1.A 02. The Pauline Method
The Pauline Method. But preaching must come back to what it was in the apostolic times. It must come back to the conditions under which those men were so eminent for their success in winning souls. If you want to be a preacher to your fellows, you must become a “Fisher of men,” your business is to catch them. The preacher’s task is first to arouse; secondly, on that aroused moral condition to build, and continue building until he has completed the whole. The thing that a preacher aims at all the while is reconstructed manhood a nobler idea in his congregation of how people ought to live, and what they ought to be. To be sure, you will find in the New Testament that there is a great deal more in the preaching of the apostles than this. There was a great deal that was incidental; a great deal that belonged to the extrication of Christians from the Jewish thraldom; a great deal that belonged to the peculiarities of the time, and which can be transferred to our time by adapting, not adopting. If you will look through the New Testament with your eye on that point, you will find that Paul the greatest of all preachers, I take it aimed all the way through, and certainly Peter, in his famous sermon on the day of Pentecost, aimed, at reconstructed manhood.
Consider attentively Paul’s idea of the work of Christian ministers, as given in his letter to the Ephesian assembly of Christians (Eph 4:11-16, inclusive). The end, Manhood. The means, Truth. The spirit, Love. The ideal, Christ. The inspiration, the living Spirit of God! This being the aim of true preaching, there is but one question more to be added that is, by what instrument, by what influence, are you to reach it? The ideal of a true Christian preacher I do not mean that no man is a Christian preacher who does not live up to this ideal, for we are all imperfect, but the ideal toward which every man should strive is this, to take the great truths of the Lord Jesus Christ’s teachings, and the love of God to the human race, and make them a part of his own personal experience; so that, when he speaks to men, it shall not be he alone that speaks, but God in him. To quote texts to men is good for some purposes; but that is not preaching. If it were, then you would better read the Bible altogether, without note or comment, to men. The reason why reading the truths that are just as plainly stated there has some times so much less effect than stating them in your own way, is, that the truth will gain a force when it becomes a part of you that it would not have when merely read as a text.
Look, for instance, at what Paul did when he preached. He was consumed with the love of Christ. He was made restless with the intensity of his feeling; and wherever he went he did not preach Christ as John would. He did not preach Christ as Peter would. He preached Christ as Christ had been revealed to him and in him. It was the Pauline conception of the Lord Jesus Christ that Paul preached.
You may say that Christ is one and the same, and whoever preaches him, it must be substantially the same thing. You might just as well say that the sun is one and the same, and that, therefore, what ever flower shows the sun’s work must look the same. But, when you look at the flowers, you will see some red, some blue, some yellow, some humble, some high, some branching. Endless is the work the sun creates; but every one of the things which it creates, reflects its power and teaches something about it. It takes the experience of a thousand men brought into one ideal, to make up the conception of the Lord Jesus Christ. You may read what Paul wrote about him, you may read what was written by John or Peter or James or Matthew, and the impression produced by either of these is fragmentary; it is presenting some things out of the infinite, and it cannot produce a conception of the infinite in the minds of men. When under the gospel men are made preachers, God works in them a saving knowledge of himself, gives them a sense of the sympathy between God and man, of the spiritual love which appeals from the infinite to the mortal; and then says to them, “ Take this revelation of Jesus Christ in you, and go out and preach it.” Tell what God has done for your soul, not in a technical way, but in a large way; take the truth revealed in you, and according to the structure of your understanding, your emotive affections, the sentiments of your own soul, filled with the power of the Holy Ghost, go and preach to men for the sake of making them know the love of Christ Jesus, and you will have a power in you to make that preaching effective. There is a place for knowledge, purely as such; but that which you want to effect is, from the consciousness of your own nature to describe the love of God, not in the abstract conception, but experimentally, just as it has been felt by you, so as to produce a longing for the love of God in your hearers. It will be imperfect. There are no perfect preachers in the world. The only perfect men in this world are the doctors of divinity, who teach systematic theology. They know every thing, all of it, and I envy them. But men that preach take only so much of the truth as they can hold; and, generally speaking, preachers don’t hold a great deal. They are all partialists.
One of the most beautiful things I read in the life of Paul is in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians, in which, when he has expressed his raptures in giving the everlasting exposition of love, he says, “ After all, we are only fragmentary creatures; we only see bits and spots: now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face; now I know in part- I know only portions of things but then shall I know as I am known.” He felt how empty he was; and yet what a creature was that Paul! What a magnificent moving spirit the man was! But when he spoke about himself in that epistle, written late in his life, he felt that he was not a full man; that he could not represent or reflect the whole of the Lord Jesus Christ. No man can; no hundred men can. It is your office as preachers to take so much of the truth of Christ Jesus as has become digested and assimilated into your own spiritual life, and with that, strike! with that, flash! with that, burn men!