God must give it, of course. “But you shall receive power,” said Jesus, “when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”
Candidly, to make the bare assertion that God must give the preacher his power is at one time to say much and to say little: much because the statement is fundamentally true, little because it is facilely unexplored.
What is more, all the exploration in the world will not yield complete agreement on the elements of which this power is composed or the tests by which it is measured. Neither the “erg” nor the “megaton” has any exact homiletical equivalent. A preacher in authentic action is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the indefinable.
This allowed, much remains to be said, measured, assessed, learned. Nothing can alter the fact that power in preaching is channeled and conditioned. If the ineffable is there, so is the discernible and the verifiable.
At least we know where to look for the locus of this thing we call pulpit potency: in the minds that preaching informs and illumines, in the moods that it creates, in the motives it addresses and kindles, in the movement of total personality that under God it evokes to obedience.
Beyond this, there are specifics worth noting, though they must be set down here with far less than adequate treatment:
1. Sermon power is linked with content. We do but deceive ourselves if we think otherwise. It is the “truth”—the vital substance of the many-faceted Gospel—that sets men free. We who profess to be men of the Word need to be saved alike from the sham of a noisy quackery and from the shimmer of a rhetorically concealed superficiality. Many a sermon that sounded powerful in delivery, when reproduced in cold print proved to be so devoid of content that no charity could absolve the failure.
For the power of what is said there is no adequate substitute in the power of the way it is said.
2. Sermon power is linked with pertinence. In Quaker circles no higher compliment can be paid to a messenger of the Lord than for a member of the “meeting” to say to him, “Thee spoke to our condition.” Needs, burdens, perplexities, defeats, rancors, hopes, fears, sorrows, joys—these are there in the hearts, if not on the faces, of the listening people. And it is to just such people in just such living situations that the sermon must address itself. If it fails to “connect,” it is more impotent than potent.
3. Sermon power is linked with rapport. This is not a repetition of point two. The preacher may speak relevantly and still fall short of that high fusion between himself and his listeners in which it is as evident to them as to him that both have been caught up into a community of light and of love, of judgment and of mercy. A single sermon may have only two or three intervals when this singular mutuality reaches maximum level.
4. Sermon power is linked with conviction. It is this that gives preaching its “message” quality. God, who has spoken to the preacher in his preparation of the message, is now speaking through him in the enunciation of it. Cynics may smile at this; but unless we are prepared to believe it, and act on it, we better turn in our resignation. It is a man “possessed” who has power in preaching. What the pious call unction is the message using the man. When the man uses the message, the unction is bogus.
5. Sermon power is linked with overtones. The word is from the world of music. If we think of tones as being like a stream, the overtones, the “upper partial,” as technicians may call them, are like ripples and wavelets. Here is beauty, here is grace, here is wonder.
Preaching furnishes a parallel. There are moments when the sermon-created mood of the congregation is so overmastering that no technique can account for it: a joy so uncontainable that a thousand hallelujahs would not do it justice, a shame so shattering that only the Cross of God’s Son can bring hope and healing, a hush of sheer worship and adoring awe so profound that one’s own heartbeat seems audible.
Power!
The preacher is foredoomed who fancies he is its creator. He is not less foredoomed if he fails to toil with terrible, praying industry at being its instrument.
