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Many examples of prayer
“Dear Lord!” “Sweet Jesus!” “Precious Christ!” are by them poured out whole-sale, till one is nauseated. These familiarities may have been not only tolerable, but even beautiful when they first fell from a saint of God, speaking, as it were, out of the excellent glory, but when repeated flippantly they are not only intolerable, but indecent, if not profane.
"Seigneur Jésus" en prière
Isaac Ambrose, once pastor at Preston, who wrote that famous book, Looking unto Jesus, always set apart one month in the year for seclusion in a hut in a wood at Garstang. No wonder that he was so mighty a divine, when he could regularly spend so long a time in the mount with God.
John Owen, whom you will do well to consult.3
Beware of having an eye to the auditors; beware of becoming rhetorical to please the listeners.
“Dear Lord,” and “Blessed Lord,” and “Sweet Lord,” come over and over again as vain repetitions, they are among the worst of blots. I must confess I should feel no revulsion in my mind to the words, “Dear Jesus,” if they fell from the lips of a Rutherford, or a Hawker, or a Herbert; but when I hear fond and familiar expressions hackneyed by persons not at all remarkable for spirituality, I am inclined to wish that they could, in some way or other, come to a better understanding of the true relation existing between man and God.
God’s name is not to be a stop-gap to make up for our want of words. Take care to use most reverently the name of the infinite Jehovah.
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“Our Father who art in heaven.” Familiarity there may be, but holy familiarity; boldness, but the boldness which springs from grace and is the work of the Spirit; not the boldness of the rebel who carries a brazen front in the presence of his offended king, but the boldness of the child who fears because he loves, and loves because he fears.
“A place for everything and everything in its place;” preach in the sermon and pray in the prayer. Disquisitions upon our need of help in prayer are not prayer.
I am not able to see any reason for depriving me of the holiest, sweetest, and most profitable exercise which my Lord has allotted me; if I may have my choice, I will sooner yield up the sermon than the prayer.
the first necessary is, that it must be a matter of the heart.
Next to this, our prayers must be appropriate.
do not let your prayer be long.
Do not be too long, for several reasons.
First,
seco...
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One little hint I cannot withhold—never appear to be closing, and then start off again for another five minutes.
Another canon is—do not use cant phrases.
130th Psalm,
the brethren in opposition meant by preparation quite another thing, not the preparation of the head, but of the heart, which consists in the solemn consideration beforehand of the importance of prayer, meditation upon the needs of men’s souls, and a remembrance of the promises which we are to plead; and thus coming before the Lord with a petition written upon the fleshy tables of the heart.
Blue
I feel, my brethren, that we ought to prepare ourselves by private prayer for public praying.
Sound information upon scriptural subjects your hearers crave for, and must have. Accurate explanations of Holy Scripture they are entitled to, and if you are “an interpreter, one of a thousand,” a real messenger of heaven, you will yield them plenteously. Whatever else may be present, the absence of edifying, instructive truth, like the absence of flour from bread, will be fatal. Estimated by their solid contents rather than their superficial area, many sermons are very poor specimens of godly discourse.
Brethren, if you are not theologians you are in your pastorates just nothing at all. You may be fine rhetoricians, and be rich in polished sentences; but without knowledge of the gospel, and aptness to teach it, you are but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
The abounding of empty declamation, and the absence of food for the soul, will turn a pulpit into a box of bombast, and inspire contempt instead of reverence.
We insist upon it, that there must be abundance of matter in sermons, and next, that this matter must be congruous to the text. The discourse should spring out of the text as a rule, and the more evidently it does so the better;
there must always be a connection, and something more than a remote connection—a real relationship between the sermon and its text.
Think of a discourse commencing with such an amazing and stupendous assertion as the following, which by its native grandeur will strike you at once with a sense of the sublime and beautiful: “MAN IS MORAL.” This genius might have added, “A cat has four feet.” There would have been as much novelty in the one information as the other. I remember a sermon by a would-be profound writer which quite stunned the reader with grenadier words of six-feet length, but which, when properly boiled down, came to as much essence of meat as this—Man has a soul, his soul will live in another world, and
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Cautious reticence is, in nine cases out of ten, cowardly betrayal.
Blue
Bring in all the features of truth in due proportion, for every part of Scripture is profitable, and you are not only to preach the truth, but the whole truth.
Do not make minor doctrines main points. Do not paint the details of the background of the gospel picture with the same heavy brush as the great objects in the foreground of it.
Among a certain order of minds at this time the Athenian desire of telling or hearing some new thing appears to be predominant. They boast of new light, and claim a species of inspiration which warrants them in condemning all who are out of their brotherhood, and yet their grand revelation relates to a mere circumstantial of worship, or to an obscure interpretation of prophecy; so that, at sight of their great fuss and loud cry concerning so little, we are reminded of “Ocean into tempest toss’d To waft a feather or to drown a fly.”
Of all I would wish to say this is the sum; my brethren, preach CHRIST, always and evermore. He is the whole gospel. His person, offices, and work must be our one great, all-comprehending theme. The world needs still to be told of its Saviour, and of the way to reach him.
If with the zeal of Methodists we can preach the doctrine of Puritans a great future is before us.
The fire of Wesley, and the fuel of Whitfield, will cause a burning which shall set the forests of error on fire, and warm the very soul of this cold earth.
We are not called to proclaim philosophy and metaphysics, but the simple gospel. Man’s fall, his need of a new birth, forgiveness through an atonement, and salvation as the result of f...
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More and more am I jealous lest any views upon prophecy, church government, politics, or even systematic theology, should withdraw one of us from glorying in the cross of Christ. Salvation is a theme for which I would fain enlist every holy tongue. I am greedy after witnesses for the glorious gospel of the blessed God. O that Christ crucified were the universal burden of men of God.
Prayer is twice blest; it blesseth the pleading preacher, and the people to whom he ministers.
We would give every portion of Scripture its fair share in our heart and head. Doctrine, precept, history, type, psalm, proverb, experience, warning, promise, invitation, threatening, or rebuke—we would include the whole of inspired truth within the circle of our teachings.
A sculptor believes, whenever he sees a rough block of marble, that there is a noble statue concealed within it, and that he has only to chip away the superfluities and reveal it. So do you believe that there is within the husk of everything the kernel of a sermon for the wise man. Be wise, and see the heavenly in its earthly pattern.
God promises to give us grace according to our days, but he says nothing of endowing us with a reserve fund for the future. “Day by day the manna fell; Oh, to learn this lesson well!”
To you, my younger brethren, I feel safe in saying with authority, leave ambitious attempts at elaborate series of discourses to older and abler men. We have but a small share of mental gold and silver; let us invest our little capital in useful goods which will obtain a ready market, and leave the wealthier merchants to deal in more expensive and cumbrous articles.
I am quite certain that if we will wait upon God for our subjects, and make it a matter of prayer that we may be rightly directed, we shall be led forth by a right way; but if we are puffed up with the idea that we can very easily choose for ourselves, we shall find that even in the selection of a subject, without Christ we can do nothing. Wait upon the Lord, hear what he would speak, receive the word direct from God’s mouth, and then go forth as an ambassador fresh from the court of heaven. “Wait, I say, on the Lord.”
Blue
Avoid that childish trifling and outrageous twisting of texts which will make you a wise man among fools, but a fool among wise men.
Brethren, in the name of everything that is sacred, ring the whole chime in your steeple, and do not dun your people with the ding-dong of one poor cracked bell.
There they might almost boast with the Pharisee, that they are not as other men are, although it would be blasphemy to thank God for it.
indeed, all mimicry is in the pulpit near akin to an unpardonable sin.
If any brother wants to die of influenza let him wear a warm scarf round his neck, and then one of these nights he will forget it, and catch such a cold as will last him the rest of his natural life. You seldom see a sailor wrap his neck up. No, he always keeps it bare and exposed, and has a turn-down collar, and if he has a tie at all, it is but a small one loosely tied, so that the wind can blow all round his neck. In this philosophy I am a firm believer, having never deviated from it for these fourteen years, and having before that time been frequently troubled with colds, but very seldom
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Sin cannot be taken out of men, as Eve was taken out of the side of Adam, while they are fast asleep.
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In order to get attention, the first golden rule is, always say something worth hearing.
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Romaine used to say it was well to understand the art of preaching, but infinitely better to know the heart of preaching; and in that saying there is no little weight.
