Proclaimer Blog
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers #15
Chapter 15. The Pitfalls and the Romance
An odd mixture of topics in this chapter. The ‘pitfalls’ are two:
- Preaching the same sermon in different contexts. MLJ is happy with that as long as it remains fresh to the preacher, and he doesn’t preach the same sermon twice in the same place!
- Using other people’s sermons. Golden rule: acknowledge it, or you’re a thief.
Then comes the ‘romance’. He’s got these things in mind:
- When you’re stepping up to deliver a fresh sermon to your own people, longing to deliver the message to them, there’s no feeling in the world so thrilling and rewarding!
- The excitement on a Saturday night when you know that you have been especially ‘gripped and moved’ yourself in your preparation, and that could be an indication that the people will be too.
- The preacher never knows exactly what will happen. Sometimes the planned first point becomes the whole sermon as you preach it.
- You never know who’s listening. It could be the turning-point of someone’s whole life.
- How often people say afterwards, ‘That sermon could have been written just for me!’, although you knew nothing of their circumstances beforehand.
Reflections
A caveat to start with. The preacher who regularly prepares too sketchily and hopes that the Spirit will make up the difference in the pulpit will not be helped by hearing about the ‘romance’ of being prompted to change the sermon as you’re preaching. However, of course, those who feel that they might be drummed out of whatever fraternity they are in if they ever admitted to doing such a thing probably need to hear that it is not beyond the scope of the Spirit’s activity.
More positively: those few pages on ‘romance’ have made me feel more excited than I did twenty minutes ago about my next sermon, and for that I am grateful. I would not have used the word ‘romance’ to describe these feelings, but that’s probably just due to differences in temperament and not having myself grown up on any Celtic fringe. Finding MLJ using that word woke me up to some glories that we can become stale towards, and that is more than good.