Proclaimer Blog
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers #13
Chapter 13. What to avoid
That’s a pretty clear chapter title!
He speaks first of the preacher himself. The central advice is: ‘watch over your natural gifts and tendencies and idiosyncrasies’ – i.e., ‘watch your strengths’, as they will tempt you to pander to yourself in preaching.
Then he applies it to the sermon itself.
The key rule, he says, is to ‘be natural’… ‘Self is the greatest enemy of the preacher … And the only way to deal with self is to be so taken up with, and so enraptured by, the glory of what you are doing, that you forget yourself altogether.’
He applies this to various areas:
- Not too much display of intellect or too little. Most young preachers display too much, and must get over it fast.
- No mere exhortation, but there must be exhortation that moves ‘to tears or to action’.
- Some polemic against false teaching, as in Scripture, but not too much.
- Don’t start with a smile and “Good morning, folks, nice to see you.” You are about a unique activity. The church is not your home and you’re not a host welcoming people into it.
Reflections
The advice to ‘watch your strengths’ carries the weight of the many years of experience that MLJ had had when he wrote these words. It made me think of those aspects of preaching that I feel come more naturally to me than others, and which seem more often to elicit immediate approval from a few. You will know what yours are (and if you don’t yet, just wait a while). How easy it is to bring those ever more to the fore, freewheeling and showboating (in an understated English way, of course).
Being so taken up by the glory of what you are doing so that you forget yourself… that of course requires a solid conviction that I am not just teaching or explaining or sharing, but that through me Christ is holding himself out to people, urging them to trust and to keep trusting. What we think preaching actually is will have a deep impact on our view of ourselves as we do it. And ironically (I think MLJ is entirely right here), the more theologically exalted our view of preaching, the less likely we are to be sinfully conscious of ourselves as we do it.