03.05. The Preacher in his Pulpit

LECTURE V THE PREACHER IN HIS PULPIT "The service of the sanctuary"

I am to speak to-day on the preacher’s life and ministry in the pulpit. There is no sphere of labor more endowed with holy privilege and sacred promise, and there is no sphere where a man’s impoverishment can be so painfully obtrusive. The pulpit may be the center of overwhelming power, and it may be the scene of tragic disaster. What is the significance of our calling when we stand in the pulpit? It is our God-appointed office to lead men and women who are weary or wayward, exultant or depressed, eager or indifferent, into "the secret place of the Most High." We are to help the sinful to the fountain of cleansing, the bondslaves to the wonderful songs of deliverance. We are to help the halt and the lame to recover their lost nimbleness. We are to help the broken-winged into the healing light of "the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." We are to help the sad into the sunshine of grace. We are to help the buoyant to clothe themselves with "the garment of praise." We are to help to redeem the strong from the atheism of pride, and the weak from the atheism of despair. We are to help little children to see the glorious attractiveness of God, and we are to help the aged to realize the encompassing care of the Father and the assurance of the eternal home. This is something of what our calling means when we enter the pulpit of the sanctuary. And our possible glory is this, we may do it. And our possible shame is this, we may hinder it. When "the sick and the diseased" are gathered together we may be ministers or barriers to their healing. We may be added encumbrances or spiritual helps. We may be stumbling-blocks over which ’ our people have to climb in their desire to commune with God. Now we may not be able to command intellectual power. Ours may not be the gifts of exegetical insight, and luminous interpretation, and forceful and unique expression. We may never astound men by a display of cleverness, or by massive argumentative structures compel their admiration. But there is another and a better way at our command. With the powers and means that are ours we can build a plain, simple, honest altar, and we can invoke and secure the sacred fire. If we can never be "great" in the pulpit, when judged by worldly values, we can be prayerfully ambitious to be pure, and sincere, and void of offence. If the medium is not "big" we can make sure that it is clean, and that there is an open and uninterrupted channel for the waters of grace. To this end I think it is needful, before we go into the pulpit, to define to ourselves, in simple, decisive terms, what we conceive to be the purpose of the service. Let us clearly formulate the end at which we aim. Let us put it into words. Don’t let it hide in the cloudy realm of vague assumptions. Let us arrest ourselves in the very midst of our assumptions, and compel ourselves to name and register our ends. Let us take a pen in hand, and in order that we may still further banish the peril of vacuity let us commit to paper our purpose and ambition for the day. Let us give it the objectivity of a mariner’s chart: let us survey our course, and steadily contemplate our haven. If, when we turn to the pulpit stair, some angel were to challenge us for the state, merit of our mission, we ought to be able to make immediate answer, without hesitancy or stammering, that this or that is the urgent errand on which we seek to serve our Lord to-day. But the weakness of the pulpit is too often this:--we are prone to drift through a service when we ought to steer. Too often "we are out on the ocean sailing," but we have no destination: we are "out for anywhere," and for nowhere in particular. The consequence is, the service has the fashion of a vagrancy when it ought to be possessed by the spirit of a crusade. On the other hand a lofty, single, imperial end knits together the detached elements in the service, it makes everything co-operative, and all are related and vitalized by the pervasive influence of the common purpose. "Who keeps one end in’ view makes all things serve." If the end we seek is "the glory of God" everything in the service will pay tribute to the quest.

Now let us see what this clearly formulated sense of sacred purpose will do for us. First of all, it will ensure the strong, gracious presences of reverence and order. Irreverence emerges when there is no sense of "the high calling.” We "trample the courts of the Lord" when we lose our sight of the gleam. Unless we see "the Lord, high and lifted up," irreverent and disorderly things will appear in our conduct of the service. We cannot keep them out. We shall sprawl and lounge about the pulpit. We shall take little part in the worship we profess to lead. Our idle curiosity will be more active than our spiritual obedience. We shall be tempted to be flippant in tone, to be careless in speech, and sometimes we may be tripped into actual coarseness and vulgarity. The first necessity to a refined pulpit ministry is reverence, and if we are to be reverent our eyes must be stayed upon "The King in His beauty." But let me mention a second security which is attained when the service is dominated by some great and exalted end. It will defend the preacher from the peril of ostentatious display. He will have power, but it will not be an exhibition. He will have light, but in the glory he himself will be eclipsed. His ministry will be transparent, not opaque. The vision of his people will not be stayed on him, it will gaze beyond him to the exalted Lord. When I was in Northfield two years ago I went out early one morning to conduct a camp-meeting away in the woods. The camp-dwellers were two or three hundred men from the Water Street Mission in New York. At the beginning of the service prayer was offered for me, and the prayer, opened with this inspired supplication: O Lord, we thank Thee for our brother. Now blot him out! And the prayer continued: Reveal Thy glory to us in such blazing splendor that he shall be forgotten." It was absolutely right and I trust the prayer was answered. But, gentlemen, if we ourselves are gazing upon the glory of the Lord we shall be blotted out in our own transparency. If we are seeking the glory of the Lord there will be about us a purity, and a simplicity, and a singleness of devotion which will minister to the unveiling of the King, and men will "see no man, save Jesus only." Everything m the service will be significant, but nothing will be obtrusive. Everything will meekly fall into place, and will contribute to a reverent and sober setting in which our Lord will be revealed, "full of grace and truth."

Now all this will mean a revolution in the way in which some parts of the service are conducted. I would have you seriously consider the pathetic, nay the tragic weakness of much of our devotional worship. We frequently fix our attention upon the sermon when we seek to account for the comparative impotency of a service, when perhaps the real cause of paralysis is to be found in our dead and deadening communion with God. There is nothing mightier than the utterance of spontaneous prayer when it is born in the depths of the soul. But there is nothing more dreadfully unimpressive than extemporary prayer which leaps about on the surfaces of things, a disorderly dance of empty words, going we know not whither,--a mob of words carrying no blood, bearing no secret of the soul, a whirl of insignificant expressions, behind which there is no vital pulse, no silent cry from lone and desolate depths.

It is not difficult to trace some of these weaknesses in pulpit prayer to their deeper cause. First of all, they are to be accounted for by our own shallow spiritual experience. We cannot be strong leaders of intercession unless we have a deep and growing acquaintance with the secret ways of the soul. We need to know its sicknesses,--its times of defilement, and fainting, and despair. We must know its Erie’s and moans when it has been trapped by sin, or when it has been wearied with the license of unhallowed freedom. And we must know the soul in its healings, when life is in the ascendant, when spiritual death has lost its sting, and the spiritual grave its victory. And we must know the soul in its convalescence, when weakness is being conquered as well as disease, and life is recovering its lost powers of song. And we must know the soul in its health, when exuberance has returned, and in its joyful buoyancy it can "leap as an hart." How are we going to lead a congregation in prayer if these things are hidden from us as in unknown worlds? I confess I often shrink from the obligation, when I think of the richly-experienced souls whom I have to lead in prayer and praise. I think of the depths and the heights of their knowledge of God. I think of their sense of sin. I think of their rapture in the blessedness of forgiveness. And I have to be their medium in public worship for the expression of their confessions, and their aspirations, and their adoring praise! I feel that I am like a shepherd’s pipe when they need an organ! They must often be "straitened" in me in the exercises of public communion. The preacher’s shallow experiences offer one explanation of the poverty of his intercession. But there is a second reason why our public devotions are frequently so impoverished. It is to be found in our imperfect appreciation of the supreme and vital importance of these parts of our services. They are sometimes described as "the preliminaries," matters merely concerning the threshold, a sort of indifferent passageway leading to a lighted room for the main performance! I do not know any word which is more significant of mistaken emphasis and mistaken values, and wherever it is truly descriptive of our devotions the congregation, which looks to the pulpit for sacred guidance will find barrenness and night. It we think of prayer as one of "the preliminaries" we shall treat it accordingly. We shall stumble up to it. We shall stumble through it. We shall say "just what comes to us," for anything that "comes" will be as good as anything else! Anything will do for a "preliminary.’’ We have prepared the words we are to speak to man, but any heedless speech will suffice for our communion with God! And so our prayerful people are chilled, and our prayerless people are hardened. We have offered unto the Lord God a "preliminary," and lo: "the heavens are as brass," and "the earth receives no rain." And I would mention, as a third reason for the weakness and shallowness of public devotion, the preacher’s lack of prayerfulness in private. If we are strangers to the way of communion in private we shah certainly miss it in public. The man who is much in "the way" instinctively finds the garden, and its fragrant spices, and its wonderfully bracing air, and he can lead others into it. But here, more than in anything else, our secret life will determine our public power. Men never learn to pray in public: they learn in private. We cannot put off our private habits and assume public ones with our pulpit robes. If prayer is an insignificant item in private it will be an almost irrelevant "preliminary" in public. If we are never in Gethsemane when alone we shall not find our way there with the crowd. If we never cry "out of the depths" when no one is near there will be no such cry when we are with the multitude. I repeat that our habits are fashioned in private, and a man cannot change his skin by merely putting on his gown.

I am fixing your thoughts upon this common weakness in pulpit devotions because I am persuaded it is here we touch the root of much of our pulpit incapacity. If men are unmoved by our prayers they are not likely to be profoundly stirred by our preaching. I cannot think that there will ever be more vital power in our sermons than in our intercessions. The power that upheaves the deepest life of the soul begins to move upon us while we commune with God. The climax may come in the sermon: the vital preparations are made in the devotions. I have heard pulpit intercessions so tremendous in their reach, so filled with God, so awe-inspiring, so subduing, so melting, that it was simply impossible they should be followed by an unimpressive sermon. The "way of the Lord" had been prepared. The soul was awake and on its knees, and the message came as the uplifting "power of God unto salvation." And on the other hand I have heard prayers so wooden, so leaden, so dead, or with only a show of life in loud tones and crude declamation, that it was simply impossible to have sermons full of the power of the Holy Ghost. I would therefore urge you, when you are in your pulpit, to regard the prayers as the essentials and not the "preliminaries" of the service, and to regard your sermon as a lamp whose arresting beams are to be fed by a holy oil which flows from the olive tree of sacred communion with God. And there is a second "preliminary" in public worship which needs to be lifted into primary significance,--our reading of the word of God. Too frequently the Scripture lesson is just something to be "got through." No careful and diligent work is given to its choice. No fine honor is assigned to it in the service. And the consequence is this, the "lesson" is one of the dead spots in the service, and its deadening influence chills the entire worship. The momentous message is given without momentousness, and it is devoid of even the ordinary impressiveness which belongs to common literature. How few of us remember services where the Scripture-lesson gripped the congregation and held it in awed and intelligent wonder! They tell us that Newman’s reading of the Scriptures at Oxford was as great a season as his preaching. I know one man who always lights up the Burial Service by the wonderful way in which he reads the resurrection chapter in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. While he reads you can see and feel the morn dawning, even though you are in the home of the dead! You should have heard Spurgeon read Psalms 103:1-22! It is a mighty experience when a lesson is so read that it becomes the sermon, and the living word grips without an exposition. I said, "without an exposition." But there are expositions which are given in our manner, in our demeanor, in the very tones of our voice, in our entire bearing. I have been told that there was a fine and impressive homage in the way in which John Angel James used to open his pulpit Bible, and an equally subduing impressiveness in the way in which he closed it. These are not little tricks, taught by elocutionists: they are the fruits of character. If they are learned as little tricks they will only add to the artificiality of the service: if they are "the fruits of the Spirit" they will tend to vitalize it.

If Scripture is to be impressively read it is of first importance that we understand it, that we have some idea of the general contour of the wonderful country, even though there are countless heights that we have never climbed, and countless depths that we have never fathomed. And if we are to have even this partial understanding of the lesson we must be prepared to give pains to it. I was deeply interested when I first went to Carrs Lane to examine Dr. Dale’s copy of the Revised Version from which he read the lessons in his pulpit. It bore signs of the most diligent devotion. In difficult chapters the emphatic words were carefully marked, and parenthetical clauses and passages were clearly defined. Dr. Dale’s making of an emphasis has sometimes been to me a revelation when I have read from his copy in the conduct of public worship. I mention this only to show what consecrated care one great expositor gave to the reading of the Scriptures. It is not elocution that we need, at least not the kind of elocution which in past years was given to theological students for the ministry. That was an imprisonment in artificial bonds which, for the sake of a galvanized life, destroyed all sense of weight and dignity. No, what we need, in the first place, is to exalt the ministry of the lesson in public worship, to set ourselves in reverent relationship to it, and then to give all needful diligence to understanding it and transferring our understanding to the people. Let us magnify the reading of the Word. Let us defend it with suitable conditions. Let us deliver it from all distractions. Let us keep the doors closed. Let no late-comers be loitering about the aisles while its message is being given. Let it be received in quietness, and it shall become manifest that God’s word is still a lamp unto men’s feet and a light unto their paths. And now, in pursuit of the one exalted purpose of glorifying God in our pulpit ministry, we shall give consecrated diligence to our common praise. Here again we are touching something which may be the abode of death or a fountain of resurrection life. And here again we are turning to something to which many of us pay but slight and indifferent regard. And once again I am seeking to convey to you the urgent conviction that every item in the service carries its own effective significance, and that carelessness concerning any part will inevitably lower the temperature of the entire worship. I am perfectly sure that it is with the hymns as it is with the reading of the Scriptures; our heedlessness is punished by antagonisms which make it doubly difficult to reach our supreme end. Many of the hymns we sing are artificial. They are superficial and unreal. They frequently express desires that no one shares, and which no healthy, aspiring soul should ever wish to share. Some of our hymns are cloistral, even sepulchral, smell-hag of death, and are far removed from the actual ways of intercourse and the throbbing pulse of common need. The sentiment is often sickly and anemic. It has no strength of penitence or ambition. It is languid, and weakly dreamy, more fitted for an afternoon in Lotus-land than for pilgrims who are battling their way to God. And yet these hymns are indifferently chosen, and we use and sing them with a detachment of spirit which makes our worship a musical pretence. The thing is hollow and devoid of meaning, and through the emptiness of this "preliminary" we lead our people to the truth of our message and hope that it will be received. It is a strangely unwise way, to prepare for spiritual receptiveness by a deadening formality which closes all the pores of the soul. Every artificiality in the service is an added barrier between the soul and truth: every reality prepares the soul for the reception of the Lord. The hymn before the sermon has often aggravated the preacher’s task.

There is another matter which I should like to mention in connection with our hymns. Many of the hymns are characterized by an extreme individualism which may make them unsuitable for common use in public worship. I know how singularly sweet and intimate may be the communion of the soul with our Lord. I know that no language can express the delicacy of the ties between the Lamb and His bride. And it is well that the soul, laden with the glorious burden of redeeming grace, should be able to sing its secret confidence and pour out the strains of its personal troth to the Lord. "He loved me, and gave Himself for me!" But still I think that these hymns of intense individualism should be chosen with prayerful and scrupulous care. Public worship is not a means of grace wherein each may assert his own individuality and help himself from the common feast: it is a communion where each may help his brother to "the things which the Lord hath prepared for them that love Him." A congregation is not supposed to be a crowd of isolated units, each one intent upon a personal and private quest. The ideal is not that each individual should hustle and bustle for himself, stretching out his hand to touch the hem of Christ’s garment, but that each should be tenderly solicitous of every other, and particularly mindful of those with "lame hands" who are timid and despondent even in the very presence of the great Physician. And so the ideal hymn in pub-lie worship is one in which we move together as a fellowship, bearing one another’s sins, sharing one another’s conquests, "weeping with them that weep, and rejoicing with them that rejoice." In this wealth of widest sympathy we must select our hymns. There must be a hymn in which the sorrowful will lay his burden, and the joyful will help him to lift it. There must be a hymn for those who are "valiant for the truth," and the timid and the fearful may take courage while they sing it. There must be a hymn in which the newly-made bride shall see the sacred light of her own new day, and the newly-made widow will catch the beams of the eternal morn. There must be hymns in which old people and little children can meet together and see the beauty of the leaf that never withers, and the glory of the abiding spring. All this means that our hymns cannot be chosen at the last moment if they are to be vital factors in a living service. They will have to be diligently considered, and their content carefully weighed, and we shall have to estimate their possible influence upon the entire worship. Do you not feel the reasonableness of this, and the importance of it, if every hymn is to be a positive ministry in constraining the congregation to intimate fellowship with God? But even now I have not done with the musical portion of our worship. I want to urge you to cultivate friendship and most intimate communion with your organist. Enlist his spirit in your own exalted purpose. Make him realize, by the fellowship of your deepest desires, that he is a fellow-laborer in the salvation of men to the glory of God. Let the music be redeemed from being a human entertainment, and let it become a divine revelation. Let it never be an end in itself but a means of grace, something to be forgotten in the dawning of something grander. Let it never be regarded as an exhibition of human cleverness but rather as a transmitter of spiritual blessings: never a terminus, but always a thoroughfare. And therefore take counsel with your organist. Tell him what you want to do next Sunday. Do not be shy about leading the conversation into the deeper things. Do not keep him in the outer courts: take him into the secret place. Tell him your purpose in reference to each particular hymn, and what influence you hope it will have upon the people. Tell him what you are going to preach about, and lead him into the very central road of your own desires. Tell him you are going in quest of the prodigal, or to comfort the mourner, or to rouse the careless, or to encourage the faint. Tell him what part of the vast realm of "the unsearchable riches" you will seek to unveil to your people, and let his eyes be filled with the glory which is holding yours. Take counsel as to how he can co-operate with you, and let there be two men on the same great errand. Let him consider what kind of organ voluntaries will best minister to your common purpose and prepare the hearts of the people for the vision of God. Let a tune be chosen from the standpoint of what will best disclose the secret wealth of a hymn and open the soul to its reception. Never let the anthem be an "uncharted libertine,’’ playing its own pranks irrespective of the rest of the service,--at the best an interlude, at the worst an intolerable interruption and antagonism--but let the anthem be leagued to the dominant purpose, urging the soul in the one direction, and preparing "the way of the Lord." In all these simple suggestions I am offering you counsel of incalculable worth. A preacher and his organist, profoundly one in the spirit of the Lord Jesus, have inconceivable strength in the ministry of redemption. And indeed what I have said about the organist I would say concerning everybody who has any office in the service of the sanctuary. Let it be your ambition to make them co-operate in the purpose that possesses you. Your pulpit ministry is helped or hindered by everybody who has to deal with your congregation, even to the "doorkeeper in the house of the Lord." And, therefore, let your ushers know that they may be your fellow-laborers, not merely showing people to their seats, but by the spirit and manner of their service helping them near to God. Let every one of your helpers be on the inside of things, and in their very service worshipping God "in spirit and in truth."

Gentlemen, there is nothing petty or priggish in all this. A prig is a man who has never seen or has lost the august, and who is, therefore, swallowed up in his own conceit. I am seeking to depict a preacher who lives in the vision of the august, and who desires to lift into its splendor even the obscurest ministry of the sanctuary. There are portions of our services that are vagrant, unharnessed to the central purpose, and I want to recover their power to the direct mission of the salvation of men,--and it can only be done when the minister takes his fellow-workers into his counsels, and makes them at home in the secret desires of his own soul. We must cease to regard the sermon as the isolated sovereign of the service, and all other exercises as a retinue of subordinates. We must regard everything as of vital and sacred importance, and everything must enter the sanctuary clothed in strength and beauty. And so with these mighty allies of prayer, and Scripture, and music, all pulsing with the power of the Holy Ghost, we shah give to a prepared people the message of the sermon. There are some questions about the sermon on which I am comparatively indifferent. Whether it shall be preached from a full manuscript or from notes, whether it shall he read, or delivered with greater detachment; these questions do not much concern me. Either method may be alive and effective if there be behind it a "live" man, real and glowing, fired with the passion of souls. Our people must realize that we are bent on serious business, that there is a deep, keen quest in our preaching, a sleepless and a deathless quest. They must feel in the sermon the presence of "the hound of heaven," tracking the soul in its most secret ways, following it in the ministry of salvation, to win it from death to life, from life to more abundant life, "from grace to grace," "from strength to strength," "from glory to glory." And in all our preaching we must preach for verdicts. We must present our case, we must seek a verdict, and we must ask for immediate execution of the verdict. We are not in the pulpit to please the fancy. We are not there even to inform the mind, or to disturb the emotions, or to sway the judgment. These are only preparative along the journey. Our ultimate object is to move the will, to set it in another course, to increase its pace, and to make it sing in "the ways of God’s commandments." Yes, we are there to bring the wills of men into tune with the will of God, in order that God’s statutes may become their songs. It is a blessed calling, frowning with difficulty, beset with disappointments, but its real rewards are "sweeter than honey and the honeycomb." There is no joy on earth comparable to his who has gone out with the great Shepherd, striding over the exposed mountain, and’ through deep valleys of dark shadow, seeking His sheep that was lost: no joy, I say, comparable to his when the sheep is found, and the Shepherd lays it on His shoulder rejoicing, and carries it home to the fold. "Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost!" And every one who has shared in the toil of the seeking shall also share in the joy of the finding--" Partaker of the sufferings" he shall also be "partaker of the glory." He shall assuredly "enter into the joy" of his Lord.