The study, art and practice of preaching, Bible preaching, has been a major focus of mine with in the past couple of months. I just read through D. Martyn Lloyd Jones Preaching and Preachers, and exactly as was promised to me before I read it, I came away from that book deeply in love with the art of biblical preaching. As I was walking out of school today, I saw someone had left me some papers in my school mailbox. It turned out to be two essays on Preaching. I immediately recognized them from a book my pastor is reading entitled Preach the Word: Essays on Expository Preaching, and they were two essays; first from J.I. Packer and the second from Peter Jensen, who, by the way, I just had the honor of hearing him preach at Capitol Hill Baptist Church about a month ago.
I just finished reading Packer’s essay entitled Expository Preaching: Charles Simeon and Ourselves, and I can not keep from writing about it. First and foremost, this book needs to be picked up just to read the essays contained in it. I haven’t had a chance to get it yet for myself, but just from these two essays alone, I think it’s safe to assume the rest are just as good. J.I. Packer has done an excellent job in making the reader completely forget that Packer wrote it. You are immediately drawn into the life of Charles Simeon, who has quickly become one of by favorite historical figures to read about.
Charles Simeon, born in 1759, lived a life of servitude to his Lord Jesus Christ that is marked by genuine humility, perseverance in the face of constant persecution, and perhaps most notably, his ability to preach the Bible honestly, powerfully, and effectively. What was so important to Simeon though, was that the Bible be preached in an expository manner. Packer eases the reader in to the nitty gritty with this statement:
“Our own constant suspicion, I think, is that our own preaching contains too much of man and not enough of God. [Does this not sound exactly like the definition of preaching constant topical sermons to you, it does to me?] We have an uneasy feeling that the hungry sheep who look up are not really being fed. It is not that we are not trying to break the bread of life to them; it is just that, despite ourselves, our sermons turn out dull and flat and trite and tedious and, in the event, not very nourishing. We are tempted (naturally) to soothe ourselves with the thought that the day of preaching is past, or that zealous visiting or organizing makes sufficient amends for ineffectiveness in the pulpit; but then we re-read 1 Cor. ii. 4— “my speech and my preaching was . . . in demonstration of the Spirit and of power”—and we are made uneasy again, and the conclusion is forced upon us once more that something is missing in our ministry. This, surely, is the real reason why we Evangelicals today are so fascinated by the subject of expository preaching: because we want to know how we can regain the lost authority and unction which made Evangelical preaching mighty in days past to humble sinners and built up the Church. When we ask: what is expository preaching? our question really means: how can we learn to preach God’s Word “in demonstration of the Spirit and of power”? What is the secret of the preaching that achieves what our own sermons are failing to achieve?”
For Simeon, preaching a text was not finding a certain text in which you could use Sunday to make a point that has been consuming you or the church’s mind. A preachers job is not to find texts in order to substantiate a certain theological camp and make certain your parishioners are of like mind, no, the point of the sermon was “precisely exposition, bringing out of the texts what God had put in them.”
Expository sermons must be preached from the text, it must have a doctrinal substructure, they will always, if honest to the biblical text, be theocentric in perspective, and always, the sermon must be preached with power; believe it to preach it, don’t preach it to believe it. The Bible was meant to be openly and somberly explored in such a way that the meaning God meant for it to have could clearly come through to its hearers.
“The text chosen should so shape the sermon “that no other text in the Bible will suit the discourse” and nothing foreign to the text must be allowed to intrude. For the prime secret of freedom and authority in preaching, as Simeon was well aware, is the knowledge that what you are saying is exactly what your text says, so that your words have a proper claim to be received as the Word of God.”
Lastly, Packer ends with a most serious and ever so real challenge to todays preachers, a challenge Simeon both met and exemplified, and that is of course personal holiness. The sermon, the preaching, is only so good as the man himself. An effective sermon can only truly come from the heart of a man who has been so influenced and changed by the Gospel and Christ himself. His heart must long for, search for, and see God ever before any words can be spoken for others to search and see God. Packer says this.
“Simeon himself is our example here. The feature of his preaching which most constantly impressed his hearers was the fact that he was, as they said, “in earnest”; and that reflected his own overwhelming sense of sin, and of the wonder of the grace that had saved him; and that in turn bore witness to the closeness of his daily fellowship and walk with his God. As he gave time to sermon preparation, so he gave time to seeking God’s face. “The quality of his preaching,” writes the Bishop of Bradford, “was but a reflection of the quality of the man himself. And there can be little doubt that the man himself was largely made in the early morning hours which he devoted to private prayer and the devotional study of the Scriptures. It was his custom to rise at 4 a.m., light his own fire, and then devote the first four hours of the day to communion with God. Such costly self-discipline made the preacher. That was primary. The making of the sermon was secondary and derivative.” That was primary. If our question is: where is the Lord God of Charles Simeon? we now have our answer. As so often with God’s answers, it takes the form of a counter-question: where are the preachers who seek after the Lord God as Simeon did? This, surely, is the final word, if not of Simeon, at least from God through Simeon, to us who would preach the gospel of Christ in the power of God’s Spirit today. God help us to hear it, and to heed it.”
Thanks be to God for giving us men like Charles Simeon to whom we may look to as encouragement and mentors.
Soulah Gratia 