The Preacher's Relationship to His Manuscript

Isolating the Precise Issue: Dependence on Written Material in Preaching

0:03 Now as we continue our studies on this whole subject of the act of preaching, let me briefly remind you where we've been. We've dealt with the act of preaching as it bears upon the preacher and his present relationship to God, the preacher and his present relationship to himself, and then the preacher and his present relationship to his hearers. Now today we move on to what may at first sound like a trivial matter, but which in reality is far from trivial. In fact, many of the issues dealt with under 2 and 3, the preacher and his relationship to himself and his relationship to his hearers, will be greatly influenced by how we handle this fourth category that is the focus of our concern today. Namely, the act of preaching. The act of preaching in relationship to any written material carried into the pulpit. So we're dealing with the act of preaching in relationship to any written material carried into the pulpit.

1:18 Now as we take up the subject, we will first of all isolate the precise issue under discussion, then secondly give some general guidelines, and thirdly conclude with specific counsels regarding any materials that you are going to read by way of quotations in your preaching. Because there are some principles that are unique to the matter of reading quotations, I felt it warranted a separate heading in the lecture. So God willing, in what I hope will be a maximum of an hour and ten minutes, so that I can get away to catch that plane to North Carolina, we take up this matter. Of the act of preaching in relationship to our paper.

2:03 That perhaps would be a briefer way to state it. Now first of all, we want to isolate the precise issue that we are dealing with. In many fields of inquiry, precise definition is vital to accurate thought. In others, precise limitation of the field of concern is equally vital to accurate thought.

2:27 And this is true. With respect to the subject we are dealing with today. Let me first of all try to state it negatively. We are not dealing with the place of writing at the desk, or at any of the initial stages of preparation.

2:45 This matter was discussed in the last lecture of Unit 2, in which we surveyed the major arguments for and against writing a sermon manuscript. I attempted to give a word. A workable synthesis, like a good Hegelian. And thirdly, I tried to give you practical guidelines for the implementation of this council.

3:09 So we are not dealing with the whole question of how much pen should be put to paper in the study. Or at the level of preparation. Nor are we dealing with primarily how much or how little paper is actually carried. Or how much paper is actually carried into the pulpit.

3:34 Rather, this is the issue. How much dependence upon and preoccupation with written material is manifested in the act of preaching. How much dependence upon and preoccupation with written material is manifested in the act of preaching. A man may bring five, six, seven pages of full notes into the pulpit.

4:13 But have very little evident dependence upon and preoccupation with that material as he preaches. Another man may bring one page of a skeleton. And it may be evident throughout the entire sermon that he is greatly dependent upon and greatly preoccupied with that one page. So you see, it doesn't have to do with what's written.

4:35 With what's done in the study. Or even how much is actually brought into the pulpit. My concern is more limited than that. And it is precisely this concern of how much dependence upon and how much preoccupation with that written material is manifested in the act of preaching.

4:58 Or to state it differently, how much mental and physical attachment is there to one's paper. How much mental and physical attachment is there to one's paper. Thereby choking the channels of mutual empathy, and present sympathy with the living audience. And you see how much then that relates to our last lecture.

5:26 This whole matter of the preacher's present reaction and interaction with his people as he preaches. This whole matter of the preacher's present reaction and interaction with his people as he preaches. If his eyes and his brain are preoccupied with his paper, his eyes and his brain cannot be preoccupied with his people.

5:46 Preoccupation of eye and brain with paper equals little preoccupation with people. Now, any discussion that does not isolate this precise issue is doomed to fail under the weight of its own inaccuracies of broad generalization or its unrealistic and legalistic rules and regulations. And brethren, over the years as I've wrestled with the matter and waded through dozens and dozens of pages of written material, I have found again and again inaccuracies in the area of broad generalization and unrealistic and legalistic rules and regulations because...

6:29 Because this issue has not been isolated. And all of these have been mingled together. And so the whole question of a written manuscript has been dealt with in terms of everything from initial study to composition to the bringing of a manuscript into the pulpit to the use or non-use of it in the act of preaching. But those things are all distinct elements and they need to be isolated, separated, and addressed specifically.

6:59 All right? So much, then, for isolating the issue at hand. Now, secondly, I want to give you some general guidelines with respect to the subject we have isolated. Namely, how much dependence upon and preoccupation with our paper is manifested in our preaching.

General Guideline 1: Never Read a Full Manuscript

7:22 And I'll do this in terms of some imperative exhortations. Number one. Guideline number one.

7:33 Never read a full manuscript from the pulpit and attempt to call it preaching. Never read a full manuscript from the pulpit.

7:49 Now, if your pulpit is being used as a lectern to give a lecture on a subject,

7:56 may even be among God's gathered people in which you're asked to give a lecture, as I have been asked, on the subject of Christian education. There may be much dependence. You may have a full manuscript. I'm not talking about that.

8:09 We're talking about preaching to the gathered people of God in the stated seasons of their gathering for public worship and ministry. And with reference to that exclusive concern, never read a full manuscript from the pulpit. And perhaps Dabney's advice is as helpful as anyone's that I have read, where he writes on page 328 in his lectures on sacred rhetoric these very insightful words. Reading a manuscript to the people can never, with any justice, be termed preaching.

8:50 Even if the matter and the style are rhetorical, the action cannot be. But it is almost impossible that the structure either of thought or language should be such, when the invention, that is, your basic composition, is performed in solitude and at the writing desk. Some men, by a powerful genius, have indeed, by long practice, now notice the qualifications, they have powerful genius and long practice. None of you fit that category.

9:23 All right? They have acquired the talent of so representing to themselves the circumstances of public discourse while engaged in solitary composition as almost to overcome this obstacle. They do indeed write as an orator should speak. But these are the exceptions.

9:46 In the delivery of the sermon, there can be no exception in favor of the mere reader. How can he whose eyes are fixed upon the paper before him, who performs the mechanical task of reciting the very words inscribed upon it, have the inflections, the emphasis, the look, the gesture, the flexibility, and the fire of oratorical action? Now, see, the only reason I can read that with a little bit is because I spend a good bit of time reading it ahead of time, mastering the flow of thought, so that I'm able to pick up whole sentences, stick them in my head, and speak them to you as though they were my own words. All right?

10:28 Mere reading, then, should be sternly banished from the pulpit, except in those rare cases in which the didactic purposes supersede the rhetorical, and exact verbal accuracy is more essential than true eloquence. So he's saying there is a place for the lecture, there is a place for the speech, but that's the only exception. In preaching, the whole matter of the living interaction of the living soul of the preacher with a living, hungry response if auditory, it's impossible, as a general rule, for someone to be stuck to his manuscript. Now, McElvain, again, addresses this issue very powerfully, and I will just quote briefly from a whole section in which he treats this matter under the chapter Familiarity with the Manuscript, Chapter 9.

11:29 You remember what McElvain calls the sub-processes of thinking, what we're seeing, and having them register on the brain and the rest, these sub-processes of speaking. He says, the sub-processes in reading and in speaking from manuscript are the reverse of expression. Reading and speaking from manuscript are so nearly allied, and the sub-processes in the two cases differ so little, and the light they throw upon each other is so important, they require to be treated together. For in both, the sub-processes are those of taking in the sense of the manuscript or printed page through the eye, what I'm doing now as I read, and these processes are the reverse of those which belong to the giving out of the sense by the voice and the impressing of the thought and sentiment upon other minds. The mental operations of giving out and of taking in the sense are in the highest degree incompatible with each other. Certainly, they cannot both go on together as the leading states of the same mind. One or the other must fall into the rank of a sub-process.

12:47 Now, I thought of the illustration of a sponge. It cannot be absorbing as well as giving out water at one and the same time. You squeeze the dry sponge and put it in the pool of water, it absorbs. Now, full of water, you squeeze it out, but you can't, be squeezing out and taking in water at the one and the same time.

13:08 One or the other must dominate. Now, so would the mind. If it is primarily preoccupied, as when reading these quotes, with taking in the sense of McElvain, having the words register on my brain in phrases and clauses, subordinate, dominant, and then trying to give proper emphasis, I am totally preoccupied with the absorbing of the thoughts as they come off the page. Though I can have some secondary sensitivity to interaction with you and how you're responding, the desire to give it out in the best way does not dominate at that point.

13:45 The absorption is the dominant activity of the mind and it, for a while, cuts off that preoccupation with the communication of those thoughts to others. Again, just one brief quote on page 143. A good reader, however, never undertakes to read, in public, a passage with which he is wholly unacquainted except from necessity. Nor, then, does he ever expect to do justice to himself or his author.

14:16 He always tries to familiarize his mind beforehand with the sentiments in words in order to relieve himself as much as possible from the operations of taking in the sense that he may be enabled to carry on these operations insofar as they are indispensable mostly as sub-processes while his faculties are chiefly employed in their proper work of expression. So, the old masters were agreed, never read a full manuscript from the pulpit for the simple reason that reading a full manuscript makes you so preoccupied in the dominant processes of the mind with absorbing the words, the thoughts, the clauses, the phrases that are on the manuscript that the mind and the spirit cannot be preoccupied with the communicating complex of your faculties and of those that are coming back to you from your people. Now again, Eter acknowledges that there are exceptions and I think it only fair to give due weight to those exceptions. On page 443, Eter says, after listening, listing, a group of preachers of the 18th and 19th century

15:39 who were those who spoke extemporaneously, may have had a skeleton but did not read a manuscript, from these historic facts the conclusion is inevitable that the original and time-honored mode of speaking without manuscript is the best for all times and for all men and calculated to produce the most efficient preaching. Chalmers, and Edwards, perhaps were exceptions but these sons of thunder possessed such an ungovernable flood and luxuriance of feeling that they needed the curb of the manuscript in order to keep them within legitimate bounds. And yet Chalmers read his paper in tones of enthusiasm that quote, made the rafters roar, end quote. During the reading of his sermons, and this is now quoting again from someone who actually heard Chalmers frequently, during the reading of his sermons Dr. Chalmers was absolutely terrible. His heavy frame was convulsed.

16:43 His face was flushed. The veins on his forehead and neck stood out like whip cords. Isn't that graphic? That's like the main veins in the arms of a weightlifter with 20-inch biceps, whip cords.

16:58 And so you can see Chalmers with the main veins in his forehead and his neck standing out. He hung over his audience, menacing them with his shaking fist, or he stood erect, manacled and staring. No one will object to this kind of sermon reading so far as animation is concerned. Quote, his manuscript burned, but some of our modern manuscripts ought to be burned, end quote.

General Guideline 2: Aim for a One-Page, Well-Mastered Skeleton

17:26 Alright, so we know there were those rare exceptions, but the old masters are agreed and on sound, philosophical, and I would say even physiological philosophy, if we may use that term, never read a full manuscript from the pulpit, all right? Second general guideline or axiom is this. Aim at reducing the substance of the sermon, aim at reducing the substance of the sermon to a one-page, well-mastered skeleton. Aim at reducing the sermon to a one-page, well-mastered skeleton. Now, you may want to carry that skeleton as a separate item.

18:30 And then have more fulsome notes, two, three pages. But by having that one-page skeleton always visually present, you never lose your own track. And you don't need to be flipping back through pages in doing the recapitulation that I advise and that I practice and that I hope exemplify and I hope I've convinced you of the benefit of it. When your people have nothing visual in front of them, it's difficult for them.

19:01 To hang the whole sermon together as it unfolds and by recapitulation of your major heads and sometimes your major sub-points, you help them to structure it together. Well, some find it very helpful to have that at least there as a separate sheet. Better yet, carry nothing more than a one-page skeleton well-mastered into the pulpit. Whatever length of composition may precede in the study.

19:30 Or, however much paper may be carried into the pulpit. If you're going to have any dominant preoccupation with paper, let it be with the skeleton and not with the details. And only referring to this when you may draw mental lapse in the opening up of point B under head number one. But let your preoccupation be here and not here.

19:57 And that's why I give that counsel. This one-page, well-mastered skeleton should help you to see in simple, logical order the bulk of your discourse to know where you've been when you've covered head two, where you are going as you anticipate head number three or four or five, whatever it may be. And again, I quote from McElvain, whose counsel here is both wise and helpful on page 147. 147.

20:31 He says, the reason is that the leading mental operations are the reverse of those which belong to expression. Something we read before. We have seen that the mental operations of taking in the sense through the eye are the reverse of those which belong to giving it out and impressing it on other minds. Consequently, when the previous study of the manuscript is neglected and these reverse operations become predominant in the consciousness of the speaker, that is, when he is wholly, or chiefly, occupied with the labor of transferring the sense of the words from the manuscript to his own mind, the speaking becomes chiefly expressive of this leading mental state, and hence it not only loses all proper adaptation to the communication of thought and feeling to other minds, but it actually consists, for the most part, of signs which are the reverse of expression. Put in more simple language, the man that is obviously screwing up his brow, seeking to figure out the words and the structure of what's on his notes, is a man that you pity when you listen to him. You feel for him. You wonder, is he going to be able to really get that next line?

21:43 Instead of saying, am I going to be able to get that next point, you're wondering if he's going to know what the next point is. And you sit there feeling for him and with him and pulling for him. You don't want him to be publicly embarrassed. Well, that's a noble feeling.

21:57 But that's far from what you ought to feel beneath the preaching of the word of God. So these old masters understood that and no doubt they had seen examples of it. And I would urge you early in your ministry to aim at reducing the sermon to a one-page skeleton to be carried into the pulpit. I've been amazed in looking at the notes of some of my preacher brethren to see men who write 10, 12 pages on sheets of paper this size and nowhere do they have the whole structure of this sermon ever before their own eyes visually.

22:28 Well, you say, well, they may be men of unusual retentive capacity who've just memorized their outline. Well, when I've heard them preach, it's evident if they had that capacity, they weren't exercising it. And one of the hallmarks of their sermons is lack of clarity. You don't know where they've been, where they're going, how long they've been getting there, and if and when they're ever going to arrive at their destination.

General Guideline 3 & 4: Minimal Paper Reliance and Strategic Glancing

22:52 So I urge you, brethren, to try at least to see if you cannot adapt to this discipline of reducing the sermon to a one-page, well-mastered skeleton to be carried into the pulpit. Now, counsel number three. Look at your paper only as much as is absolutely necessary. Look at your paper only as much as is absolutely necessary.

23:27 It's better to lose a bit in precise statement if the only alternative is leaving directness and cutting off the flow of empathy between you and your people. Better to lose a bit in precise statement. Now, I didn't say better a little error. But I said better to lose a little bit in precision of statement if the only alternative is to give up directness and cut the living nerve of empathy.

24:02 And Spurgeon again, the natural preacher that he was, who then sought to bring some scientific investigation to the subject in his chapter on the faculty of impromptu speech says on page 152 in lectures to my students, if you are happy enough to acquire the power of extemporary speech, pray recollect that you may very readily lose it. I'm sorry, not pray recollect.

24:40 If you are happy enough to acquire the power of extemporary speech. See what's happening now? I'm involved in the subject. I thought I had understood the quote and read it over this morning.

24:47 But I think there's something wrong here, a misprint. If you are happy enough to acquire the power of extemporary speech, pray because what he's saying, you may readily lose it. And then he gives the example of himself. And this is what threw me.

25:02 I have been struck with this in my own experience. And I refer to that because it is the best evidence I can give to you. If for two successive Sundays I make my notes a little longer and fuller than usual, I find on the third occasion, third occasion, that I require them longer still. And I also observe that if on occasions I lean a little more to my recollection of my thoughts and am not so extemporaneous as I've been accustomed to be, there's a direct craving and even an increased necessity for pre-composition.

25:35 If a man begins to walk with a stick merely for a whim, he will soon come to require a walking stick. If you indulge your eyes with spectacles, they will speedily demand them as a permanent appendage. And if you were to walk with crutches for a month, at the end of the time, they would be almost necessary to your movements, although naturally your limbs might be as sound and healthy as any man. So you see, Spurgeon understood that if you allow yourself to become excessively dependent upon your paper, that becomes a kind of paper addiction very quickly.

26:16 And a man of his ability said, he could get addicted in two weeks. Well, what about us lesser mortals? They'd probably get addicted in two hours. So we need, by God's grace, to exercise a strict discipline over ourselves to look at our paper only as much as is absolutely necessary.

26:36 And don't assume it's necessary until you have proof that it is. You just cannot recall that next head, that next illustration. You'll need to look down at your paper in order to grasp it. All right?

26:49 Council number four. Look at your paper at those times which are least likely to break your living contact with the congregation. Look at your paper at those times which are least likely to break your living contact with the congregation. For example, when you've come to the, perhaps the end of a, a portion of the sermon where you've been unusually intense and you're going to come down into a more ordinary volume and intensity of speech and there's a natural pause to let the congregation come down with you, that pause often can even be enhanced by glancing at your notes. Your people sense you've shot your wad on that point and you've brought them to a conclusion or a climax of thought and now when they see you looking to your notes they know that you're now about to make a transition into a pattern of thought that's less impassioned and even the glancing at the notes can help them make that transition with you and that doesn't cut into that living bond. But you see, if halfway through a part in the sermon where your own spirit is enlivened with the truth and there is impassioned speech and utterance but you're so fastidious

28:17 that you might not say the next sentence just right, to cut right off in the middle of that and into your notes is to just kill the optimum impress of that moment. So when there is a natural pause in what I would call rhetorical transitions of mood, of intensity. Second area, when you've asked them to turn to a specific portion of the Word of God and already by their eyes being turned to their Bibles, few people can by feel know Isaiah 47 from Ezekiel 33. So their eyes automatically, when you say will you turn with me to Isaiah 47, while they're turning, you can be glancing at your notes, getting in hand exactly what you want to say afresh on that passage so by the time they look up and you've turned to it, now you're not engaged with your paper anymore, you're engaging their eyes. So cultivate that art of looking at your paper at those times which are least likely to break your living contact with the congregation. All right, fifth axiom or counsel, and this sounds almost ludicrously practical, but I'm surprised again. Many men in the pulpit have great grace, great gifts, but little common sense.

General Guideline 5: Optimal Paper Placement and Posture

29:40 Place your paper in a position as directly in line with your congregation as possible. Place your paper in a position as in direct line with your congregation as possible. Place your paper in a position as directly in line with your congregation as possible. Place your paper in a position as directly in line with your congregation as possible.

30:02 All right, here's the man in the pulpit. Let's get his pulpit down a little bit, it's almost hiding him. Okay. Now, the more the paper is toward this edge of the pulpit, Now, the more the paper is toward this edge of the pulpit, the greater the angle, especially if you don't have bifocals.

30:20 There's one, several benefits with bifocals. One of them is that it keeps you from seeing, I can't see them there, I got to be up this way anyway, see? So it's very good in that it helps you to maintain eye contact So it's very good in that it helps you to maintain eye contact for no other reason. You're not able to read it if you drop your head down too much. But try to have your notes as far up on the pulpit as is necessary to keep the basic angle of the eye and of the mouth, the two key organs of public speech. Keep them so that their angle never drops beyond someone in the front row. See, if it drops here, then you're excluding all these people back here. You want to engage your whole congregation with the mouth and with the eye throughout the entire sermon. Regard your mouth as the bell of a brass instrument. And one of the

31:14 first lessons you would learn from anyone who taught you how to play anything from the little E-flat cornet to a trumpet to a, and you can't do it, of course, with anything beyond a trombone. When you get up into a baritone or euphonium, the bell goes out this way. But the standard rule is that you keep the bell of the instrument out in the direction of the audience and the rest of the orchestra. You don't allow the bell to get down into your own lap. Well, your mouth in that sense is the bell of your gospel trumpet. And it's a terrible thing to have it out here and then it's down here, especially when men continue to speak. Well, I feel like saying, well, do your paper need to be converted? I mean, do you hope your preaching to be a means of grace to the desk? No, well, then

32:00 stop preaching to them. Get it out to the people that you hope to do good to. Keep the mouth up and never allow it to drop below that angle of directly projecting to the congregation. And likewise with your eyes. And even if you don't have bifocals and you just got regular glasses, well, then you may have to back off a bit, you see, and that will automatically, and if you're still able to see it, that automatically closes the angle. The closer you get and the lower the notes are here, the sharper the angle. For some men, I thought maybe the best thing to do would be to get a surgical collar and make them preach in it for one year. You know, the kind people get when they've had whiplash and you can't put your head down? Be the best way. Pray for a stiff neck in only one circumstance when you're

32:47 preaching. Don't want a stiff neck in any other situation. It's bad. Stiff-necked is bad. But some preachers, I could will for them the fusion of the cervical vertebrae because they just plain have their... And I don't know how you are, but I'm insulted when a man's supposed to be talking to me and he's talking to his paper or talking to his pulpit or talking to the six feet of carpet in front of the... And I usually sit up close. I want to get close to the action, close to the spit and the fire when somebody's preaching. But sometimes even sitting closely, somebody just gets done, oh, it galls me, it irritates me. And I may be particularly perverse, so I don't make my irritation the measure of what's right in this. Certainly, it is right, as we've seen, that a man continually engages congregation with his eyes and continually trumpet the message by his mouth. And physiologically, it's impossible to do those

33:44 two things if the angle is too great. And sometimes it's just as simple as getting the notes up. If you've not seen our customized pulpit upstairs, that whole business of the bar with the little places to adjust it, that was part of my customizing of that pulpit. So that...

34:01 Shorter people would be able to move the notes down by moving that bar down. Those of us who are taller move it up so the notes get up and away and are in an angle of being able to project to the people. That's a simple little thing, but it's so vital. And often the difference between merely mediocre preaching and truly effective preaching is the combination of a bunch of little things. It's not that someone has 50 more pounds of raw gift in a specific errand.

34:31 It's just an ounce or two here and a pound and a half there of little things all put together that make the difference between a mediocre preacher and a very effective preacher. So we want to push in our little ounce and pound here or there, whatever will make us optimally useful in the work of preaching. All right? Axiom number six, or counsel number six, labor continually to cultivate the skills of extemporaneous speech.

General Guideline 6: Cultivate Extemporaneous Speech

35:03 Labor continually to cultivate the skills of extemporaneous speech. Now, bear with me while I give you a little study in linguistics here. Linguistically, impromptu and extemporaneous are synonyms. And basically, they would be defined as unprepared or without previous preparation.

35:30 But in homiletics, and even in the dictionary, there is a practical and real difference. And I'll give you now...

35:39 a layman's definition of the difference. Impromptu, that's speaking off the cuff, literally without any specific previous preparation to speak on the subject concerning which you're speaking. There may have been 50 years of acquisition. For example, a man who's been a plumber for 50 years is called upon in the spot to speak for five minutes on the greatest problems encountered in being an effective plumber. He's had no previous specific preparation for that five-minute speech. But in a sense, he's had 50 years of general conditioning in preparation by his experience as a plumber. But if he gave a five-minute speech on that subject with no previous preparation, that would, strictly speaking, be an impromptu speech. Now, an extemporaneous speech would be where he was informed a week ahead of time that the next gathering of local such-and-such, since you're going to be retiring soon, we'd like you to speak to all the young apprentices for five minutes on the subject, the greatest problems you will encounter as a plumber. So he sits and he

36:47 thinks, he cogitates, he starts taking notes, he outlines what he's going to say. He does everything except exegete the plumbing books that we do in preparing a sermon. But now he may come with a three-by-five card or a little sheet of paper. He does not have sentences written out. He does not have paragraphs written out. He has done previous preparation. He may have a skeleton with him, but his speech is not impromptu. It is extemporaneous. Now, that's the way the term is used in your books on homiletics. Extemporaneous preaching is preaching with preparation, but without full manuscript and without memorization. Those are the distinctives. Anything that comes from a full manuscript as read is not extemporaneous. That which is memorized is not extemporaneous. Now,

37:48 my counsel to you is labor continually to cultivate the skills of extemporaneous speech. That is, where your mind has been furnished by careful study and your heart has been furnished by prayer and meditation, then you should leave to the moment of preaching the actual construction of sentences, the actual construction of paragraphs. And as I've given counsel in another setting, you may do well to think through ahead of time even the exact wording of your introduction and your transitions, but if you find in the midst of preaching that those things are coming on their own, then chuck what you've written and go with the living thought born of the living situation of preaching to a living congregation in the presence of the living God. Now, Spurgeon has some very, very helpful advice in that chapter on the faculty. I think it's called of impromptu speech. Yes, the faculty of impromptu speech. And to give

38:55 you a little sampling of Spurgeon's counsel in this very area, he says, every man, page 149, who wishes to acquire this art, that is, of extemporaneous speech, must practice it. It was by slow degrees, as Burke says, that Charles Fox became the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever lived. He attributed it to the fact that he was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, success to the resolution which he formed when a very young man of speaking well or ill at least once every night. During five whole sessions, he used to say, I spoke every night but one, and I regret only that I did not speak on that night too. End quote. At first, he may do so with no other auditory than the chairs and books of his study, imitating the example of a gentleman who, upon applying for admission to this college, assured me that he had for two years, practiced himself in extempore preaching in his own room. Students living together might be of great mutual assistance by alternately acting the part of audience and speaker with a little friendly criticism at the close of each attempt. Conversation, too, may be of essential service if it be a matter of principle to make it solid and edifying. Thought is to be linked with speech.

40:14 That is the problem, and it may assist a man in its solution if he endeavors, in his private musings, to think aloud. Then Spurgeon says of himself, So has this become habitual to me that I find it very helpful to be able in private devotions to pray with my voice. Reading aloud is more beneficial to me than the silent process, and when I'm mentally working out a sermon, it's a relief for me to speak to myself as the thoughts flow forth. And I can attest in the area of the first two of praying in secret, though I don't pray out loud.

40:48 With a full voice, as though I were leading the congregation, to frame my prayers audibly, I find is a tremendous help not only to my prayer life, but to the ongoing cultivation of the ability to speak extemporaneously. And the reading of the scriptures is well. Rarely do I have my devotional reading in silence. I find the word of God is more powerful to my heart when it comes through my own ear, as well as through my own eye. And it's practice, practice, practice, practice. Think aloud as much as you can when you're alone, and this will soon put you on the high road to success in this matter. So Spurgeon observed this in his own experience and counseled the men in his college to follow through on it. So I urge you, labor continually to cultivate the skills of extemporaneous speech. In your reading, when something triggers a thought, speak the

41:46 thought out loud. Try to construct the thought out loud. Try to construct the thought out loud. Try to construct it into a well-constructed sentence. Where possible, try to draw upon imagery and analogy and figures of speech. Continually be working that delicate interplay of mind and the ability to conceptualize and the choice of words and the formation of words into sentences and phrases. Practice, as in everything else, if not makes perfect, certainly makes more efficient. I commend you.

Specific Counsels for Reading Quotations

42:18 And to you, Bridges, practical suggestions on page 290 and 291. Bridges on the Christian Ministry and then Shedd, Homiletics and Pastoral Theology, page 197 and 198. There you have some very practical suggestions that I trust you will find helpful. All right, now, thirdly, having isolated the issue we are addressing and having given you six, alas, you'll have to forgive me for not finding a seventh, words of counsel with respect to this whole matter of our interaction with our paper in the act of preaching. Now, thirdly, I want to give some specific counsels concerning the reading of quotations in your preaching. Since I don't know how to read a quotation without paper in front of me, I think it fits into this category. And my counsels here are, six, but much briefer. Number one, be sparse in your use of quotations. It's one thing to be

43:37 profuse in the use of them in lecturing in a pastoral theology course, because you want men to feel the weight of the unanimous, or if not unanimous, the general consensus of the masters of the past. But in preaching, people come to hear you, the living teacher, give them the fruit of your labors. Without impressing them at how much you labored by all the quotes you give them. You are being given double honor to do your own work. Give them the fruit of your reading, not a catalogue of quotes derived from your reading. So be sparse in your use of quotations. Secondly, seek to have quoted material copied before bringing it to the table. Second, be sparse in your use of quotations.

44:35 In the age of the copy machine, graciously insist very early in your ministry that the church furnish you with a desktop copier. I'm putting in my appeal right now. The little Mickey Mouse outfit I've had for four years has just about had it, one of those little hundred dollar jobs that you've got to spend five minutes warming it up and then try four or five times to get the thing at the right density. If you've got a page that's got a little bit of density, you've got to get it yellowing on it. So I finally now give up. And usually I do my copying between Sunday school and Sunday morning service. Bring the books in my satchel and do the copying on the church copier. But it's much less obtrusive. I mean, someone sees you going up into the pulpit. It's one thing to

45:23 come into a lecture like this, but they see you go into the pulpit and lay all those books there. They wonder, well, is he trying to impress us that he's learned it? Or are we going to be here until four o'clock this afternoon? You don't exactly predispose.

45:37 them favorably by carrying a stack of books. So my second practical counsel is seek to have your quoted material copied before bringing it into the pulpit. Thirdly, master the content of your quotes by frequent oral reading before using them in the pulpit. Master the contents of your quotes by frequent, not reading only, but by frequent oral reading. You see, had I read that quote, out loud, in preparing my lecture, I would have caught what hit me the minute I tried to read it with emphasis. My eye apparently made the, because of the sense, my eye made the switch. But when I was reading it, there was no way I could emphasize that quote to make it come out right. Now, had I followed my own counsel with regard to that specific quote, I wouldn't have stood before you and made a donkey of myself, you see. So that's why I emphasize. And in preparation for

46:44 the pulpit, I would have caught what hit me the minute I tried to read it with emphasis. In the pulpit, there's no substitute for this matter of mastering the content of your quote by frequent oral reading before using it in the pulpit. You may even want to take your pencil and mark pauses, underline words to be emphasized, so that as much as possible, the manner in which you read the quote is not radically different from the manner in which you are preaching your own thoughts. Now, it's amazing how the minute some people see material, lined up like this, knowing that it's poetry, they absolutely freeze in terms of naturalness.

47:25 And they go from naturalness into a stilted form of reading. And I've never quite been able to understand that. Don't let poetry, the fact that it's lined up in poetic or verse form, throw you off. I was trying to see if I could find one of the poems. There are, there are several here in Bridges, I know. I can't put my eye on it right off. But the minute someone who's talking along comes to poetry, then it's, and they lose all their natural inflection. And they completely lose track of punctuation. And because there's a poetic line, they immediately

48:12 pause when there's no reason to pause. There's no comma, there's no semicolon, there's no dash, and the thought goes right through to here. Well, let the thought go clean through in the manner in which you read it. I've got to find a poem and illustrate this. Huh? Well, no, because the hymn book is according to the, uh, I just may not be able to. I'm sure there must be some poems in all the books I brought with me. Yeah, Virgin has some in there. He has some on chapter 21.

48:55 All right. Is it? This is a four-liner. Okay. Okay, yeah, but here it is. Uh, uh, this is where he's, uh, yeah, he's got a lot of them here. This is a pungent version of Cowper's review of certain messengers of grace who relapsed into themselves when the sermon was ended. Very little selves they must have been. All right, here's the poem. Fourth comes the pocket mirror, period. First we stroke an eyebrow. Next, impose a straggling lock. Then, with an air most graceful, performed fall back into our seat. Extend an arm and lay it at its ease with gentle care, with handkerchief in hand, depending low.

49:42 The better hand, more busy, gives the nose its bergamot. I don't know what a bergamot is. Or aids the indebted eye with opera glass to watch the moving scene and recognize the slow retiring fare. Now this is slow.

49:57 This is fulsome and offends me more than in a churchman's slovenly neglect and rustic coarseness would. You see, a lot of these lines, no punctuation, so it should not be read. Now this is fulsome and offends me more than in a churchman's slovenly neglect and rustic coarseness would. The minute people see that just something seems to happen to them, don't let that do that. Master any poetic lines that you read according to the structure of thought and the punctuation, not according to the visual lining of the poetry, all right? So that's vital again. Otherwise, an element enters the very manner of your speech that people sense is it's not you, it's somebody else. Okay, counsel number four. When using quotes, you are not under obligation to give

50:51 the full name, century, circumstances, address, and telephone number of the person quoted. In other words, draw as little attention to the person quoted as possible unless there is some good reason to do so. All you need to say so that you're giving due respect and allowance is, a man of God of another generation has stated this so forcefully when he wrote, boom. So if anyone ever finds that, you haven't given it out as your thought, you've given it out as someone else's, all right? And particularly be sensitive to this. If, say, in a church, you have a person in a given series of sermons, you're leaning heavily upon Calvin's commentary, commentary on that particular passage. Don't always, as Calvin said, Calvin said, people have got this notion that what we believe is something that was created in Geneva back in the 16th century. Well, don't feed that by saying Calvin said that. All we need to say is a proven expositor from another generation has very helpfully opened up the kernel of this text when he wrote, as follows, boom, and you quote Calvin, say. So be judicious in this matter of identifying the

52:08 person quoted. That way then, if you really do want to identify the person for good purpose, since it's not your normal practice, it'll mean all the more. People aren't glutted with all these names of dead preachers. So that when you do mention one, it's a sense in which you're trying to put that name before the consciousness of your people, hoping when they go into the bookstore, they'll say, oh.

52:33 Pastor quoted from that. Oh, yeah, good. That must be good. I must get that, you see. Or you can actually do a little promoting of a book sometimes that way. But make sure you have good reason if you do anything other than a minimal statement to indicate that you are quoting, okay?

52:48 Then number five, master the art of summarizing quotations. There are times when you're so indebted to someone else that you won't feel comfortable presenting that insight in your own words. your own way, you'll feel that I must give some acknowledgement. Well, do that, and then give a summary of that, rather than to weary people with an extensive and lengthy quote.

53:31 And then my sixth counsel is, substitute archaic, now I'll illustrate it by the word I use, recondite words. Substitute archaic, that's outmoded, no longer used. Recondite would be words that only specialists and super smart people would use. And I don't believe, unless you were actually doing this in writing, in which case you would bracket it, I do not believe it is a violation of the keenest sensitivity to biblical ethics, when in quoting, you put in your own word that matches the author's thought, but does not confuse. Often, for example, in these old writers, when I quote, when they use the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, I put in the word, or the rhetorician, because there's such nasty words in I've day, because he's talking about the sacred orator, the preacher, I substitute the word preacher for orator, because that's what they meant in that context, and rather than have quotes that have a knee-jerk effect, and you should master your quotes in such a way that there is no unnecessary obscurity or prejudicing of what

Conclusion: Personal Discipline and Ongoing Growth

54:53 you're attempting to enforce by that quotation. All right, let me say then, in summary, and in conclusion, I hope you have understood the isolation, or the concern that I have isolated in addressing what we have this morning. It is not how much paper is carried into the pulpit, it is precisely the issue of how much actual involvement you have with that paper in the act of preaching. I've given you six lines of general counsel, some of these specific and practical counsel.

55:31 Relative to quotes, now if the Lord spares me and gives me one of my desires, and that is to find someone who is favorably disposed toward me as a person, and would count it a privilege to express his friendship by either purchasing from someone he knows or supplying out of his own storehouse three or four professional disguises, the kind that would be found in a CIA's ditty bag. And with those disguises, I plan to appear at the direction and consent of my fellow elders in the churches, where certain men who've received training in a certain place are now ministering and just happen to come in on the back row as an unnamed and unknown visitor. And then I'll know ten years from now when I thus appear in my disguise how much you really absorbed and how seriously you took my counsel. But don't be surprised if you're so patently violating all that you've heard that I just might start peeling off my mustache in the midst of your sermon, pull my wig off, and let you by degrees stew in your own

56:56 consciousness of perverse indifference to the counsel. Okay? Now those are the...

57:02 kinds of things I think about before I go to sleep, concerning which I hope you have a nightmare or two. But seriously, brethren, really, it's relatively easy to sit here and to have your conscience convinced of the soundness of the judgment of the masters of the past in my attempt to sort of collate their counsel. But where the rubber meets the road, all of us, at one point or another, a predisposition to violate one or more of the aspects of this most efficient use of our paper. And if we keep coming back to that great axiom, the great end in all of our preaching is optimum edification, then we're going to be prepared to subject ourselves to whatever disciplines we personally need in order to be as useful as possible in the work of preaching the word of God. For some of us, as I think, I've intimated in one of the other units. With the passing of the years, it means that I take more paper into the pulpit with me. In the early days of my preaching, most of my sermons were a skeleton on one side of the paper, like that.

58:18 I have some skeletons that go back to 1952 when I was preaching in missions and churches up in Stanford, Connecticut. And looking at them, I had occasion to be both red-faced and grateful to God at one and the same time. Red-faced at some of the immaturity and yet grateful to God that there was order, structure, and an attempt to handle the text with integrity. And I'm glad that I started with this counsel because it helped me to get locked into this business of the eyeball and the mouth and being open to the empathetic interaction with the people.

58:57 But the years with the store of knowledge and experience have a tendency to make a man excessively localized and he can be tempted to be less precise, to be less efficient in moving from one thing to another. I need the discipline. I've gone from ordinarily three pages 15 years ago to four pages that lasted for about 10 years to where now it's generally five pages of full handwritten notes that I carry into the pulpit. Now, I've often had people ask me, do you ever look at your notes?

59:32 Well, that's a compliment. And I've asked them and said, I'm not conscious of you looking at your notes. Well, it shows I hope I've learned at least something of that second or third counsel to you. Learn to look at your notes at the point at which you will least break the living bond with your people.

59:49 So every one of us has to find his own level and it's not static. We may find the older we get, you may be such that, as Spurgeon said, you would be getting chronically dependent upon that. You may want to cut back and wean. Some of you may have gotten into bad habits.

60:03 Early in your preaching, when because you just blethered on and seemed to be excited, people told you you were Whitfield back from the dead. Well, now you've lived long enough to know that you're not Whitfield back from the dead. You just got the gift to get. That's all.

60:19 And you've come to see that that can be a curse. Well, you may want to start with carrying five pages of notes. Not that you're going to have your head buried in it, but at least it's a constant reminder. You better stick within the bounds of what you've thought out and prayerfully considered and not let yourself go off on all kinds of tangents.

60:36 So there's an area where only you and God can go and nobody can go for you. Nobody can impose his artificial rules upon you. But if you get the principles and make conscience of the principles, God will give you wisdom in their application.