PREACHING:
PREPARATION FOR; PREACHING: NEED FOR SKILL

Among the countless gifts of God, one of the most precious to us is our beautiful, expressive English tongue. That such a gift should be neglected by busy men and women in their wild race to make a living is at least understandable, if unfortunate; but that it should be neglected as well by the ministers of the sanctuary is not only impossible to understand but completely inexcusable.

For the very reason that God has committed His saving truth to the receptacle of human language, the man who preaches that truth should be more than ordinarily skillful in the use of language. It is necessary that every artist master his medium, every musician his instrument. For a man calling himself a concert pianist to appear before an audience with but a beginner’s acquaintance with the keyboard would be no more absurd than for a minister of the gospel to appear before his congregation without a thorough knowledge of the language in which he expects to preach.

There have been extraordinary situations where God has blessed a halting and broken message to the edification of the hearers, but these must be recognized as instances of providential overrulings and not as the operation of the highest will of God. Under an abnormal set of circumstances God moved Balaam’s ass to speak with enough eloquence to convict a renegade prophet and rate being quoted in the Bible. But surely no one would cite this as proof that religious teachers should not concern themselves about their skill in the use of language.

Numbers 22:28; Colossians 3:23; 1 Timothy 4:13–16; 2 Timothy 2:14–16

The Size of the Soul, 32, 33.