Why Our Preaching Fails

In the days of our grandfathers it was believed that the great truths of redemption should be preached every Sunday from every pulpit. There were doctrinal differences, of course. The Baptist believed in immersion, the Congregationalist defended the sovereign rights of the local congregation, the Episcopalian kept in mind his apostolic succession, and the Presbyterian insisted upon the Kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ. In one important respect, however, they all agreed: the great message of the pulpit must be sin and salvation. Man is a lost sinner by nature, and he can be saved only by the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ. That was the central truth kept before the people by C. H. Spurgeon the Baptist, G. Campbell Morgan the Congregationalist, Charles R. McIlvaine the Episcopalian, B. B. Warfield the Presbyterian, C. F. W. Walther the Lutheran, and scores of others. Young men in seminary were told emphatically that preaching must be Christ-centered and redemption-centered.

Loss Of Anchor

All that was years ago. Then came a period when the pulpit lost its evangelical anchorage. After a few years of sensationalism, smart-aleck sermon titles and catchy rhetoric, many clerical faddists cast away the evangelical preaching of their forefathers and substituted life-centered sermons for Christ-centered ones. It was not a proclamation of the life to come. It was an analysis of the life that we are living today. A popular Scottish preacher, whose books of sermons were known to many in America, was one of the leaders of the new homiletical fashion.

The Saturday church page of almost any newspaper contained such sermon titles as: “On Facing Life in an Atomic Age,” “What to Do When Life Lets You Down,” “The Poignant Call of Life’s Yesterdays,” “On Standing up to Life Unafraid.” Such sermons were often devoid of any evangelical content. A sailor lad was not far wrong when he said of a sermon that he had just heard: “He used the word ‘life’ thirty-seven times and the name of Jesus Christ but once, and that was in his last sentence.”

The formula of life-preaching was simple. It consisted in selecting any trite saying, adding all manner of rhetorical embroidery, then ending with an admonition of the self-improvement variety. A popular preacher, for example, was quite likely to take a current cliche, such as “take it easy now,” and out of this vapid expression produce the following:

“Life surrounds us with all manner of temptations, and one of these is the bad habit of trying to do too much. The business man rushes for his 7:15 commuter train, the children scamper off to school, and the housewife hurries to the shopping center. We are all in too much of a hurry. We have never learned the art of sitting down for a quiet hour and getting acquainted with ourselves. Life surrounds us with too many distractions, and life puts many an obstacle in our way; but on the other hand, life will speak to us with a still, small voice if only we might learn to sit down and listen to the things that life is trying to say to us.”

Having taken his original theme of four words, our preacher has said the same thing in a paragraph of 124 words. Then he restates the idea once more in different form, and continues so to do until 15 minutes are consumed. Then he says, “Let us pray.”

Neither Law Nor Gospel

There is nothing difficult about such preaching, for it demands no study of the Greek text, no effort at exposition, not even a knowledge of theology. Is such preaching a faithful fulfilment of one’s duty? It cannot be, for it contains neither the Law which leads sinners to repentance, nor the Gospel which declares the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. When such men as Spurgeon, Herber Evans and Moody preached, men and women were brought to a knowledge of sin by the Law, and led to Calvary by the Gospel; but if ever a sermon on “Life’s Message to an Age of Stress” caused one reprobate to live an upright life, or directed one alarmed sinner to the Cross, neither you nor I have heard of the incident.

A variation of the life-centered sermon is the more recent discourse that is loaded with terms borrowed from the prep school’s course in psychology and psychiatry. Such sermons are man-centered and sprinkled with pronouns in their plural form. There is never a mention of sola gratia and sola Scriptura in these we-us-our-ourselves essays. No person with wavering faith has ever been strengthened by a tepid little lecture on procrastination, nor has ever a family, stunned by a sudden bereavement, received comfort on Sunday by listening to their pastor say: “We are all inclined to side-step life’s more basic commitments. There is a tendency in all of us to shirk the duty of evaluating the problems presently before us. Our reluctance to integrate our own potential with life’s more attractive possibilities results in a positive loss to ourselves.” Such words as “commitments,” “evaluate,” “presently” (which means soon, and not now), “integrate” and “co-ordinate” are shop-soiled expressions of the news secretaries of the New Deal period, and to link them together with plural pronouns can bring comfort and strengthening of faith to no one.

Secularized Preaching

John Kennedy of Dingwall, that magnificent evangelical pulpit orator of the Scottish Highlands, realized the danger of secularized preaching more than 70 years ago. In his The Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire (Edinburgh, 1861), in his The Apostle to the North (London, 1867), and in the posthumous Sermons by the Rev. John Kennedy (Inverness, 1883), this great Gaelic-speaking preacher pleads in the English language for better preaching, declaring that the work of the pulpit is “worthless because it is Christless.” Dr. Kennedy declares:

Pauline preaching is becoming, in the estimation of many, an antiquated kind of thing, which, in an age such as ours, should be quite laid as a fossil on the shelf. And what is this new thing which they have introduced? It is not easy to describe it, for it is neither Law nor Gospel, and it is a rare eye that can discern it to be common sense. It is suited neither to saint nor to sinner, and where to find an audience for such preaching, in which neither of these shall be, it is utterly impossible to conjecture.… There are some who are enamoured of what they call practical preaching, by which they mean preaching which is not doctrinal, for they dislike to be made to feel how ignorant they are of the divine scheme of grace, preaching which, taking it for granted that all are Christians, deals out its counsels to all indiscriminately; and which, coming down to the everyday cares and anxieties of life, tends to cheer men in their daily toils by comforts which are furnished by reason rather than by Scripture, and which never flowed from “the fountain of living waters” through Christ crucified. These are the new styles of preaching, and if recent progress is maintained, Pauline preaching will soon cease to be heard from Scottish pulpits (Sermons, p. 550).

Still another type of sermon of our own day is that which attempts to present a Bible character in the light of psychoanalysis. Abraham, Moses, David, Simon Peter, Judas and the dying thief are each given a character dissection, and each part is mounted neatly, labeled and commented upon. The problem is to discover why such men acted as they did. Those who defend such preaching will tell us that Alexander Whyte did it; and was not Dr. Whyte one of the greatest of his generation? Did not all Edinburgh queue up for half an hour, twice every Sunday, before what was then called Free St. George’s Presbyterian Church? However, were one to read G. F. Barbour’s The Life of Alexander Whyte (London, 1923), he will discover that Dr. Whyte preached a Law and Gospel sermon morning and evening at St. George’s. His lectures on Bible characters were given after the close of the service, and in the assembly hall adjoining the kirk. Admission was by ticket, and tickets were issued only to those who had attended the entire service at which Law and Gospel had been preached. Dr. Whyte would not permit Hugh Black, John Kelman or any other assistant pastor to discuss Bible heroes, for he declared that such things are not true evangelical preaching. Men may call Whyte legalistic, yet he told his assistants and all guest preachers that only the great truths of redemptive Christianity were permitted in his pulpit.

The Immortal Truths

It is just these immortal truths of sin and grace that have vanished from many a fashionable pulpit. They have taken refuge in the mission halls and the storefront churches. A few evangelical strongholds still remain in our larger cities, but quite too often do we hear much about life personified, and little in regard to our Lord crucified. Men are preaching psychology and religious psychiatry instead of sin and salvation.

Evangelical preaching begins with the fact that all men, by reason of the Fall, are sinful creatures. Except for the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ, such men are helpless. The Law can bring the sinner to a knowledge of his lost state, but the Law cannot save him. Jesus Christ, true God, became man for our sake. He was born of the Virgin Mary without a human father. Where man had failed miserably to obey the Law, Jesus Christ became our substitute in respect to the Law. He kept it perfectly, and God accepted the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ as though it were ours. Our Lord Jesus likewise became our substitute in respect to the penalty of the Law. The wages of sin is death, and our Lord Jesus died for us, taking our place on the Cross, so that hell-deserving sinners might not have to die. He rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven. He is coming again, and we may be sure that every one of us will stand before our Saviour on the last day. He offers salvation freely to all men by grace; and grace is a gift that no man has earned nor deserved. If a man is saved, it is due entirely to this grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ. If a person is lost, it is due entirely to his own sin and unbelief. Faith is the only thing asked of us, and even this saving faith is God-given. The true believer is assured of unending joys in heaven, whereas those who reject the Saviour can expect only the fires of hell.

What is wrong with much of the preaching of today? Precisely the lack of these basic truths of the New Testament. Evangelical truth is no longer questioned in the pulpit. The method of some preachers of today is to ignore it. The fault of such men lies in what they do not say. In place of Law and Gospel they substitute their innocuous sermonettes on “the cares and anxieties of life,” and they seek “to cheer men in their daily toils by comforts which are furnished by reason rather than by Scripture.”

If we would see a religious awakening in our time, this can be accomplished only by a return to just that which brought about every spiritual awakening in the past, namely, a fearless preaching of Law and Gospel, sin and salvation. Men have tried other methods, yet the basic fact remains that “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Cor. 1:21). This Gospel that God permits men to preach is a means of grace. It is a bridge over which the Holy Ghost comes to men, and thus we say that the Gospel is a means of grace.

Men have tried to bring about religious awakenings by other methods. Many have assured us that an indifferent world, and a Christian church diluted with secular ideas, will pay no heed to our message of repentance and faith until we form a strongly centralized ecclesiastical government. However, our Lord said, “Thus is it written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations” (Luke 24:46–47). He tells us in Matthew 28:19–20 to go, preach, baptize and teach all nations. Where faithful men preach Law and Gospel in their entirety, such efforts will prove effective. Sinners will be brought to repentance. Uncertainty will yield to conviction. Weakness of faith will become strength of faith. Through the power of God the Holy Ghost the benefits of our Saviour’s suffering, death and resurrection, and the merit of the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ will be given to the believing Christian.

F. R. Webber was Secretary of the Architectural Committee of the Lutheran Missouri Synod for more than 30 years. He has written six books, three on A History of Preaching in Britain and America. The American appraisal appeared in 1957.

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