Proclaimer Blog
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers #3
Chapter 3. The sermon and the preaching
Partway through this chapter, MLJ gives what he calls the basic definition of preaching. What is that man doing there?, he asks…
– ‘he is standing there as a mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address those people’
– ‘he is there … to do something to those people’
– ‘the hearer knows that he has been dealt with and addressed by God through this preacher’.
This explains, he says, why he once refused an invitation to debate with an atheist at the Oxford Union: ‘God is not to be discussed or debated’.
He then makes another distinction:
– The message of salvation (kerygma): the declaration of God’s being and glory, of sin and of Christ.
– The teaching element (didache), which edifies believers. This itself has two aspects: experiential and instructional.
It follows that there are three kinds of preaching:
– primarily evangelistic (which should occur at least weekly in a church)
– instructional-experiential
– instructional-didactic.
He readily acknowledges that these aren’t strict distinctions, and the elements will often be mixed together in a single sermon, but it’s important for the preacher to keep them distinct in his mind.
Reflections
His basic definition of preaching is robust and bold, and rightly so. It should both hearten and humble the preacher to read a definition like that every time he preaches.
His outworking of his definition of preaching often assumes that large numbers of unbelievers will be in church every week. It may well be that, less than fifty years on, we live in different times.
The ‘three kinds of preaching’ analysis deserves some reflection. Probably most of us preachers naturally default to one of the three, and end up being fairly narrow in our aim over a stretch of time. Keeping those three categories in mind, and deliberately moving between them, may well help our preaching hit a wider variety of targets.