Proclaimer Blog
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers #5
Chapter 5. The act of preaching
MLJ describes this chapter as a general introduction to sermon delivery. Certain elements must be present:
– the whole personality of the preacher being exercised, including bodily action
– a sense of authority and control of proceedings, since he has been sent to declare something
– the element of ‘freedom’, being open to ‘the inspiration of the moment’
– interplay between preacher and congregation
– seriousness
– liveliness (since seriousness isn’t dullness)
– zeal (since we are personally involved as witnesses)
– warmth
– urgency (since the preacher ‘is there between God and man’)
– persuasiveness
– pathos (also emotion): we must love the people, and that will show in our preaching
– power (more on this later, he says).
The chief end of preaching is ‘to give men and women a sense of God and his presence’.
If we glimpse what preaching is, we’ll conclude that we’ve never really ‘preached’, but we’ll keep trying.
Reflections
There is much here that is wise. I can do a good ‘delivery health-check’ on my preaching by comparing it to that list. Do I have such a desire not to be thought boring that there is too little of the seriousness of the gospel in my preaching? Am I so tied to my prepared notes that I don’t wisely adjust certain things when I see who is present and how they are reacting? I think so, sometimes.
What is intended by saying that preaching should aim to give a sense of God and his presence is also right, I think. Since the preaching of Christ ought to be received as the word of God (1 Thess 2.13), it is hard to see how that can be done without a sense in the hearers of also receiving Christ who is real and present by his Spirit.
I do find the line about concluding that I’ve never really ‘preached’ troubling. There is a sense in it of something which I can’t find in the NT. For all his acknowledged human limitations, we have no indication that Paul doubted that his preaching was truly preaching. MLJ intends by the point to spur the preacher on to greater power and zeal, and that is a good aim. He may well, though, end up discouraging the preacher by giving him too low a view of the effectiveness of his ‘ordinary’ weekly preaching.