How to Preach | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 4, 1882

How to Preach.

MAKE no apologies. If you have the Lord’s message, deliver it; if not, hold your peace. Have short prefaces and introductions. Say your best things first, and stop before you get prosy. Do not spoil the appetite for dinner by too much thin soup. Leave self out of the pulpit and take Jesus in. Defend the gospel, and let the Lord defend you and your character.

Do not scold the people. Do not abuse the faithful souls who come to meeting rainy days, because of the others who do not come. Preach the best to smallest assemblies. Jesus preached to one woman at the well, and she got all Samaria out to hear him next time. Ventilate your meeting-room. Sleeping in church is due to bad air oftener than to bad manners. Do not repeat, saying, “as I said before.” If you said it before, say something else after. Leave out words you cannot define. Stop your declamation, and talk to folks. Come down from stilted and sacred tones and become a little child. Change the subject if it goes hard. Do not tire yourself and every one else out. Do not preach till the middle of your sermon buries the beginning and is buried by the end. Look people in the face, and live so that you are not afraid of them. Aim at the mark. Hit it. Stop and see where the shot struck, and then fire another broadside. Pack your sermons. Make your words like bullets. A board hurts a man worse if it strikes him edgewise.—Selected.