WHEN Sir Marcus Loane was installed as Archbishop of Sydney in 1966 during a service broadcast nationally on ABC TV, he preached a powerful sermon on 1 Corinthians 9.16b: ‘necessity is laid upon me, and woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.’ Even those of us who were beyond his jurisdiction could see that it was a sermon in which he preached what he practised and which carried the undertone: ‘go and do thou likewise’. And we were happy to fall in behind a man of such biblical firmness and faithful conviction.
Similarly, as we all know, Bishop J.C. Ryle had the words of the Greeks who sought Apostle Andrew’s aid: ‘Sir, we would see Jesus’ chiselled into the rafter just above his head. I’ve preached from pulpits with those words engraved on a bronze strip at the top of the pulpit lectern and been given a powerful reality check just in the nick of time.
We pastors/preachers need to have a certain singlemindedness whenever we stand to preach. Preaching is always a unique occasion. If we adopt the admirable practice of preaching serially through a particular book of the Bible, each sermon though part of a series must also stand alone. Serial preachers will set the scene for each sermon by reminding their hearers briefly of what has gone before and give them a taste of what is to come both today and further down the track before unleashing the message of the day followed by brief revision and memorable conclusion; and by the way, prayer for illumination and prayer of application should bookend the sermon.
As the old gentleman of colour said to the person who asked why his preaching was so effective: ‘First I tells ‘em what I’m gonna tell ‘em; then I tells ‘em; then I tells ‘em what I told ‘em.’
An NIV or ESV portion should provide sufficient grist for the mill each day as we take Stuart Ollyott’s advice and ‘preach for 30 or so minutes, but make it seem like 20’, and if we reach the end of our ‘30 or so minutes’ with just three of our five points made, let’s not waste time complaining about how the time has flown, but let’s just come to a memorable conclusion and tuck the rest away in our minds to extend our series by one more week. Then if in preparation or delivery we discover that the portion before us contains one of God’s ‘exceeding great and precious promises’, perhaps we’ll rediscover the joy of preaching on a single text from time to time.
But whatever our preaching method might be, our purpose must always be this: to preach the Gospel through preaching Christ in all His dying love and risen power. – Bob Thomas