Ministers often speak of "getting up" a sermon or "making" one, but Charles Edward Jefferson, for many years pastor of Broadway Tabernacle in New York City, thinks a sermon in the highest sense is a growth rather than a manufactured product, a living organism and not a thing that is made. He goes on to say:
"The art of preaching is something like the art of agriculture. The successful farmer works incessantly on the soil. He fertilizes it, changes the fertilizer from time to time, shifts his crops now to one field, now to another, always studying the •condition of the soil. He breaks up one field, lets another field lie fallow, works with thesoil in all sorts of ways that every field may be rich and mellow.
"The secret of good farming lies in constant working with the soil. It is, of course, important that the seed should be good, but good seed avails nothing in an exhausted soil. Now a preacher is nothing but a spiritual farmer. His mind is his farm. From that farm he must bring repeated harvests for the feeding of the sons of God. . . . Unless the soil is fertilized from day to day, and unless it is worked with, and that unceasingly, the soil is certain to grow shallow, and in the pulpit there will be an exhausted man."—"The Minister as Prophet," pp. 99, 100.
As for the creation of conditions under which sermons can grow and take on beauty and fragrance, Jefferson thinks this calls for hard study day in and day out : "The work of growing sermons requires more strenuous forthputting of more different faculties of the mind than is necessary in any other calling, and if one is not capable of sustained intellectual effort and not willing to exert his mind in season and out of season, let him never think himself called of God to preach."
The hard work that Jefferson has in mind is not that having directly to do with a given sermon. It is rather intense study of the Bible as a whole, digging below the surface in the prophets of old and in the evangelists, thoughtful reading of volumes that throw light on the Bible, poring over the great world books, always accompanied by devout prayer for heavenly guidance. The mind needs to be fertilized if it is to produce sermons that will stir men's hearts. The successful preacher must live a full life; he must be alert in mind and spirit ; his faculties must be up to concert pitch.
If this life of laborious mental toil is kept up day by day, then the time required for the preparation of any one sermon will, in the opinion of Doctor Jefferson, be comparatively short. The preacher living on the heights has large reserves of knowledge and spiritual power. When the time comes to preach, the Spirit will give him utterance.
A four-year college course does a good deal for a young man. It gives him valuable mental training, a certain amount of culture, and a fairly broad outlook over the field of knowledge. Professional training in large part still lies before him ; but if he has learned how to study and has acquired a healthy hunger for more knowledge, he will continue to grow intellectually and spiritually, and there will be a freshness about his sermons that will be attractive to old and young.
Natural Background for Preaching
Wide reading and study form a natural background for creative preaching, because the pastor of a church is also a teacher to whom a goodly number of persons look for timely instruction week by week. We admire the physician who not only at the outset devotes seven full years to medical study, but frequently goes to Chicago or New York to take postgraduate work in order that he may keep fully up to date in the practice of medicine. Yet the physician's ministry is confined mainly to the body. The preacher, on the other hand, ministers to the intellectual and spiritual needs of men and women, and those needs are infinite in range and more than can be numbered.
The sermons that make a deep impression on thinking people are the outgrowth of a prayerful, studious life, a mind daily exercised in acquiring knowledge and filled so full with good things that it just naturally overflows in words that inspire men and move them to action. Such sermons give joy and satisfaction to the preacher as well as to the congregation. When prayer and study of the word are neglected and the mind lies fallow while precious time is wasted on the radio and the newspaper, there is neither life nor power in preaching. Such cannot inform the mind ; neither can it warm the heart.
In these days when most ministers have a good deal of administrative work to do, scholarly pursuits are in danger of being crowded out. The wise minister will need to be on his guard against encroachments on his study hours. He should take the church members into his confidence and make them understand that to deliver living messages from the pulpit week after week calls for intellectual toil far more exhausting to the vital organs than an equal amount of physical labor.
Most men are by nature intellectually indolent, though they may not know it. Many adults have scarcely grown mentally since they were in grammar school. It is unfortunate that, in general, men shun mental activity; but it is fatal to a successful ministry for the preacher to let himself down in this particular, for it signifies that he is headed for the dead line in his ministry. People know pretty much what he is going to say before he begins to speak; and if they remain in their seats, it is chiefly from considerations of politeness and of reverence for the house of prayer.
But there is no real excuse for the minister of the gospel to fall down intellectually. He has much to encourage him to persevere in his studies. He does not require access to the laboratory and the operating room, as does the doctor. Seated in his own study, he can become increasingly familiar with the sacred languages, New Testament Greek and Hebrew. He can also range at will in the field of history, sacred and profane. He can study world literature or investigate the early beginnings of systematic thinking. He can study psychology and sociology. In all these various fields of knowledge he can do something by himself ; but he will save time and make more rapid progress if he enjoys the companionship of one who has specialized in a certain field of knowledge and can give him skilled guidance when needed.
Advanced study carried on for twenty minutes or a half hour daily, will give the worker mental freshness and a pleasing sense of growth and achievement that comes in no other way. To read Paul's epistles in the very words of the apostle gives one a real thrill, and it also gives a sense of security to the preacher who is expounding a vitally important text. Language study, moreover, is a kind of mental gymnastics that helps to keep on top of things intellectually.
The minister who is continually growing in knowledge need not fear that his sermons will be uninteresting. His influence on young people and on forward-looking older ones will be stimulating. They, too, will want to study in order to become more skillful in co-operating with the pastor in his soul-winning work. Thus the growing minister is soon surrounded by wide-awake church members, resourceful Sabbath school teachers, and inspirational leaders of the youth.
When such a minister conducts a series of evangelistic meetings, it is to invite the people of the neighborhood and the whole town or city to join him and his congregation in an open-minded study of the Scriptures in the light of fulfilling prophecy. Whether the converts are many or few, the effort is a success because it is carried on in the spirit of the Master, who was in the truest sense of the word a great world teacher and left with His followers the one behest to go and teach all nations.
