1.I 12. Suggestive Preaching

Suggestive Preaching. A respectable source of failure is conscientious thoroughness. It is true that it is the office of the preacher to furnish thought for his hearers, but it is no less his duty to excite thought. Thus we give thought to breed thought. If, then, a preacher elaborates his theme until it is utterly exhausted, leaving nothing to the imagination and intellect of his hearers, he fails to produce that lively activity in’s their minds which is one of the best effects of right v preaching they are merely recipients. But under a true preaching the pulpit and the audience should be carrying on the subject together, one in outline, and the other, with subtle and rapid activity, filling it up by imagination, suggestion, and emotion. Don’t make your sermons too good. That sermon, then, has been overwrought and overdone which leaves nothing for the mind of the hearer to do. A sermon in outline is often far more effective than a sermon fully thought out and delivered as a completed thing.

Painters often catch the likeness of their subject when they have sketched in the picture only, and paint it out when they are finishing it; and many and many a sermon, if it had been but sketched upon the minds of men, would have conveyed a much Letter idea of tlic truth than is produced by its elaborate painting and filling up. This is the secret of what is called “ suggestive preaching,” and it is also the secret of those sermons which are called “good, but heavy.” There are no more thorough sermons in the English language, and none more hard to read, than those of Barrow, who was called an unfair preacher, because he left nothing for those to say that came after him. You must be careful not to surfeit people; leave room for their imagination and spirit to work. Don’t treat them as sacks to be filled from a funnel. Aim to make them spiritually active self-helpful.