Good preaching is gripping preaching

There is a persuasiveness and a compellingness about good preaching. We are told that the common people heard Jesus gladly. The teaching was often profound and even his own disciples who heard some of those messages many times did not understand the parables. Messages were constantly provocative and controversial but there was something in them that gripped the hearers. Masses of men walked right around a lake to hear another sermon from him when he had sailed across to the other side. They would follow him in their thousands to listen to him speak and hang on to every word.

I remember in September 1958 I had heard in camps, particularly from the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist students who were the officers, respectful and affectionate references to ‘the Doctor’. Who was this man they called ‘the Doctor’? Then a month before I began university, while still a teenager, I saw in the Western Mail that ‘the Doctor’ was coming to preach at the ordination service of Dr. Eifion Evans at the Memorial Hall in Cardiff. I took a train from Barry and walked along Cowbridge Road from Cardiff General Station and sat in that packed Forward Movement Hall looking around at the congregation. It was a black suited congregation; a hatted congregation; a serious-minded congregation, and such a singing congregation when they sang ‘A debtor to mercy alone.’

There he was in the flesh and I was to tell him twenty years later that this was the first time I had heard him. ‘I don’t remember what you preached on’, I said. He did not appear to like that, but I didn’t remember. I just knew that this was a very important occasion and I need to understand why. I took just that one message to adjust to that level of piety, and reasoning, and encounter, and seriousness, and truth that I had been deprived of for so long. He told me, ‘You know what I preached on’, and he told me the passage. But I couldn’t remember. He added, ‘You know how I said that Eifion Evans was going to be a pharmacist, and suddenly God touched him and changed the whole direction of his life. He became an ambassador for God.’ ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. He told me of someone who had had such a blessing in that meeting. I too had had a blessing and I was sorry I couldn’t remember the words of Lloyd-Jones, just the Word, great and golden and full of God and utterly magnificent. How fascinating it all was. The Gospel came not in word only but in power and in the Holy Spirit and with much assurance.

Shouldn’t one expect some such phenomenon, as God lives, and we are his appointed servants? Shouldn’t it be like that? Shouldn’t the absence of those confirming signs of the work of God deeply grieve us today? I am referring to their absence from the pulpit in which I have stood and preached for forty years, of the gospel coming in a gripping way so that men know that it is with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven?

Consider the preaching of the Lord Jesus and the great impact he made. In John 7 we have the incident of the Pharisees sending their bully boys to arrest Christ. Off they go, these yokels, and Jesus is in the temple and he is saying things like, If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink; out of his belly will flow rivers of living water, and he said that of the Spirit that was to be given to those who believed in him. Those two men tried to get through to him but the crowds were packed like sardines, and as far as his voice carried they stood, sitting on windowsills, standing around the doors and on the walls. No one was prepared to give way lest they should fail to hear one word of life. So those country boys grated to a halt in the crowd and they had to stand and listen with everyone else. They too came under the power of the word; those who had come to arrest remained to pray.

Finally when Jesus ended his sermon, and the crowd slowly and quietly moved away, those young men knew that they had to return to give account to their employers the Pharisees. They knocked the door and went in; the Pharisees asked where Jesus was. ‘We sent you to get him. Why are you here empty handed?’ The spokesman said, ‘Never man spake like this man. We never heard anyone speak like that in our lives before.’ The words of Jesus had turned wolves into puppy dogs. No miracles were done that day; just the word of the Lord spoken with divine energy – and thus it has been throughout history. When they heard that reply the Pharisees were so afraid. If men who had been in their pockets and in their pay could be captivated by Jesus then who could be safe?

I learn one lesson from this, that the great antidote to doubt is to sit under the best ministry you can. Another lesson is to do what Al Martin exhorts: never stop developing a real, expanding, varied and original acquaintance with God and his ways. My heroes have been men who are always thinking about new portions of Scripture and new books to read and study, who share with congregations the freshness and the delight of the message of the gospel, and want in every way to declare that word of God. Charles Wesley sang,