The Message and the Man: / Some Essentials of Effective Preaching

by J. Dodd Jackson

To the student of our times there is nothing more pathetic than to observe the struggles of those upon whom materialism casts its spell to escape from their bondage. To aid them in this endeavour they call the painter, the sculptor, the dramatist, the man of letters, the player skilled in the language of music, and to one and all they say, "Idealise! Idealise!" Periods of realism in art never last long, though, in a sense, realism is easier to the artist than idealism. The explanation is that it is not realism that is really in demand. The artist must give us not man as he is, but as he ought to be; not life as we know it, but life as we would know it and live it, too; not the human face scarred and seamed by vices inherited from a thousand tainted years, but fresh, and sweet, and beautiful as it came from the hands of God, new washed in the dews of His infinite affection. Even nature must be idealised, and the painter struggles to produce the perfect landscape, the sculptor to represent the perfect form. The artist who mixes no imagination with his colours never holds for long the public honour. The heart of man asks for the ideal; the actual is not enough.

And to the preacher, also, these unsatisfied spirits bring the same request. If it is not upon their lips, you may read it in the deep longing of their unquiet eyes. The age is not a happy age, and its lack of happiness does not arise, alone, from its sicknesses, its bereavements, its shattered hopes, the cruelties of "offence's gilded hand." Some one has said that men would be happy if it were not for their pleasures, and the saying contains a profound truth. In this unhappiness they turn to see if, peradventure, the preacher can show them higher and clearer heights of joy. Sometimes, thank God! the vision splendid is spread before them. It is a vision no poet or painter, save such as have been to the springs of the Eternal, can depict, and if the glory of it find its way into the seeker's soul life for him is never the same again. But sometimes, alas! he is disappointed. The voice in the pulpit is little more than a sanctimonious echo of the voices of the street. Then goes the sorrowing seeker hence, and lo, the tiny glimmer of hope with which he came has all but been put out!

For it is a criticism one all too often hears, that the modern preacher, instead of asking too much, asks too little, and that, when he does ask for much, his asking is more for great faith than for great living from both the individual and the age. It has been remarked that almost the whole of the difference between the Christian preacher and the heathen moralist is expressed in the statement that the preacher adds to his teaching a flavour of Jewish history and sweetens with the promise of a future life. Otherwise the heathen moralist points as far up the mountain side as he. There is such a possibility as that of preaching along too low a level. It is an ill thing when the preacher becomes content with the straw and forgets the crown.

For the preacher like the rest of men may become enslaved to things and powers material. "Where there is no vision the people perish," and of vision, in the larger sense, the preacher may share the general poverty. After all, even he belongs to the age into which he was born, and it needs qualities that are none too common to resist the influences of the times and of environment. Beside all this, are there not personal experiences in the lives of all of us which make it hard to keep our eyes upon the stars? We think of the local preacher spending his week in the market or behind the counter, in office or mine or factory or in the field wrestling with Nature for the bread that perisheth. We think of the minister often worried, almost distracted, by "the care of the churches," by the crabbed foolishness and miserable jealousies of contentious men and women. We must remember that for many a preacher life is not a May Day festival, but a question and a struggle. Surely the wonder is not that sometimes the man in the pulpit speaks in a minor key, but that, under all the conditions of his life, we hear from him so much of the higher music as we do. The memory comes to us as we write of a man who preached the Gospel for years with the cruel disease of cancer gnawing at his vitals. We can recall others who came to proclaim the golden year from domestic circles blighted by the debauchery and vice of children but too well beloved. Did these men sometimes speak falteringly, and with hesitation, the message in which they asked and promised glorious things? Did they, from the very darkness of the clouds lowering above them, see only the lower slopes of the Mountains of the Lord? Who could wonder? The preacher is but a man!

Yes, the preacher is but a man, and as a man finds out something else:—That, after all, it is not out of his experiences of life, nor from the influences of his time, nor from both together that the greatest hindrance to altitude of tone in his preaching arises. As a man is in heart and life so in some degree he preaches. The call of the Gospel is to perfection, and the perfect man is not yet, though many there are, even in these days, whose lives are a constant and noble struggle to reach this far-off mark. Is it strange that sometimes a preacher's own failure to gain the wished for heights should cause him to put before others possibilities, not, indeed, according to his own low level of attainment, but still far below those he is sent to declare? Living on low levels means inevitably preaching on low levels, though, as a man's preaching is derived from higher sources than are found in his own soul, his call to others ought always to be of higher things than he has, himself, attained.

Here, then, are some of the reasons why it often happens that our preaching lacks the elevation of high idealism. This idealism is none the less needed that there are reasons for its absence. Along these lines lies one of the great struggles of the preacher's life, which is so triumphantly to resist the influences of his day and the depression of his personal experiences, so to live his own life that he shall always be able to act as a joyful guide to the Alps of God.

And what are these higher heights to which he has to point his fellows? We ask the question first as concerning the individual and then as concerning the nations. We shall surely find it easy to obtain an answer to the inquiry in both its forms.

"Easy!" Yes; for the heights designed for us to reach are so clearly mapped out in the teaching, and especially in the life of Him whose word the preacher comes forward to declare, and whose example it is his glorious employment to put before the world. "The prize of the mark of our high calling" is the utter conquest of sin in the heart, its eradication not only in branch but in very root. Our goal is the utterly blameless life. It is more glorious, even, than this. It is the realisation in their perfection, not of negative virtues alone, but of virtues positive, active, aggressive. It is in brief the "perfect man in Christ Jesus."

And of what use is any lower understanding or interpretation of the purpose of Christ? Indeed, is any lower interpretation possible on the face of things? We cannot bring ourselves to believe that He would of set purpose come to secure a partial triumph in the subjects of His grace. We speak of the difficulties of this our doctrine, but, after all, greater difficulties would have to be overcome in consenting to any lower conception of the divine intent. Try to imagine the Master effecting the saving of a soul with the design that it shall still hold to some remains of former vices, to some of its old lusts, of its ancient enmities. Imagine Him, again, agreeing that a man shall continue to be the prey of evil tempers, of covetousness, of jealousy, of pride and falseness. Imagine Him entering into a tacit compromise with the forces of evil, that He will take so much and expect no more in the worship and ownership and conquest of those for whom He died. The idea is unthinkable! Jesus Christ came, suffered, bled, died, rose again, and ascended up on high that once more the eyes of God might look upon a perfect man.

Now, all this sounds very old-fashioned and very much like the teaching that we have heard, and perhaps in varying degrees disparaged, from the lips of those whom we call, sometimes with a slight, but none the less real, touch of sarcasm, "holiness men." How afraid we are that any one should ask us to be too good! But the teaching of Scriptural holiness was once one of the glories of Methodism and clear in the forefront of her preaching. To-day, perhaps, we hear less concerning that gospel than once we did. Is it absolutely certain that this fact always works out to the advantage of the preacher and his people? To-day, also, we hear less concerning the joy of the Christian life than formerly; less concerning new triumphs in the conversion of sinners than in days it is glorious to remember. To-day men complain, as we have already heard, that the preachers ask too little and do not bid them look so high as something in their bosoms tells them they ought to look. The preaching of Scriptural holiness has been discredited, it must be confessed, by the language into which it has often been thrown; by a disposition to censoriousness in those who have given it a large place in their ministry; by a disposition, too, on the part of its preachers to label as sins many things which were capable of innocent use and enjoyment, to cut out of life more than they sought to put in, dealing rather in prohibitions than in inspirations. This doctrine has suffered, again, more than most, from the inconsistencies of its apostles, as was indeed inevitable and should have been expected, for the higher a man's preaching the more clearly his personal imperfections are brought out by force of contrast, which may be rather to the glory of the preaching than to its discredit. Say, however, all that can be said in this direction concerning the doctrine of Christian Perfection; the ideals of the Gospel for human living are no lower than the highest word the Perfectionist has ever uttered. These ideals, as put before us and required of us, are part of the message of the Cross, and the preaching which does not include and enforce them is incomplete and cannot become, in the highest sense, effective in the accomplishment of its divine purpose. When a man's preaching presents ideals higher than those of the Sermon on the Mount; when he asks for a whiter purity, a more embracing charity, a nobler style of living than are required by Jesus Christ, then will have come the time to call a halt. Up to this point he has behind him not only divine permission but divine command. By his ears, if he but listen, may be heard, also, the voices of men who are weary of the valleys and the swamps, and who long to climb the heights and pierce the clouds that hold their vision from the skies. We need a new Puritanism, and it must not be a Puritanism principally of prohibitions, as was the old. It must be a Puritanism in which all the glories possible to heart and mind and soul are set forth in charm and beauty.