bookseller’s' shop in London, John Henry Newman saw a col lection of sermons labeled “Warranted unorthodox, never preacjied before, and —20 minutes.” “Twenty minutes, with a leaning to mercy,” was the pithy way in which an English judge answered the question, “How long should a sermon be?” Henry Drummond, a fascinating speaker if ever there was one, is re ported to have said that he could under take to hold an audience for twenty minutes, but not for twenty-one. This view may seem extreme, but it ex presses a fine truth. So far as most of us ordinary mortals are concerned, we never err by conciseness and brevity. Abbe Mullois points out: “The har angues of Napoleon lasted only a few minutes, yet they electrified whole armies.” So short a time as ten minutes would not suffice for the preacher whose busi ness is not to “harangue,” nor simply to exhort or declaim, but rather to ex plain, to instruct, and to apply. A true sermon cannot be limited, as a brief, impassioned harangue can be. Albert E. Shaw expressed this ob servation: “ Sermons in our churches get shorter and shorter. A London
church is nowadays ad vertising short morning services, with sermons lasting only five min utes!” This practice is a little different from the days of Wesley, when a sermon customarily started at any time in the morning and
RESPONSIBILITY Thirty minutes— more or less— is all the time a preacher has for sermon delivery. Just thirty minutes— in which to heal a broken heart, to guide an awakened conscience, to cheer a saint, to bid defiance to the might of hell! The preacher must summon power for one intense half-hour conflict which may amount to agony. His is a tremendous responsibility.
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