Preaching

Did the Apostle voluntarily deny himself the pleasure of being eloquent? Was he not an eloquent man? Not in the sense in which Apollos was eloquent, the fluent, ornate, dazzling style of eloquence, but rather suggestive, stimulating, audacious, and yet chastened with the sublimest spirit of devotion. Was Paul his very best intellectual self when he went to Corinth? He says he was not. In one sense, the Corinthians saw the poorest aspect of his manifold nature; and yet, if they had known it, they were in reality seeing the very best aspect of the man's ministry. But they were sensuous, objective, looking out for spectacle and colour, and not listening with the inner ear, which alone can hear the true music of life and speech. The Apostle had a specific reason for not being verbally eloquent: he was talking to children; he would rebuke their intellectual vanity by presenting himself under aspects that were, apparently at least, humiliating. But the reason is deeper than a mere accommodation to Corinthian infancy; the reason is given in plain terms. The Apostle went to Corinth to declare the testimony of God. That was an all-explanatory reason; in the glory of that function the worker lost all his individuality. The Apostle recognised himself to be but a vessel, an instrument, a medium; he himself being as surprised as those who heard him at the music which God sounded through his voice. It is always so with great teaching and great speaking; the speaker is as surprised as the hearer. Why? Because he yields himself to the hands of God, and he knows not what tune will be played upon the instrument of his soul. Who ever found the Apostle Paul wondering what he should say, as to the substance, the pith, and the purport of his doctrine? The Apostle Paul was an errand-bearer; he had himself nothing to say to the world; he had a testimony to deliver, and his testimony was the testimony of God. That carries the whole purpose and thought of Christian ministry. The Apostle must fill his mind with Divine messages, he must read the prophets, and peruse the life of Christ, and study the ministry of the Cross, and only tell what he himself has been told. Preachers have nothing to say; they are unfaithful when they utter any word of their own, then they steal an honour, and arrest public attention with thoughts that are not worth taking out of the dust. The sermon is nothing, the text is everything: but were this theory proceeded upon, all Corinthian congregations would be dissolved. "Excellency of speech or of wisdom" has its subtle temptations. There is a profanity of sentence-making, there is a blasphemy of rhetoric. We do not want the vessel, we want the life-giving fluid which it holds. It is not the goblet that saves us, it is the blood. Has he time to think out of what vessel he drinks who is dying of thirst? Does he take up the goblet and ask questions as to its age, as to its decoration, as to its symbolism? He sees not the vessel, he lays hold of it and drains it, because he is conscious of a fatal thirst. But the Corinthians in all this have themselves to blame that so much attention is paid to the vessel. Their criticisms are flippant, superficial, profane. There are not wanting those who speak about a "finished style"; the heavens frown on them that they should talk such folly and madness within presence of the Cross. The Apostle Paul, therefore, comes before all Christian ages as the exemplar of Christian apostolicity and Christian ministry.

The strength of the temptation may be in some degree measured by the strength of the resolution with which Paul encountered it. Read: "For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." Men have to gird themselves for great occasions; sometimes men have to go into training for a long time, that they may strengthen muscle and fibre, and flesh and bone, so as to endure the conflict well, and come out of it triumphantly. No man can know how long the Apostle was in corning to this determination. His, indeed, was a swiftly acting mind; he did not hover about a subject, but fell upon it with energetic precision. Yet we have the Apostle here in various moods; trembling like a leaf wind-shaken, and standing like a rock. He was a manifold man. He cried in public, and in public he thundered. The one thing he determined to know was the all-inclusive thing. He was not content to know about Jesus Christ. Many persons are fascinated by that theme who are not Christians. There is nothing less acceptable to the Son of God than a compliment paid to his character, if the payment of that tribute be not followed by the imitation of his Spirit and the reproduction of his life. Many persons preach about Jesus Christ who never preach him. The whole difficulty lies in that word "about." They are within sight of him, they have a clear vision of his personality, his figure, his colour, his height, his bulk, his historical relations; they write learned essays about him, they paint verbal pictures of the Messiah, they turn his miracles and mighty signs and wonders into poesy, into idyllic incidents. They do not preach Christ. Sometimes they preach Christ best who never name him. Were a minister to preach upon the forgiveness of sins, he would be termed a moralist, a legalist; whereas, he is preaching the very agony of the Cross of Christ. No man can preach the forgiveness of a foe without preaching Christ, yet Christ's name may not be mentioned. We are humiliated and disgraced by bigots, who call that preaching Christ which simply names the Name without penetrating to the inner meaning, thought, and purpose of the Son of God. You cannot reconcile two enemies without preaching Christ. He who does Christ's work preaches Christ himself. Could we persuade the Church to accept this definition what charity would be developed, what nobleness, what consciousness of one man supplying what is lacking in the ministry of another, and what a grasp of the whole ministry we should secure! There must be some strong men willing to live on begged bread until they can drill this doctrine into the stony heart of a nominal but insufferable Church. Why was the Apostle not satisfied with knowing about Jesus Christ? Because Jesus Christ may be but a historical name, one of many, the brightest point in a series of brilliant points; what the Apostle would know was Jesus Christ "crucified," that word bearing all the emphasis of his meaning. Many persons fall short of the Cross; they can witness the performance of any number of miracles, and be appropriately amazed; they can listen to any number of discourses and say, "How wonderful!" All this amounts to nothing: unless a man be crucified with Christ, on Christ's Cross, he is none of Christ's. But this would cut down the Church by millions. All the proud people would have to go; all the self-satisfied people would be scattered, while all persons who have little theories and religious inventions and pious tricks of their own would have to be dispersed. Who is sufficient for these things? The man who thinks he has about him one rag of respectability would have to be driven forth, and Jesus Christ would be left with a few broken hearts, a few sinners having one only cry, "God be merciful unto me a sinner." Numerically, the Church would be small; energetically, spiritually, dynamically, it would be omnipotent. He who erases the word "crucified" erases the words "Jesus Christ."

How was the Apostle with the Corinthians? He explains his spirit and his attitude in pathetic terms:—"And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling." What a various character was Paul! Hear him on one occasion when they tell him that bonds and imprisonment await him in every city; he says, "None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I may finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I had received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God." Then you describe him as a mighty north wind tearing down the valleys of time, never to be resisted or turned back. At Corinth he was in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. This was not all bodily infirmity; there was a touch of another sensation in this mysterious experience. It would be curious to range on the one side all the heroic utterances of Paul, when he is giant conqueror, not a whit behind the chiefest of the Apostles; and then to put down on the opposite page all the times of his depression, when he needed cheering words from angels and from God himself; for no man so much needed cheering as the Apostle Paul. Peter had better spirits. Collate the passages in which God is obliged, so to say, by the constraint of love to come to Paul and say, "Fear not." Listen to Paul as he says: "There stood by me the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve, saying, Fear not, Paul." To no man in the Church was that word so frequently addressed; yet at other times he seemed to carry the whole Church by his strength, to hold the whole flock of Christ within the fold of his heart. Poor is the life that has only one line in it! How stricken with the disease of monotony the soul that can only sing one tune! Sometimes the Apostle could only rebuke vanity by what might appear to be excessive humility on his own side. The Apostle had to create an atmosphere in which it was impossible for any man to speak above his breath, lest he should convict himself of ostentation and self-idolatry. The mystery wrought by this apostolic action ended in a consciousness on the part of the Corinthians that they must not display themselves, if he, the greatest, was so tremulous, so self-restrained, and so consciously and lovingly subject to the chastening of the Divine Spirit. The only way in which certain blatant persons can be put down is by the silence of the men who are attacked. Paul could only rebuke the vanity of the Church by exhibiting himself in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. For not one man amongst them did he care one iota, so far as that man's intelligence or power was concerned. Every man in that Church acquired his quality and his value by his attachment to One greater than himself. This was a studied depreciation; this was a calculated abasement.

How does the Apostle describes his preaching? He says: "And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom": I never made a sermon: to make a sermon! why, that is to make an idol, a graven image, a shape in clay; and to breathe into its nostrils my own dying breath, why that were waste of life: I simply said, Thou Blessed One of the Cross, put into my heart what has to be uttered by my tongue; tell me thy word, and I will go and speak it, though every man be a lion, and every town a den of lions. "Enticing words of man's wisdom:" small inventions of man's mind; man's answers to the puzzle of the universe; man's renewed attempt to answer an unanswerable enigma; man's profession of being able to arrange the little pieces of the universe so as to get the shape of the whole; man correcting himself to-day for what he said yesterday, and begging the pardon of an audience whilst he retracts an assertion and replaces it with another which is equally devoid of truth. What we want is the burning heart, the burning tongue, the self that has no self, the heroic egotism that in the very grandeur of its passion forgets the pettiness of its individuality.

How, then, did Paul preach? "In demonstration of the Spirit and of power; that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." The converts might be few, but they should be good. No man should be able to say that his minister was not present, and therefore he could not defend his own religion; no one should be driven to say, If you want to know what I believe, consult my preacher: let every man have his own conviction wrought in him by God the Holy Ghost. Faith that stands in the wisdom of men may be overturned by the very energy that created it. Any man who accepts Christ as the result of controversial study may reject Christ tomorrow because some mightier controversialist has undertaken to teach a contrary doctrine. We must come to Christ through the heart. It is not the intellect that receives Christ, but when the heart lays hold upon him it takes another heart greater still to extract the infinite benediction. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness." It is because the heart is not touched that we have bigotry, sectarianism, separation one from another, so that one saith, It is so, and another saith, It is not so. Men cannot be reconciled in opinion; they can be one in the ocean of love. But would not this be mere emotion? I answer, No. We should be careful how we admit the existence of any such thing as mere emotion. There may be an animal emotion, but the emotion that is spoken of in connection with the Cross of Christ is a soul-melting passion, a fire that brings into one all the various elements of life, fusing them together, and representing them in outward action as a unity strong and indissoluble.

The Apostle gathers himself together, and says, "Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect." That is to say, we can be wiser than we appear to be: whilst I was in Corinth I taught the alphabet; I could have spoken a fluent literature that would have amazed and distressed you all; but wisdom is not to be spoken in the presence of children; we speak to children in children's language; we speak the wisdom of God among them that are perfect, them that are strong, them that are spiritually-minded; men who can handle a mystery without taking the bloom off it; men who can see the meaning of a parable without being bewildered by its accidentals; men who see the spirit is greater than the word, the letter, the form. There be those clever people who examine the robe that has been brought out for the shoulders of the prodigal, and who take up his shoes and examine them, and take off the ring that they may look at it; and there be those who see no robe, nor shoes, nor ring, but join the infinite gladness because a soul has been raised from the dead. Do not waste the parables, the mysteries, the symbols of God; they teach some inner core-truth, some heart thought; seize them, and as for the drapery let it flow as it may, for God is often redundant in his gift of cloud and colour, flowers and music.

Paul is very ironical in the after parts of his discourse. It is a beautiful and profitable intellectual study to follow this man in all the gamut of his intellectual action. He looks at the Corinthians with a countenance charged with expressions they can never understand. He speaks "the wisdom of God in a mystery," in a parable, in a concealed way, in a way that is only half disclosed; "even the hidden wisdom," the wisdom that rises, floats, passes, falls out of view, returns, shines with added glory, and then dissolves in added clouds and darkness. Then the Apostle says, "But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." Where is it so written? Some say in an Apocryphal book. But that is a poor answer; ten thousand other things may be written in Apocryphal books which we have never read. But it is written—where? Did any one try to find out whether this passage is inscribed in the Old Testament? We take it for granted it is written because Paul says it is written; there we are poor Papists, there we are miserable idolaters; Paul says it is written, and therefore we accept it, and never inquire where—the fact being it is not written. We should study Paul's method of quoting the Bible. When Paul seeks to establish a given doctrinal point he will give you, as it were, chapter and verse; at other times he will give you, not chapter and verse, but the whole Bible. It is lawful so to quote the Bible as to lose all sense of chapter and verse. Chapter and verse are not Divine inventions, they are not human inventions—we will not press the inquiry farther. We have been ruined by chapter and verse. We may be biblical when we have no text to quote. "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive." When did he say so? Never, and yet he never said anything else. If you ask for chapter and verse, then Jesus Christ never said these words; but if you ask for Jesus Christ's teaching you cannot have a finer, more suggestive declaration of the doctrine and purpose of his life. So "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." You find an echo of this in Isaiah, in more places than one, but not in this connection, and not in this relation; and yet the whole Old Testament simply says this. When you have read through from Genesis to Malachi, you might say the whole is comprehended in one saying, namely, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." Talk about the finality of the Book! it begins but never ends. Thus this is the teaching of Paul when he says: "But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit." There is a continual spiritual communication going on between God and the believer. We know many things by the spirit we do not know by the letter. The ear of corn has outlived the seed out of which it sprang; the flower expresses the secret of the root, and the fragrance of the flower. What shall be said of that? always giving itself away, shaking out its blessing on the wind, so that, though rich men wall in their flower-gardens, the fragrance comes over the wall and blesses the humblest little child that plays on the road. Dear little child, sniff this gift of odour, by-and-by thou shalt have a whole paradise.

Have we the spirit of interpretation and sympathy, the spirit that sees afar off? If so, we are rich, and we are never alone.