PREACHING,
SIMPLICITY OF
In the United States the vocabulary of an average person is 600 words, whereas that of the average preacher is 5,000 words. So the average person in the pew does not know what the man in the pulpit is saying. That’s why I fight to keep it simple.
Billy Graham
Martyn Lloyd-Jones recounts how he once led a university mission, in 1941, at Oxford. He was invited to preach on the Sunday night, the first service of the mission in St Mary’s Church, from the pulpit where John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, once regularly preached. After the service students were invited to put any questions they had to the preacher. The room was packed and the first question came from a law student who was also a leading light in the famous Oxford University Union Debating Society – where future barristers and statesmen learnt about the art of public debating.
The law student said to Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Your sermon could equally well have been delivered to a congregation of farm laborers.” He sat down to a burst of laughter and applause.
Lloyd-Jones replied, “I do not see your difficulty. For while you may regard me as a heretic, I have always thought of undergraduates and indeed graduates of Oxford University as being just ordinary common human clay and miserable sinners like everyone else. I hold the view that your needs are precisely the same as those of the agricultural laborer or anyone else. I preached as I did quite deliberately.”
A preacher should have the skill to teach the unlearned simply, roundly and plainly; for teaching is more important than exhorting. When I preach I regard neither doctors nor magistrates, of whom I have about forty in the congregation. I have all my eyes on the servant maids and the children. And if the learned men are not well pleased with what they hear, well, the door is open.
Martin Luther
No one can be a good preacher to the people, who is not willing to preach in a manner that seems childish and vulgar to some.
Martin Luther
You will never attain simplicity in preaching without plenty of trouble. Pains and trouble, I say emphatically, pains and trouble. When Turner, the great painter, was asked by someone how it was he mixed his colors so well, and what it was that made them so different from those of other artists, he replied: “Mix them? Mix them? Mix them? Why, with brains, sir.” I am persuaded that, in preaching, little can be done except by trouble and pains.
J.C. Ryle
Be sparing in allegorizing or spiritualizing.
John Wesley
We use the language of the market.
George Whitefield