On Preaching

No Christian teacher has any business to open his mouth unless he is sure that he has received something to impart to men as a gift from the divine Spirit.  To preach our doubts, to preach our own opinions, to preach poor platitudes, to talk about politics and morals and taste and literature, and the like, in the pulpit is profanation and blasphemy.  Let no man open his lips unless he can say, “The Lord has showed me this, and this I bring to you as His Word.”  Nor has a Christian organization any right to exist unless it recognizes the communication and reception and further spreading of this spiritual gift as its great function.  Churches which have lost that consciousness and, instead of a divine gift, have little more to offer than formal worship or music or entertainments or mere intellectual discourse, whether orthodox or “advanced,” have no right to be and, by the law of the survival of the fittest, will not long be.  The one thing that warrants such a relationship as subsists between you and me is this: my consciousness that I have a message from God and your belief that you hear such from my lips.  Unless that be our bond, the sooner these walls crumble and this voice ceases and these pews are emptied, the better…O, for more, in all our pulpits, of that burdened consciousness of a divine message which needs the relief of speech and longs, with a longing caught from Christ, to impart its richest treasures. – From: Expositions of Holy Scripture.  Comment on Romans 1:11-12.

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