Ministerial Reading Course

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 19, 1914

Ministerial Reading Course

Advice to Young Preachers

IN "The Minister as Prophet," Mr. Jefferson in speaking to young preachers uses the two following apt illustrations defining a sermon:—

"Go to the bee, young preacher; consider her ways, and be wise. Where does the bee get her honey? You say, Out of the flowers. You are mistaken. There is no honey in the flowers. You cannot get an ounce of honey out of a hundred fields of flowers. Open a flower and there is no honey in it, only a little sweetened water. But the bee takes the sweetened water, squeezes into it a drop of its own secretion, makes to it a personal contribution, and lo! the sweetened water becomes honey. The bee did it by personal work. And so must you. All the flowers of speech and the illustrations and the anecdotes and the stories are so many posies containing nothing but a little sweetened water. You cannot feed an audience of adults on water, even though it is sweetened. You can feed men only on thought, and you must do

the thinking. To whatever you find you must make your own individual and personal contribution. It is only as you put your own heart and brain into your sermons that they become sweet as honey and the honeycomb."

"Go to the spider, young preacher, and get from it a lesson in preaching. The spider does not weave its web out of material which is gathered from the field or the house, but the web is spun out of the substance of the spider itself. That delicate and artistic creation, the spider's web, is too fine to be made of the rough stuff of the streets. Those gossamer threads are woven out of the stuff of which the spider is made, and its miracle becomes possible only by the forthgiving of the spider's own life. If you would catch and hold the hearts of men, you must weave your sermons out of the very substance of your soul. It is not the material which other men have gathered and organized, but the stuff of your own spiritual self which is demanded by the people who think. Your personal contribution is everything. You must pour into your sermon your own heart's blood. Let me give you a new definition of sermons: they are drops of blood shed by the servants of the Lord for the redemption of the world."

Speaking further, the same author cautions against depending on other men's thoughts:—

"Preaching is the unfolding of truth; it is the evolution of an idea. One idea is sufficient to make a powerful sermon. A man who can take a great idea and by sheer force of brain unfold it until it glows and hangs glorious before the eyes of men, and so burns that hard hearts melt and consciences awake and begin to tremble, is a preacher indeed, and actually performs the work of the Lord. But the little dabbler in other men's thoughts, who fills up his time with secondhand anecdotes and stale stories, and tales intended to make people cry, never gets down to the place where the soul lives, and does not know either the preacher's agony or his reward. A congregation knows when it is in the hands of a man who is a thinker; and it also knows when it is listening to a man who is a retailer of other men's ideas."

Materials for Sermons

In the preparation of sermons there is much said by the spirit of prophecy on the importance of Bible study. From "Gospel Workers," page 122, we quote:—

"Those who engage in the business of school-teaching prepare for the work. They qualify themselves by attending school, and interesting their minds in study. They are not allowed to teach children and youth in the sciences unless they are capable of instructing them. Upon applying for a situation as teacher, they have to pass an examination before competent persons. It is an important work to deal with young minds, and instruct them correctly in the sciences. But of how much greater importance is the work of the ministry! Yet many engage in the important business of interesting men and women to enter the school of Christ, where they are to learn how they may form characters for heaven, who need to become students themselves. Some who enter the ministry do not feel the burden of the work upon them. They have received incorrect ideas of the qualifications of a minister. They have thought that it required but little close study in the sciences or in the Word of God to make a minister. Some who are teaching present truth are not acquainted with their Bibles. They are so deficient in Bible knowledge that it is difficult for them to quote a text of Scripture correctly from memory. By blundering along in the awkward manner they do, they sin against God. They mangle the Scripture, and make the Bible say things that are not written therein."

Dr. Broadus, in the "Preparation and Delivery of Sermons," under the heading "Accumulation of Materials" says:—

"The chief materials of a sermon are in the great mass of cases not really invented at the time of preparation; they are the results of previous acquisition and reflection. This is true even of much that seems to the preacher himself to have then for the first time a place in his mind; it is, in fact, the revival of something forgotten, or the development of something already known. In this respect inexperienced and comparatively uncultivated young preachers are often greatly deceived. Their early sermons are made with ease. Ardent, zealous, excited, they find that thought springs spontaneous in the mind, and feeling flows like a torrent. They imagine that it will always be easy to find something to say which will interest themselves and their hearers. But they are like men who have inherited a fortune in cash, and who spend their principal as if it were but income. Rejoicing in his facility of speech, the young preacher is not aware that he is drawing upon all that he has thought, felt, and seen, all that he has read and heard, since his childhood. And not a few go on for some months or years, consuming all their store, and evoking all that their minds are so constituted as readily to produce, and presently begin to wonder and lament that they find it so much harder than formerly to make a sermon. In like manner, preachers who are growing old sometimes complain that people will not listen to them as in other days, when the difficulty is that they have ceased to maintain activity of mind and good store of fresh thought; and unable to interest themselves, they of course cannot interest others. These somewhat frequent and very painful experiences only illustrate the proposition, we draw our sermons mainly from what we have wrought out or learned beforehand. And when the preacher speaks from great fullness of thought, then what he says borrows power from what is in reserve, as the head of water gives force to that which strikes upon the wheel. It follows that, next to the cultivation of personal piety, there is nothing for which the preacher should so earnestly labor, from his first call to the close of his life, as the acquisition of abundant general material for preaching.

"These materials will of course be drawn from every source. No kind of knowledge can be utterly useless to a preacher, and reflection, upon whatever subjects, will always leave him something which may hereafter be turned to account. But it may be well to remark upon the principal sources from which materials for preaching are derived.

"The Scriptures themselves should at every period of his life be a preacher's chief study. When we meet a young brother who has just become convinced that it is his duty to preach, and who is inquiring about preparation for the work, our first word ought to be, the Bible,—not so much, at the outset, the profound study of doctrinal epistles or prophetic books as the familiar and accurate knowledge of historical facts, the analysis of Biblical characters, the memorizing of devotional passages and of precepts, the acquisition of a general familiarity with the contents of particular books and of the entire sacred collection."