W. A. Criswell’s Key to Successful Preaching

It lies in keeping your appointment book filled—with the right pursuits.

In the bible, the phrse “thus saith the Lord” appears more than 2,000 times. The preacher who has the Holy Scriptures in his hand as he stands before his congregation is a tower of spiritual strength.

If, however, he depends solely on his own personal speculations about life and the times, he is only a paper tower, one that the slightest wind of disagreement can blow down.

I appeal to the pastor, therefore, to preach expository sermons. If he stands on the Word of God, he may have times when he will be afraid of human opposition, but the rock on which he stands will give his ministry a solid foundation and prevent the collapse of his fortress.

The expository preacher will take time for study and preparation. If his Sunday morning message—or Sunday evening message, for that matter—is not based on a thorough study of God’s Word, it will be of little ultimate value to the congregation.

If you are a pastor, avoid like the plague the temptation to squander your time on endless empty engagements and become a back slapper. Instead, fill your calendar with engagements with God for Bible study and prayer. If someone asks you to give the invocation at the annual meeting of the Beekeepers Association some morning, tell that person you have an important engagement at that time. And keep that engagement—with God in the study. The endless demands on your time are skim milk; you cannot live on skim milk all through the week and preach cream on Sunday.

Many pastors succumb to the temptation to live on skim milk, however. A friend of mine who had attended one church for 40 years commented to me, “Many sermons today are empty. They have absolutely no doctrinal content. As a result, they are light and superficial.”

She was right. I appeal to the pastor to study—and keep on studying all through his life. Phillips Brooks, even after he had become famous, continued to study the Bible and Bible commentaries so his preaching would have the ring of truth.

If you can, have your study in your home where you can avoid the inevitable interruptions that you will have at the church. When you get up in the morning, go to your study. Keep the time holy and sacred for God.

College graduates thinking of attending seminary often ask me, “Dr. Criswell, if you had one piece of advice to give to a young seminarian, what would it be?”

Year after year, through more than 55 years of preaching, I have invariably answered, “Keep your mornings for God.”

When you stand in the pulpit for the first time, tell your people that your mornings are to be kept sacred for prayer and Bible study. In the afternoon you can do the work of the church. In the evening you can go to any kind of church meeting. But in the morning let people know you want to be left alone with the Lord and his Holy Scriptures. Your people will respect your wishes. And when they sit in the pew before you, they will know by the message you bring that you have been with Jesus.

If you prepare expository messages, the congregation will not feel its time has been wasted in the house of the Lord on Sunday. Henry David Thoreau said of the uninspired drivel of pastors who had not spent the time to prepare careful expository sermons, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin listening to the chickadees than to the dry drivel of the D.D.’s in Boston.”

When the pastor preaches expositorily, his message is always waiting. There are many preachers who pace up and down the floor of their studies wondering, “What shall I preach on next Sunday?” Even the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon did that.

The expository preacher will also pace up and down the floor of his study. But he will do it for a different reason. “O God,” he will cry, “I am going to grow old and die before I get to the depths of the treasures you have hidden in your Holy Book.”

Preaching from the Bible is like dipping water out of the ocean with a bucket. We never exhaust the vast reservoir of truth we have in the Bible. If a pastor preaches through a book of the Bible, he has the text of his message in front of him at his desk. Instead of wasting valuable time pondering what message he is going to preach the following Sunday, let the pastor sit down at his desk and immediately begin to learn what the Word of God has to say to his people.

Any series of expositions can make a mighty and meaningful message from the pulpit. The illustrious teacher of preachers, Andrew Blackwood, in his book The Preparation of Sermons quotes B. H. Streeter as saying, “A connected series in any subject by a man of moderate ability will make for a more permanent impression than an equal number of isolated sermons by a brilliant speaker. The congregation recalls what was said the last time. They look forward expectantly to what will be said the next time.”

Preaching the Bible paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, section by section, book by book, affords the pastor an incomparable series that the Holy Spirit will bless in winning the lost and encouraging God’s people in the faith.

Dr. Criswell is pastor of First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas, one of the nation’s largest churches.

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