Proclaimer Blog
The ploughboy and the brickie
Every now and again, when I’m not preaching, I listen to the Sunday morning service on Radio 4. I often regret it. This last Sunday I listened carefully to the sermon because I thought the text was pretty ambitious for a Sunday service – the LORD revealing his name to Moses.
So here is the thing: I did not understand a word of what was said. Now, I’m not perhaps the brightest spark, but neither am I a complete idiot. And I couldn’t understand what was being said. It was like someone was reading out a page of John Owen. At least in print form, you have the chance to read the sentence two or three times to make sure you know what it means. Not in a sermon. It is, I’m sure you’ve noticed, an oral communication.
In the previous church where I served, there was a delightful old saint, a Welsh brickie, who once told me that a particularly perplexing visitor was a ‘brilliant preacher, just brilliant.’ I obviously raised an eyebrow, for he followed up with his justification for the preacher’s brilliance: ‘I couldn’t understand a word of it.’ I made it my work after that to make sure I was understood by the brickie – he was my measure, my 21st Century ploughboy.
Our trouble, of course, is that we confuse simplicity with profundity. We think that to be simple is to be simplistic. The best preachers are those who communicate the timeless truths of the Scripture in all their depth and wonder but with a clear simplicity that means even the least educated listener can grasp what is being said.
It’s worth reading JC Ryle’s instructions again. And again. And again.