How to Weaken Pride and Cultivate Humility

Always:

1. Reflect on the wonder of the cross of Christ.

As Each Day Begins:

1. Begin your day by acknowledging your dependence upon God and your need for God.
2. Begin your day expressing gratefulness to God.
3. Practice the spiritual disciplines – prayer, study of God’s Word, worship. Do this consistently each day and at the day’s outset, if possible.
4. Seize your commute time to memorize and meditate on Scripture.
5. Cast your cares upon Him, for He cares for you.

As Each Day Ends:

1. At the end of the day, transfer the glory to God. “When we have done anything praiseworthy, we must hide ourselves under the veil of humility, and transfer the glory of all we have done to God.” Thomas Watson
2. Before going to sleep, receive this gift of sleep from God and acknowledge His purpose for sleep. There is only One who “will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4), and I am not that One.

For Special Focus:

1. Study the attributes of God (especially the incommunicable attributes).
2. Study the doctrines of grace. “God intentionally designed salvation so that no man can boast of it. He didn’t merely arrange it so that boasting would be discouraged, or kept to a minimum – He planned it so that boasting would be absolutely excluded! Election does precisely that.” Mark Webb
3. Study the doctrine of sin.
4. Laugh often, and laugh often at yourself.

Throughout your days and weeks:

1. Identify evidences of grace in others.
2. Encourage and serve others each and every day.
3. Invite and pursue correction.
4. Respond humbly to trials.

The Perils of Pride

-         Why does God hate pride so passionately? Pride is when sinful human beings aspire to the status and position of God and refuse to acknowledge their dependence upon Him.

-         Confessing pride to God: “Lord, in that moment, with that attitude and that action, I was contending for supremacy with You. That’s what it was all about. Forgive me.”

-         John Calvin in his commentary on Psalm 9:1-3: “God cannot bear with seeing his glory appropriated by the creature in even the smallest degree, so intolerable to him is the sacrilegious arrogance of those who, by praising themselves, obscure his glory as far as they can.”

As Each Day Begins

-         You should have a list. You should be purposeful about this. Each day you should be planning the defeat of your greatest enemy and cultivating your greatest friend.

-         “Fill your affections with the cross of Christ that there may be no room for sin.” John Owen

-         “There is only one thing I know of that crushes me to the ground and humiliates me to the dust, and that is to look at the Son of God, and especially contemplate the cross…Nothing else can do it. When I see that I am a sinner…that nothing but the Son of God on the cross can save me, I’m humbled to the dust…Nothing but the cross can give us this spirit of humility.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

-         “Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to be saying to us, “I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.” Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross. All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called
Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size.” John Stott

-         It was said of Matthew Henry that “he was an alert and thankful observer of answered prayer”; his gratitude for God’s mercies was constantly “sweetening his spirit, and he would often invite others to join him in giving thanks.”

-         The very act of opening my Bible to read and turning my heart and mind to prayer makes a statement that I need God.

Identifying Evidences of Grace

-         Make a practice of observing how the Spirit manifests the fruits of the Spirit in the lives you see around you (“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” Gal. 5:22-23).

-         Observe the Spirit equipping believers to teach, to lead, and to serve. When you become familiar with the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit and learn to recognize their manifestation, suddenly you will be aware that God is at work everywhere.

-         Called is one of Scripture’s most frequent one-word descriptions for the Christian…We must remind ourselves, This individual has been previously acted upon by God.

-         Paul looks at the Corinthian church as it is in Christ Jesus before he looks at anything else that is true of the church. That disciplined statement of faith is rarely made in local churches; the warts are examined and lamented, but often there’s no vision of what God has already done in Christ.

-         Memorize Eph. 4:29

Fourthly, good preaching must “employ analogies and images” (pg. 90). Jonathan Edwards’ sermons “abound with images and analogies to give light to the understanding and heat to the affections.” (pg. 92). Finding analogies and images can be hard work, but we should not grudge it, because it is for the good of our people and the glory of God.

Fifthly, good preaching uses threat and warning. Jesus spoke about the horrors of hell more than anyone in the Bible. However, “Preaching about hell is never an end in itself. You can’t frighten anyone into heaven. Heaven is for people who love purity, not for people who simply loathe pain.” (pg. 93).

One of the most important directions for powerful, biblical preaching is to “yield to the Holy Spirit in prayer” (pg. 98). “The Holy Spirit fills the heart with holy affections and the heart fills the mouth.” (pg. 99). As Edwards says, “When a person is in a holy and lively frame in secret prayer, it will wonderfully supply him with matter and with expressions…(in) preaching.” (pg. 99). This is how Edwards counsels young men who are entering the ministry of the gospel: “Ministers, in order to be burning and shining lights, should walk closely with God, and keep near to Christ; that they may ever be enlightened and enkindled by him. And they should be much in seeking God, and conversing with him by prayer; who is the fountain of light and love.” (pg. 99). “Good preaching is born of good praying.” (pg. 100).

Good preaching also comes from one who is poor in spirit, meek, and mourning over his own sin (Matt. 5:3-5); “a spirit of brokenness and tenderness” (pg. 100). The gracious affections and fruit of the Spirit “do not tend to make men bold, forward, noisy, and boisterous; but rather to speak trembling” (pg. 101). Piper points out how important our example is as we shepherd the flock of God: “The spirit we long to see in our people must be in ourselves first. But that will never happen until, as Edwards says, we know our own emptiness and helplessness and terrible sinfulness” (pg. 101). Humility must be the aroma in all our labors.

Finally, be intense: “Good preaching gives the impression that something very great is at stake.” (pg. 103). “Lack of intensity in preaching can only communicate that the preacher does not believe or has never been seriously gripped by the reality of which he speaks” (pg. 103).

            The chapter on the theology of Edwards is equally as inspiring as the chapter on his life. “The goal of all that God does is to preserve and display his glory.” (pg. 79). And since all of God’s acts flow out of his infinite fullness, and not from deficiency, man cannot add anything to God. The glory of God is the fact that He does not need anything added to Him to make Him more “God”. He is not improved by man in any way, He has no glory to add to Himself; if He did, He would not be God but a creature. Therefore, since God never acts to add to His glory, because this would be impossible, but only to “preserve it and display it” (pg. 79), the duty of man is to delight in God’s glory. Delighting in God essentially means that we have affections for God; vigorous and sensible exercises of the will of the soul for God. “Delight in the glory of God includes, for example, hatred for sin, fear of displeasing God, hope in the promises of God, contentment in the fellowship of God” (pg. 80) etc. As Edwards rightly points out, those who are truly saved will (and must) persevere in these affections for God. These continuing affections for God are evidence of their conversion. “They that will not live godly lives find out for themselves that they are not elected; they that will live godly lives, have found out for themselves that they are elected.” (pg. 80). Therefore, if the saints must continue in these holy affections as evidence of God’s active grace in their lives, our preaching must strengthen the saints to persevere in these affections to the end. “Preaching is a means of grace to assist the saints to persevere.” (pg. 81). Every time we preach, we must grasp the weight of our calling, “For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.” (2 Cor. 2:15-17).

            In our preaching we must also rely on the gift of the Spirit’s power. John Piper’s acronym APTAT is an excellent example for us in this way. Prayerful dependence on God should saturate all stages of our sermon preparation, including the moments before we step into the pulpit. APTAT is admitting to the Lord that without Him we can do nothing, praying for help, trusting in a specific promise from God’s Word, acting in confidence that God will fulfill His Word, and thanking God at the end of the message that He sustained us to preach His Word.

            “Gladness and gravity should be woven together in the life and preaching of a pastor in such a way as to sober the careless soul and sweeten the burdens of the saints” (pg. 55). Gladness and gravity are equally necessary in the preaching task. Gladness without gravity would not build up the saints or sober the soul who is careless about Christ and their eternal destiny. Gravity without gladness “would be of no benefit” (Heb. 13:17) to the saints, and a pastor who is not glad in God does not glorify God. Piper’s discussion of the gravity of preaching is so necessary for me to hear. As he says, “Gravity in preaching is appropriate because preaching is God’s appointed means for the conversion of sinners, the awakening of the church, and the preservation of the saints.” This should make me very serious about what is happening in the pulpit every Sunday morning. As one preacher said, “No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save” (pg. 59).

            I especially appreciated Piper’s seven practical suggestions for cultivating gladness and gravity in our preaching. What he says about striving for earnest, glad-hearted holiness in all of life is seminal to the preacher’s entire life calling: “You can’t be blood-earnest in the pulpit and habitually flippant at the board meeting and the church dinner” (pg. 63).

Piper states in Trinitarian terms the means by which God is made supreme in preaching: the goal of preaching is the glory of God, the ground of preaching is the cross of Christ, and the gift of preaching is the power of the Holy Spirit. This is how God is supreme in preaching. “From him (the power of the Spirit) and through him (the cross of Christ) and to him (the glory of God) are all things. To him be glory forever” (Rom. 11:36). Piper’s burden is to plea for the supremacy of God in preaching, to show that “God is the goal of preaching, God is the ground of preaching, and all the means in between are given by the Spirit of God.” This is an essential book for every preacher. If God is not supreme in preaching, then all our labor will be in vain.

“The goal of preaching is the glory of God reflected in the glad submission of the human heart” (pg. 29). The goal of preaching is one goal, not two, as Piper states. The goal is not 1) the glory of God, and 2) the glad submission of the human heart (loving that glory). The goal is one because “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” We proclaim the glory of God, the good news that “Your God reigns!” (Isaiah 52:7) so that people would love His glory. There would be no preaching or good news to herald if we could not tell of the glory of God. And if the human heart could not gladly submit to God’s glory then there would be no reason to preach. There would be no good news to herald, only bad news of judgment and condemnation. But since “God’s deepest commitment to be glorified and my deepest longing to be satisfied are not in conflict, but in fact find simultaneous consummation in his display of and my delight in the glory of God” (pg. 29) then God truly is supreme in preaching. For “the one who satisfies gets the glory; the one who gives the pleasure is the treasure” (pg. 29).

But the only way that the glory of God can be reflected in the glad submission of his creation is through the cross of Christ. There would be no hope for sinners to be glad in God’s glory if it were not for the satisfaction of God’s righteousness in the cross. So it is the good news of the cross that we preach. “The cross has brought together the two sides of the goal of preaching that looked hopelessly at odds with each other: 1) the vindication and exaltation of God’s glory and 2) the hope and joy and gladness of sinful man” (pg. 36). Without the cross, humanity would have no hope of rejoicing in the glory of God, because we would be condemned by God as a result of our love of ourselves more than His glory. So, as preachers, if we are to “glorify a righteous God in the gladness of sinful man”, the cross is absolutely, unspeakably necessary. There would be no validity to our preaching of the good news that God is glorified in our satisfaction in Him without the cross.

The cross is the validity and the ground of our preaching, but it is also the ground of the humility of our preaching. We cannot preach in a God-honoring way without the crucifixion of our own pride, self-reliance, and self-exultation. Boasting in man and in our own eloquence and oratorical skill is excluded by the cross. As Paul said, “Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power” (1 Cor. 1:17). In all of Paul’s preaching, the cross executed his pride, self-reliance, and boasting, so that people would not see Paul but the life of Christ, and the power of God. As Piper says so well, “The cross is both a past event of substitution and a present experience of execution…it is the foundation of our doctrine and the foundation of our demeanor…unless the preacher is crucified, the preaching is nullified.”

In summary, the goal of preaching is the glory of God reflected in the glad-hearted submission of the creature, and this is made possible by the cross of Christ. The cross is the only reason why we can preach the good news of the glory of God. Though I’ve read through this book probably three times by now, I am looking forward to reading and reflecting on the next two chapters!

Listening to or reading the reflections of others on preaching is, for most preachers, inherently interesting and stimulating (whether positively or negatively). These reflections then are offered in the spirit of the Golden Rule, and only because the Editor is a long-standing friend!Forty years exactly have passed since my first sermon in the context of a Sunday service. Four decades is a long time to have amassed occasions when going to the church door after preaching is the last thing one wants to do—even if one loves the congregation (sometimes precisely because one loves the congregation and therefore the sense of failure is all the greater!). How often have I had to ask myself “How is it possible to have done this thousands of times and still not do it properly?”Yes, I know how to talk myself out of that mood! Everything from “It’s faithfulness, not skill, that really matters”; “How you feel has nothing to do with it!”; “Remember you’re sowing seed.” “It’s ultimately the Lord who preaches the word into people’s hearts, not you.” All true. Yet we are responsible to make progress as preachers, indeed evident and visible, or at least audible progress (1 Tim. 4:13, 15 is an instructive and searching word in this respect!). All of this led me while traveling one day to reflect on this: What ten commandments, what rule of preaching-life, do I wish someone had written for me to provide direction, shape, ground rules, that might have helped me keep going in the right direction and gaining momentum in ministry along the way?Once one begins thinking about this, whatever Ten Commandments one comes up with, it becomes obvious that this is an inexhaustible theme. My friend, the Editor, could easily run his journal for a year with a whole series of “My Ten Commandments for Preaching.” I offer these ten, not as infallible, but as the fruit of a few minutes of quiet reflection on a plane journey.

1. Know your Bible better. Often at the end of a Lord’s Day, or a Conference, the thought strikes me again: “If you only knew your Bible better you would have been a lot more help to the people.” I teach at a seminary whose founder stated that its goal was “to produce experts in the Bible.” Alas I was not educated in an institution that had anything remotely resembling that goal. The result? Life has been an ongoing “teach yourself while you play catch-up.” At the end of the day seminaries exist not to give authoritative line-by-line interpretations of the whole of Scripture but to provide tools to enable its graduates to do that. That is why, in many ways, it is the work we do, the conversations we have, the churches we attend, the preaching under which we sit, that make or break our ministries. This is not “do it yourself” but we ourselves need to do it. As an observer as well as a practitioner of preaching, I am troubled and perplexed by hearing men with wonderful equipment, humanly speaking (ability to speak, charismatic personality and so on) who seem to be incapable of simply preaching the Scriptures. Somehow they have not first invaded and gripped them. I must not be an illiterate. But I do need to be homo unius libri—a man of one Book. The widow of a dear friend once told me that her husband wore out his Bible during the last year of his life. “He devoured it like a novel” she said. Be a Bible devourer!

2. Be a man of prayer. I mean this with respect to preaching. Not only in the sense that I should pray before I begin my preparation, but in the sense that my preparation is itself a communion in prayer with God in and through his word. Whatever did the apostles mean by saying that they needed to devote themselves “to prayer and the ministry of the word”—and why that order? My own feeling is that in the tradition of our pastoral textbooks we have over-individualized this. The apostles (one may surmise) really meant “we”—not “I, Peter” or “I, John” but “We, Peter, John, James, Thomas, Andrew . . . together.” Is it a misreading of the situation to suspect that preachers hide the desperate need of prayer for the preaching, and their personal need? By contrast, reflect on Paul’s appeals. And remember Spurgeon’s bon mot when asked about the secret of his ministry: “My people pray for me.”Reflecting on this reminds me of one moment in the middle of an address at a conference for pastors when the bubble above my head contained the words “You are making a complete and total hash of this,” but as my eyes then refocused on the men in front of me they seemed like thirsty souls drinking in cool refreshing water, and their eyes all seemed to be fixed on the water carrier I was holding! Then the above-the-head-bubble filled with other words: “I remember now, how I urged the congregation at home to pray for these brethren and for the ministry of the word. They have been praying.”Alas for me if I don’t see the need for prayer or for encouraging and teaching my people to see its importance. I may do well (I have done well enough thus far, have I not?) . . . but not with eternal fruit.

3. Don’t Lose Sight of Christ. Me? Yes, me. This is an important principle in too many dimensions fully to expound here. One must suffice. Know, and therefore preach “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). That is a text far easier to preach as the first sermon in a ministry than it is to preach as the final sermon. What do I mean? Perhaps the point can be put sharply, even provocatively in this way: Systematic Exposition did not die on the Cross for us; nor did Biblical Theology, nor even Systematic Theology or Hermeneutics, or whatever else we deem important as those who handle the exposition of Scripture. I have heard all of these in preaching . . . without a center in the person of the Lord Jesus. Paradoxically not even the systematic preaching through one of the Gospels guarantees Christ-crucified centered preaching. Too often preaching on the Gospels takes what I whimsically think of as the “Find Waldo Approach.” The underlying question in the sermon is “Where are you to be found in this story?” (are you Martha or Mary, James and John, Peter, the grateful leper . . .?). The question “Where, Who and What is Jesus in this story? Tends to be marginalized. The truth is it is far easier to preach about Mary, Martha, James, John, or Peter than it is about Christ. It is far easier to preach even about the darkness of sin and the human heart than to preach Christ. Plus my bookshelves are groaning with literature on Mary, Martha . . . the good life, the family life, the Spirit-filled life, the parenting life, the damaged self life . . . but most of us have only a few inches of shelf space on the person and work of Christ himself.Am I absolutely at my best when talking about him, or about us?

4. Be deeply Trinitarian. Surely we are? At least in some of our churches not a Lord’s Day passes without the congregation confessing one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But as is commonly recognized Western Christianity has often had a special tendency to either an explicit or a pragmatic Unitarianism, be it of the Father (Liberalism, for all practical purposes), the Son (Evangelicalism, perhaps not least in its reactions against Liberalism), or the Spirit (Charismaticism with its reaction to both of the previous). This is, doubtless, a caricature. But my concern here arises from a sense that Bible-believing preachers (as well as others) continue to think of the Trinity as the most speculative and therefore the least practical of all doctrines. After all, what can you “do” as a result of hearing preaching that emphasizes God as Trinity? Well, at least inwardly if not outwardly, fall down in prostrate worship that the God whose being is so ineffable, so incomprehensible to my mental math, seeks fellowship with us!I sometimes wonder if it is failure here that has led to churches actually to believe it when they are told by “church analysts” and the like that “the thing your church does best is worship . . . small groups, well you need to work on that . . ..” Doesn’t that verge on blasphemy? (Verge on it? There is surely only One who can assess the quality of our worship. This approach confuses aesthetics with adoration).John’s Gospel suggests to us that one of the deepest burdens on our Lord’s heart during his last hours with his disciples was to help them understand that God’s being as Trinity is the heart of what makes the gospel both possible and actual, and that it is knowing him as such that forms the very lifeblood of the life of faith (cf. John chapter 13-17). Read Paul with this in mind and it becomes obvious how profoundly woven into the warp and woof of his gospel his understanding of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is. Our people need to know that, through the Spirit, their fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. Would they know that from my preaching?

5. Use your Imagination. Does this not contradict the immediately preceding observations that the truth of the Trinity should not be thought of as speculative metaphysics? No. Rather it is simply to state what the preaching masters of the centuries have either explicitly written, or at least by example, implied. All good preaching involves the use of the imagination. No great preacher has ever lacked imagination. Perhaps we might go so far as to say it is simply an exhortation to love the Lord our God with all of our . . . mind . . . and our neighbor as ourselves.Scripture itself suggests that there are many different kinds of imagination—hence the different genre in which the word of God is expressed (poetry, historical narrative, dialogue, monologue, history, vision and so on). No two biblical authors had identical imaginations. It is doubtful if Ezekiel could have written Proverbs, for example! What do we mean by “imagination”? Our dictionaries give a series of definitions. Common to them all seems to be the ability to “think outside of oneself,” “to be able to see or conceive the same thing in a different way.” In some definitions the ideas of the ability to contrive, exercising resourcefulness, the mind’s creative power, are among the nuanced meanings of the word.Imagination in preaching means being able to understand the truth well enough to translate or transpose it into another kind of language or musical key in order to present the same truth in a way that enables others to see it, understand its significance, feel its power—to do so in a way that gets under the skin, breaks through the barriers, grips the mind, will and affections so that they not only understand the word used but feel their truth and power.Luther did this by the sheer dramatic forcefulness of his speech. Whitefield did it by his use of dramatic expression (overdid it, in the view of some). Calvin—perhaps surprisingly—did it too by the extraordinarily earthed-in-Geneva-life language in which he expressed himself. So an overwhelming Luther-personality, a dramatic preacher with Whitefieldian gifts of story-telling and voice (didn’t David Garrick say he’d give anything to be able to say “
Mesopotamia” the way George Whitefield did?), a deeply scholarly, retiring, reluctant preacher—all did it, albeit in very different ways. They saw and heard the word of God as it might enter the world of their hearers and convert and edify them. What is the secret here? It is, surely, learning to preach the word to yourself, from its context into your context, to make concrete in the realities of our lives the truth that came historically to others’ lives. This is why the old masters used to speak about sermons going from their lips with power only when they had first come to their own hearts with power.All of which leads us from the fifth commandment back to where we started. Only immersion in Scripture enables us to preach it this way. Therein lies the difference between preaching that is about the Bible and its message and preaching that seems to come right out of the Bible with a “thus says the Lord” ring of authenticity and authority.This is, surely, a good place to end the “first table” of these Commandments for Preachers. Now it is time to go and soak ourselves in Scripture to get ready for the “second table.”  The first part of this “Preacher’s Decalogue” reflected on five commandments that I thought might helpfully have guided me from early days in ministry. Unlike the true Decalogue, these “commandments” make no claim to either inspiration or They are the reflections of the moment. More prolonged reflection, or the stimulated reflection of others, might well produce a more coherent and perhaps more salutary list. The “first table” of the “Preacher’s Decalogue” was as follows:(1) Get to know your Bible better; (2) Be a man of prayer; (3) Don’t lose sight of Christ; (4) Be more deeply Trinitarian; (5) Use your imagination. We turn now to:6. Speak much of sin and grace. In his exposition of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Martin Luther insightfully used the words of Jeremiah’s call: The sum total of this epistle is to destroy, root out, and bring to naught all carnal wisdom . . . All that is in us is to be rooted out, pulled down, destroyed, and thrown down, i.e. all that delights us because it comes from us and is found in us; but all that is from outside of us and in Christ is to be built up and planted If that is true of Paul’s “preaching” in Romans, it ought to be true of ours as well. Sin and grace should be the downbeat and the upbeat that run through all our exposition. But there are some cautions. Preaching on sin must unmask the presence of sin, and undeceive about the nature of sin, as well as underline the danger of sin. This is not the same thing as hammering a congregation against the back wall of the “sanctuary” with a tirade! That requires little more than high levels of emotion. A genuine, ultimately saving, unmasking and undeceiving of the human heart is more demanding exegetically and spiritually. For what is in view here is the skilled work of a surgeon—opening a wound, exposing the cause of the patient’s sickness, cutting away the destructive malignancies, all in order to heal and restore to life.Doubtless people need warnings against the evils of contemporary society (abortion, apostasy in the visible church, etc). But we cannot build a ministry, nor healthy Christians, on a diet of fulminating against the world. No; rather we do this by seeing the Scriptures expose the sin in our own hearts, undeceive us about ourselves, root out the poison that remains in our own hearts—and then helping our people to do the same “by the open statement of the truth” ( 2 Cor. 4:2). There is only one safe way to do this. Spiritual surgery must be done within the context of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Only by seeing our sin do we come to see the need for and wonder of grace. But exposing sin is not the same thing as unveiling and applying grace. We must be familiar with and exponents of its multifaceted power, and know how to apply it to a variety of spiritual conditions. Truth to tell, exposing sin is easier than applying grace; for, alas, we are more intimate with the former than we sometimes are with the latter. Therein lies our weakness.

7. Use “the plain style”. This is a familiar enough expression in the history of preaching. It is associated particularly with the contrast between the literary eloquence of the High Anglican preaching tradition and the new “plain style” of the Puritans in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. William Perkins’s The Arte of Prophesying served as the first textbook in this school. But this seventh commandment is not insisting per se that we should all preach like the Puritans. Indeed acquaintance with the Puritans themselves would underline for us that they did not all preach as if they had been cloned from William Perkins! But they did have one thing in common: plain speech which they believed Paul commended and should be a leading characteristic of all preaching. (2 Cor 6:7, cf. 2 Cor 4:2). There are many ways this principle applies. Do not make eloquence the thing for which you are best known as a preacher; make sure you get the point of the passage you are preaching, and that you make it clear and express its power. True evangelical eloquence will take care of itself. Despite Charles Hodge’s reservations, Archibald Alexander was in general right in urging students to pay attention to the power of biblical ideas, and the words used in preaching will take care of themselves. The “masters” of clear style can teach us here. Paradoxically, in this context, two of them were themselves Anglicans. C. S. Lewis’s counsel on writing applies equally to preaching: Use language that makes clear what you really mean; prefer plain words that are direct to long words that are vague. Avoid abstract words when you can use concrete. Don’t use adjectives to tell us how you want us to feel—make us feel that by what you say! Don’t use words that are too big for their subject. Don’t use “infinitely” when you mean “very”, otherwise you will have no word left when you really do mean infinite!In a similar vein, here is J.C. Ryle’s counsel: Have a clear knowledge of what you want to say. Use simple words. Employ a simple sentence structure. Preach as though you had asthma! Be direct. Make sure you illustrate what you are talking about.Of course, there are exceptions to these principles. But why would I think I am one? A brilliant surgeon may be able to perform his operation with poor instruments; so can the Holy Spirit. But since in preaching we are nurses in the operating room—our basic responsibility is to have clean, sharp, sterile scalpels for the Spirit to do his surgery.

8. Find your own voice. “Voice” here is used in the sense of personal style—“know yourself” if one can Christianize the wisdom of the philosophers. That being said, finding a voice—in the literal sense—is also important. The good preacher who uses his voice badly is a rara avis indeed. Clearly affectation should be banned; nor are we actors whose voices are molded to the part that is to be played. But our creation as the image of God, creatures who speak—and speak his praises and his word—really requires us to do all we can with the natural resources the Lord has given us. But it is “voice” in the metaphorical sense that is really in view here—our approach to preaching that makes it authentically “our” preaching and not a slavish imitation of someone else. Yes, we may—must—learn from others, positively and negatively. Further, it is always important when others preach to listen to them with both ears open: one for personal nourishment through the ministry of the word, but the other to try to detect the principles that make this preaching helpful to people. We ought not to become clones. Some men never grow as preachers because the “preaching suit” they have borrowed does not actually fit them, or their gifts. Instead of becoming the outstanding expository, or redemptive historical, or God-centered, or whatever their hero may be, we may tie ourselves in knots and endanger our own unique giftedness by trying to use someone else’s paradigm, style or personality as a mold into which to squeeze ourselves. We become less than our true selves in Christ. The marriage of our personality with another’s preaching style can be a recipe for being dull and lifeless. So it is worth taking the time in an ongoing way to try to assess who and what we really are as preachers in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

9. Learn how to transition. There is a short (2 pages) but wonderful “must-read” section for preachers in the Westminster Assembly’s Directory for the Public Worship of God. Inter alia the Divines state that the preacher “In exhorting to duties . . . is, as he seeth cause, to teach also the means that help to the performance of them.” In contemporary speech this means that our preaching will answer the “how to?” question. This perhaps requires further explanation.Many of us are weary of the pandemic of “how-to-ness” we find in much contemporary preaching. It is often little better than psychology (however helpful) with a little Christian polish; it is largely imperative without indicative, and in the last analysis becomes self and success oriented rather than sin and grace oriented. But there is a Reformed and, more importantly, biblical, emphasis on teaching how to transition from the old ways to the new way, from patterns of sin to patterns of holiness. It is not enough to stress the necessity, nor even the possibility, of this. We must teach people how this happens.Years ago I took one of our sons for coaching from an old friend who had become a highly regarded teaching professional. My son was not, as they say, “getting on to the next level.” I could see that; but no longer had (if I ever had!) the golfing savoir faire to help. Enter my friend, and within the space of one coaching session the improvement in ball-striking was both visible and audible (there is something about the sound of a perfectly struck drive—or home run for that matter!). This is, in part, what we are called to effect in our handling of the Scriptures—not “this is wrong… this is right”—but by our preaching to enable and effect the transition. But how? For all its criticism of the pragmatism of evangelicalism, Reformed preaching is not always skilled in this area. Many are stronger on doctrine than on exegesis; and often stronger on soul-searching than on spiritual upbuilding. We need to learn how to expound the Scriptures in such a way that the very exposition empowers in our hearers the transitions from the old patterns of life in Adam to the new patterns of life in Christ.How do we do this? To begin with by expounding the Scriptures in a way that makes clear that the indicatives of grace ground the imperatives of faith and obedience and also effect them. This we must learn to do in a way that brings out of the text how the text itself teaches how transformation takes place and how the power of the truth itself sanctifies (cf. Jn. 17:17). This usually demands that we stay down in the text longer, more inquisitively than we sometimes do, asking the text: Show me how your indicatives effect your imperatives. Such study often yields the surprising (?) result: depth study of Scripture means that we are not left scurrying to the Christian bookshop or the journal on counseling in order to find out how the gospel changes lives . . . no, we have learned that the Scriptures themselves teach us the answer to the “What?” questions and also the answer to the “How to?” question.Do we—far less our congregations—know “how to”? Have we told them they need to do it, but left them to their own devices rather than model it in our preaching?Some years ago, at the end of a church conference, the local minister, whom I knew from his student days, said to me: “Just before I let you go tonight, will you do one last thing? Will you take me through the steps that are involved so that we learn to mortify sin?” I was touched—that he would broach what was obviously a personal as well as pastoral concern with me; but perhaps even more so by his assumption that I would be able to help. (How often we who struggle are asked questions we ourselves need to answer!) He died not long afterwards, and I think of his question as his legacy to me, causing me again and again to see that we need to exhibit what John “Rabbi” Duncan of New College said was true of Jonathan Edwards’s preaching: “His doctrine was all application, and his application was all doctrine.” The ministry that illustrates this, and that understands what is involved in how preaching transitions its hearers from the old to the new, will have what Thomas Boston once said about his own ministry, “a certain tincture” that people will recognize even if they cannot articulate or explain why it is so different and so helpful.  

. Love your people. John Newton wrote that his congregation would take almost anything from him, however painful, because they knew “I mean to do them good.” This is a litmus test for our ministry. It means that my preparation is a more sacred enterprise than simply satisfying my own love of study; it means that my preaching will have characteristics about it, difficult to define but nevertheless sensed by my hearers, that reflect the apostolic principle:What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake (2 Cor. 4:5)We were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us (1 Thess. 2:8)In Jesus Christ, the church’s One True Preacher, message and messenger are one. He is the Preacher, and also the message. That is not true of us. But, in union with Christ (and we preach “in Christ” as well as live and die “in Christ”) a coalescence of a lesser sort takes place: the truth of the message is conveyed by the preacher whose spirit is conformed to the grace of God in the message. How can it be otherwise when preaching involves “God making his appeal through us” (2 Cor. 5:20)? “A preacher’s life” (wrote Thomas Brooks) “should be a commentary upon his doctrine; his practice should be the counterpane [counterpart] of his sermons. Heavenly doctrines should always be adorned with a heavenly life.”[1]A “Preacher’s Decalogue” might be helpful; but at the end of the day we are nourished not by the commands of law but by the provisions of God’s grace in the gospel. It is as true of our preaching as of our living that what law cannot do, because of the weakness of our flesh, God accomplishes through Christ, in order to fulfill his commands in us by the Spirit. May it be so for us! Then we will be able truly to sing:Happy if with my latest breath,I might but gasp his Name

Preach him to all, and cry in death Behold, behold the Lamb