December 24, 2014

From Jim McGuiggan... A POX ON INFORMATIVE PREACHING


A POX ON INFORMATIVE PREACHING

     Henry S. Coffin spoke of the difference between guides who are pathetic and those who are truly in touch with what they are guides in and to. I'd like to say something about that with regard to preaching and teaching. Hand on my heart, I don't profess to preach well but I know down into my bones when I hear it done well and for the reason God willed it into being.
There are guides who take visitors around the great Continental cathedrals or magnificent buildings, to look at a much-talked-about statue or famed art gallery or any great historic site or to some marvellous place from which you can see half the world.
One kind is filled with patter, he’s rarely silent and for the 1000th time reels of the information he has read in a book and tells us what this or that expert or art critic has said. He regurgitates the facts, the dates, the places, the measurements and you come away overwhelmed with bits and pieces of information—and a very temporary recollection of some of the jumble of things he has said.
The other is in tune with the grandeur and mystique of it all—he experiences it, has entered into the heart of it, or at least he has us convinced that he has because it is more than stuff he has rattled off. He says something, enough, but he does more than that; he brings us to that “place” and “draws back the curtain” and we’re confronted with the “thing” itself. He steps aside and leaves us there to be stunned by someone or something from the hand of a master instead of a stream of someone else’s experience or opinion or judgement. With this guide we’re not deafened to the “real thing” by the “noise” of a prepared spiel, well-prepared chatter, of bored and speedy lecturing.
There’s so much religious talk, a lot of verses are thrown in that give it a biblical coloration but in the end it’s all a substitute for biblical preaching. We’re rarely confronted with “the master”. We hear lots of opinions from this commentator or that, this exegete or that, this theologian or that but it’s so much hearsay. Christ’s words to Pilate come to mind and we might think he asks the preacher, “Sayest thou this of thyself or did another tell thee?”
Edward Thomas Taylor preached a lot and preached a lot to sailors. One of them said: “When a man is preachin’ at me I want him to take something hot out of his heart and shove it into mine. That’s what I call preachin’.”
 
A pox on “delightful,” “interesting” and “informative” preaching!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.

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