48a) Preacher & His Present Relationship to His Paper, #1

Introduction: The Preacher and His Paper

0:03 Our Father, we do thank you for the privilege that is once again afforded to us to draw near to you as the living and the true God, the God whose ear is open to the cry of the righteous. And we thank you that as we come to you this morning, we come to one who knows our frame, who remembers that we are dust, who knows how much we need constant supplies of grace that we may please you. And especially today, as we take up another very practical consideration with respect to the preaching of your word, we ask that you would direct us by your Holy Spirit, help us to make sound judgments. And as we reflect upon these issues, as they relate to our own particular ministries, our own peculiar gifts and temperaments, help us, our Father, that we may please you. And especially today, as we come to one who knows our frame, that we may make proper application of the principles that will be underscored in our time together, we again acknowledge the truth spoken by our Lord Jesus, who said, Apart from me you can do nothing, and therefore we call upon you for the aid and presence of your grace to be operative in our class today. Meet with us and help us, we plead,

1:28 through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Now we continue, brethren, our studies in the preaching ministry of the man of God. In particular, our focus this semester has been upon the act of preaching itself. And let me briefly remind you of the ground that we've already covered. We have considered the act of preaching as it bears upon the preacher and his present relationship to God while he preaches. Secondly, the preacher and his relationship to God while he preaches. And secondly, the act of preaching as it bears upon himself and several major categories of concern under that heading. And then the preacher and his present relation to his hearers, material that you got in the form of the two lectures in the pastor's conference two weeks ago. Now today we move on to what may at first sound like a very trivial matter. Some would question the wisdom of taking an entire lecture session or two sessions and addressing it. But the older I become and the more I observe preaching and preachers and the more I try to analyze what I'm doing as I attempt to preach, the more I'm convinced that this issue is not a trivial matter. In fact, our ability to work out many of the principles under heading number

2:57 two, the preacher and his relationship to himself, where we dealt with the emotions in preaching, physical action, preaching, and certainly that third category of the preacher and his present relationship to his hearers is greatly influenced by this fourth category that we address this morning, namely the preacher and his present relationship to his paper, or as you see in your notes in parenthesis, written material taken into the pulpit. Now by way of introduction, I want to identify the specific area of our concern this morning. In thinking our way through this subject, as with so many other subjects of inquiry, precise definition is vital to accurate thought. In others, precise limitation of the field of concern is equally vital, and such is the case this morning. And therefore, in your printed notes, you will notice that I've stated that I'm not a preacher, but I'm a preacher.

Defining the Precise Issue: Dependence on Written Material

4:04 I've stated it is crucial that we identify the precise issue under discussion, and to help us to do so, I've stated it negatively and then positively. Negatively stated, we are not dealing with the place of writing at the desk or at the stage of preparation. This was discussed in the last lecture of unit number two, and in those lectures I surveyed with you the major arguments, for and against, written composition in the study. I attempted a workable synthesis, and then sought to give you practical guidelines for implementing these principles. But we are not dealing now with the subject of how much pen is put to paper, how many characters are punched into your word processor in the study at the level of preparation. Nor, nor, nor, nor, nor, nor, nor, nor, nor, nor, nor, nor are we dealing primarily with how much or how little paper is actually carried into the pulpit. That is not the field of our concern. So negatively stated, not how much paper is

5:20 generated in the study, not how much paper is carried into the pulpit. But positively stated, the issue we are addressing, and only this issue, is how much dependence upon and preoccupation with written material is manifested in the act of preaching. That's the precise area of our concern. How much dependence upon and preoccupation with written material is manifested. I'm not even saying how much is actually going on, but is manifested in the act of preaching. To state the matter another way, the issue is not how much mental and physical attachment. The issue is how much mental and physical attachment is there to one's paper. How much mental and physical attachment is there to one's paper.

6:20 At the end of the day, we are not so much concerned with issues of paper and print. For me, it would be more natural to write paper and ink, but for you moderns, I've put paper and print. But with the issues of writing paper and ink, I'm not so much concerned with the issues of writing paper and ink. But I think the issue is how much your eyes and brains are engaged with whatever amount of paper you bring into your pulpit.

6:53 So that's the precise area of our concern. And why do I underscore it? Almost to the point of being tedious. Because in my reading of reams of material on this subject, and And I assure you I've read hundreds of pages on this subject alone.

7:12 For at least the old writers realized how critical it was and freely expressed their convictions on the subject. I find that much of the discussion in what I have read is confusing because it does not isolate the precise issue under consideration. And as a result, there are inaccuracies of broad generalizations or unrealistic and legalistic rules and regulations imposed upon men that simply are not workable. So as we work through today, just remember what we're considering.

General Guideline 1: Never Read a Complete Manuscript

7:50 Not the amount of paper in the study, not even the amount of paper in the pulpit, but the level of dependence upon and engagement with that paper in the act of preaching, both in terms of your physical preoccupation with the paper and your mental engagement with the paper. All right, having isolated and identified the field of concern, what I'm going to attempt to do in the time allotted this morning is first of all to set out some general guidelines. And notice these are not. Semi-mosaic, psiniatic rules, they are general guidelines. They are in the form of pastoral counsel, but counsel given nonetheless rather dogmatically at points and I hope with convictions that have some tap roots of sound judgment and of proven experience. And the first is this. Never read a complete manuscript from the pulpit.

8:59 Remember? I'm not talking about a lecture or a speech in another setting. Or I would be violating this axiom, this directive, even in giving my lectures to you. I'm not preaching to you here in our pastoral theology course.

9:15 Occasionally the lecture, I think, merges into preaching, but I'm lecturing. And in order to lecture with a degree of accuracy, I have before me almost a full manuscript. Something like two-thirds of a full manuscript. And we're talking about the preaching that we do to God's people in ordinary circumstances of pastoral ministry.

9:38 And I am saying, as a general guideline, you ought never to read a complete manuscript from the pulpit. And Dabney has captured the heart of this issue most perceptively and therefore, because he has stated the issue more accurately and more succinctly than I can state it, I read. His Sentiments to You, as found on page 328, 329, and 330 of his classic work on preaching. Reading a manuscript to the people can never, with any justice, be termed preaching.

10:19 Now there the man is really dogmatizing. Even if the matter and 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 is performed in solitude and at the writing desk. You see, what he is saying is, if all the basic activities of the mind coming under the heading of old rhetorical terminology invention, we would say the composition.

10:51 If that's all done in the isolation of the study, and that is then brought into the pulpit, paper and pen, or paper and the laser printer, having done its work, that being read, he says, that can't be called preaching. And one of the reasons is that a critical element of what makes preaching preaching, the things that happen in the living interaction between the preacher and the people, as his own mind and soul are engaged with the truth, that in turn will give birth to enriched thought and enriched utterance, you've excluded all of that by carrying over the manuscript into the pulpit and making the pulpit nothing but a transcription of what was embalmed with your pen or with your laser printer. Hear him further. Some men of powerful genius have indeed by long practice acquired the talent of so representing to themselves the circumstances of public discourse while engaged in the work of the preacher. And so, in solitary composition, as almost to overcome this obstacle, they do indeed write as an orator should speak.

12:07 You see what he's saying? Some men of genius are able to bring into the isolation of the study all of the dynamics of the living communication context. But they are rare geniuses. Now, I said there are some.

12:22 He acknowledges it. But these are exceptions. In the delivery of the sermon, then there can be, 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, the fire of oratorical action?

12:53 Mere reading, then, should be sternly banished from the pulpit. Strong language. But this is no boy talking. This is no novice talking.

13:04 This is a man who himself was a great preacher and had heard great preachers and had thought through the issues. Sternly banished, except in those rare cases in which the didactic purpose supersedes the rhetorical and exact verbal accuracy is more essential than true eloquence. Now, he says there may be a time as in, in stating matters in a lecture where to be more bound to a written text has to be traded off for these other concerns. Yet, there is a use of the written sermon in the pulpit which has given us many respectable and some powerful preachers.

13:46 These write with the greatest possible care and with rhetorical structure a manuscript having two-thirds the length of the intended sermon. After the final verbal corrections, they spend, in many hours of the intensest toil, not in committing to memory the words written, but in absorbing the ideas in their exact order. They even fix in their memory the geography of their manuscript, if I may so apply the term, in order that they may know without searching on what part of any page to find the beginning of a given paragraph or thought in case the ardor of delivery shall have carried the eye and the mind for a season away from the paper. So you see what he's saying. They took fire in their preaching, yet they've so mastered what they have on paper that when they come back to the flow of thought as previously hammered out and embalmed in ink or in the jet printer, they're able to know precisely where they were and come back to it without giving anyone in the audience the sense that they're momentarily lost.

14:56 That's the point that Dabney is making. For this purpose, they go over their sermon eight, twelve, or even twenty times until their recollection of the order of thought is indelible and until the whole soul is possessed and fired with the subject. Then they take the manuscript into the pulpit and open it before them. The knowledge that they can recur to it every moment sets them at ease from the fear of losing their thread or hesitating for words.

15:25 The whole train of thoughts and the face of the manuscript are so much more than just words. They're so much more than just words. They're so much more than just words. They're so much more than just words.

15:29 They are so fixed in the memory that few and rapid glances enable them to give almost the very words that they have written. But they do not make any conscious effort to adhere to or to depart from those words. They feel that they can do the former at any instant, that is, adhere to it. For the words are before them and they were selected with care for their appropriateness.

15:56 But if an impulse possesses them to modify the language, to modify the language, to modify the language, to modify the language of any passage, it is also easy to do this. They select with facility either of these alternatives which the awakened and impassioned mind prefers at the moment. And in many places where nearly the exact language of the manuscript is in fact retained, yet the utterance has the quality of extempore eloquence because there is a process of invention at that very moment. In other words, you are not conscious that someone is reproducing by the process of absorbing through the eyeball and into the brain words previously put on paper.

16:41 All you're conscious of is a flow of utterance in articulating thought that is gripping and compelling. And Dabney says it's because people are not tied to the sub-processes as McElvain would call them of letting the eye get the sub-processes of the sense of the words register on the brain and then fishing with what remaining powers are there for some strength of utterance. They use these words not at the mere dictate of eye and memory they are not mechanically read from the paper and they have not been memorized for the purpose but at the dictate of their conscious fitness. They also indulge freely the impulse to add new thoughts and images suggested chiefly during the facetiousness of the they experience also that ennobling momentum which Cicero compares so beautifully to the progress of the ship after the oars are dropped.

17:55 And here's a large ship being pulled by a whole galley of oarsmen. And the oars stop but the momentum of the ship is still carried on after the oars stop. Beautiful imagery used by one of the ancient rhetoricians. The career acquired from the delivery of the parts carefully prepared bears their minds through that which is added impromptu and enables them to give it coherent elegance and vigor of expression.

18:26 The result is that the manuscript of thirty minutes length is expanded to forty-five minutes in the actual preaching room. In such a use of the manuscript also the eyes are but little occupied with it and the preacher is at liberty now listen to hold much converse of look and countenance with the listeners. The empathetic involvement which is in great measure both secured and maintained by the eye. And the eye not just the eye looking at people's foreheads but seeking to read the soul through the eye.

19:04 And Dabney recognized how critical that was and he says there is a way that some use a manuscript that they don't break that living current that passes between the preacher and his hearers. Now this process is manifestly not reading. This is his summary statement. It is free from many of the objections made against that indolent and slovenly practice.

19:28 That's what he calls reading sermons an indolent and slovenly practice. If the liberty of eye and thought and emotion which I have described can be acquired then this method approaches very near the merit of the best extempore preaching. Now I think it's one of the most balanced statements. It isolates the issues.

19:53 It frees us from artificial rules and regulations. If the liberty of eye and thought and emotion can be acquired while still having a fairly full manuscript in the pulpit Dabney says I've got no complaint. But if you're reading in the truest sense of reading then he says I'm going to call you an indolent and slovenly practitioner of the art of preaching. Now Blakey in his book for the work of the ministry states the issue as follows and here again I quote the book these old masters because well for a number of reasons not the least of which is to apprise you that in emphasizing these things this is not some little quirk some little special pet peeve or some hobby horse that Pastor Martin has gotten on. I'm just standing behind these giants and seeking to echo what they have said. Listen to Blakey page 144 in his masterful work on the work of the ministry. Undoubtedly the general judgment of the Christian church is against the reading of sermons.

The Church's General Judgment Against Reading Sermons

21:04 The practice is inconsistent with the purpose of preaching. It interferes with it as a free living force. Preaching becomes a somewhat dull intellectual operation instead of a process in which every force and faculty of the preacher is applied to move the entire nature of the hearers. So you've got the whole preaching seeking to move the whole listener.

21:33 You don't just have a preacher's head having a conduit through his tongue trying to get some things into some listeners' ears that it might make a little trip upward into their brains. He said, no, you've got a whole preacher using all of his faculties to capture whole men with God's truth. You see, this is a totally different theology of what preaching is all about and what listening to preaching is all about. And that, lies behind these comments.

22:02 A young preacher deliberately adopting this method publicly confesses his weakness, that is, the method of reading sermons. He owns himself unable to preach in the manner most in harmony with the nature of the ordinance of preaching and most fitted to accomplish its ends. So Blakey would say, if you can't preach without a manuscript, you ain't called preach.

22:25 Now, I've never gone that far, but I'm telling you what these men said. Yet there may be legitimate exceptions. Here comes the wisdom. In judging of such cases, some consideration requires to be had, number one, of the temperament of individual preachers, two, of the nature of the subject, three, of the nature of the audience and the occasion.

22:49 And then he begins to expand on those elements that will help us to a Romans 12.3 sober assessment. I believe if some of us were to take the counsel of some men and preach without a scrap of paper in front of us, we would be tempting God, we would be cutting the throat of our own optimum usefulness, robbing our people of edifying sermons. On the other hand, on the other hand, if we don't listen to the counsel of some of these men and say, what lies behind such strong statements and seek to take steps to at least move in a direction of less involvement, most likely and most helpfully with less paper involved, in the pulpit, we're really not listening to the wise counselors and God has a word for people who don't listen to sound counsel. Begins with F and ends with L and has a double vowel in the middle that's round like a goose egg.

23:46 You know what the word is. Now, in summarizing what he's saying about individual temperament, listen to Blakey's very helpful insight because almost everyone will cite, well, what about Chalmers? He read his manuscripts. Ah, but they said when Chalmers preached he made the rats tremble with the sheer power of his voice and I'll give you some more of what it was like to look and listen to Chalmers when he preached.

24:11 But he says this in general, for read sermons three things may be laid down is absolutely indispensable. First, lively tones of voice. Second, vigorous style. And third, interesting and rousing thoughts.

24:27 If the preacher have a monotonous voice and a heavy style, if his thoughts are common, and with all the sermon is long, it is no wonder if in popular estimation a red sermon becomes a synonym for dullness, a tax on the patience, and a temptation to go to sleep.

McElvain's Analysis: Incompatibility of Reading and Speaking

24:51 Well, those are Blakey's sentiments on the matter and the reason for this almost universal conviction against reading a manuscript lies lies in the analysis that McElvain gives to what goes on when someone is standing before a living congregation and seeking to communicate thought by means of reading a manuscript. And here, in my judgment, no one has subjected this matter to more sound philosophical and critical analysis than has McElvain. I quote him now from page 138. The sub-processes in reading and in speaking from manuscript are the reverse of expression. Now listen carefully to what he says and I will try to read in a way that will help exegete it as I've read and re-read these quotes. 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 that they require to be treated together. For in both, that is, reading and speaking from a manuscript, in both, the sub-processes are those of taking in the sense of the manuscript or printed page through the eye

26:19 and these processes are the reverse of those which belong to the giving out of the sense by the voice and to the impressing of the thought and sentiment upon other minds. You see what he's saying? One is a taking in, if I may call it, mental inhaling and the other is mental exhaling. And you cannot inhale and exhale at one and the same time.

26:49 Try it.

26:51 Now, you can hold your breath. You're doing neither. But you can't inhale and exhale at one and the same time. And McElvain is saying, and I believe with indisputable accuracy, that when I'm reading McElvain seeking to understand I'm engaged in a form of mental inhaling.

27:12 The dominant processes of my mind are that he has said something, I'm trying to understand it and absorb it. Whereas in preaching I have something I've absorbed and I want you to absorb it and I'm exhaling seeking by all of my God-given faculties and faculties and faculties in dependence upon the Holy Spirit to exhale something in the act of preaching. And the sub-processes just as the physical processes inhaling involves a certain physiological exercise exhaling another. And I found that that analogy as I reworked the lecture was helpful to me and added it to my notes and I sort of squeezed it in at this point in McElvain. But now to pick up McElvain again. For in both the sub-processes are those of taking in the sense of the manuscript or printed page through the eye and these processes are the reverse of those which belong to the giving out of the sense by the voice the impressing of the thought and sentiment upon other minds. Now here's the new section.

28:24 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 leading states of the same mind. One or the other must fall into the rank of a sub-process. You see what he's saying?

28:49 You can't have the two dominant processes at the same time taking in and giving out any more than you can inhale and exhale at the same time. At least three of those leading states or mental operations the expressions of which constitute good delivery namely the consciousness of speaking directly to the audience B with the desire of accomplishing a given object C which object is held firmly in the grasp of the mind are diametrically opposed to the mental operations of taking in the sense through the eye. This opposition and incompatibility between these two classes of mental operations are the two both of which have to be carried on simultaneously exhibits the great difficulty to be overcome in speaking from a manuscript.

Historical Consensus for Extemporaneous Preaching

29:45 And I believe his thesis is undeniable in our own self-consciousness. This is why even in sharing these quotes with you I read them over and over again until I'm not just reading them to you that I can read them with some degree of felt passion and reading your eyes to see if it's registering to know at which point I'm going to bring in my illustration of inhaling and exhaling so that I'm not just simply as it were for the first time opening up McElvain and concentrating on seeking to see where his commas are what is the main verb what is the main thrust how to shade the words so that the meaning processes I then of necessity cannot have as the dominant activities of the mind reading your eyes and seeking to engage your mind as I'm speaking it's impossible that both processes should be dominant at one and the same time and there's a wonderful summary of all the various arguments as I've plowed through these old writers and sought to think through this matter in a work again that to my knowledge went through one printing and never saw the light of day again by a man named Etter and his work is entitled The Preacher and His Sermon and Etter summarizes much of what I have laid before you in these words thus after a thorough trial of the various modes of delivery

31:14 for above fourteen hundred years and after three hundred years of discussion upon their advantages and disadvantages the best modern opinion is in favor of the primitive mode of extemporaneous address rendered however as nearly perfect as possible by collateral and exilient their exiliery writing in other words they're saying don't have an undisciplined mind and to have a disciplined mind do right but in terms of what you do when you preach he says the best modern opinion is in favor of preaching without a preoccupation with one's paper our best authors on homiletics and I'm going to read this just again to show that this was no minority opinion in his day our best authors on homiletics such as Kidder an old work that God has put into my hands Shedd Broadus Hoppin all of which I've consulted in this area all strongly advocate the extempor method in the Church of England the homiletic writers Bridges ever heard of him before Bridges Gresley I don't have and Moore don't have among the Baptists Ripley yes Wayland I don't have him Broadus among the Presbyterians Skinner and Shedd unanimously give the palm to the same method even where a Unitarian author

32:42 has written the most systematic treatise on extemporaneous preaching among the Methodists not one is known says Dr. Kidder that was ever a reader of sermons this mode of delivery was also adopted to the most successful preachers of nearly all denominations and then he cites the leading preachers of the Congregational Church of the Baptists of the Episcopals and he says all who possessed a high reputation as the most powerful preachers were accustomed to speak extemporaneously the greatest pulpit orators of today Newman Hall Charles Spurgeon Joseph Parker Henry Ward Beecher T. DeWitt Talmadge belong to the school of extemporaneous address from these historical 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 possess 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 the and yet Chalmers read his paper

34:09 in tones of enthusiasm that quote made the rafters roar continuing to quote during the reading of his sermons Dr. Chalmers was absolutely terrible his heavy frame was convulsed his face flushed the veins on his forehead and neck stood out like whip cords and the foam flew from his mouth in flakes he didn't just have little spitlets he had flakes come out of his mouth while reading a manuscript he hung over his audience menacing them with his shaking fist or he stood erect manacled and staring no one will object to that kind of sermon reading so far as animation is concerned the writer goes on to say his manuscript burned but some of our modern manuscripts ought to be burned there's the contrast well brethren when I urge you never read a complete manuscript from the pulpit I hope I've convinced your judgment that we're standing in good company and for good and wise reasons rooted in an accurate analysis of what is going on in preaching what is going on in reading you say chapter and verse well since the little encounter in the pastor's conference I've done a lot more thinking about this whole matter of how much of these aspects of preaching are dependent on general revelation and I've come

35:38 to the conviction that I would not make a trite use of scripture just to give a scriptural semblance to a given point though that could be done because I believe it's an insult if God has clearly spoken in general revelation to put him in a hammerlock and say you've got to say it again in special revelation God says you listen to me where I speak and you listen to what I speak but certainly as I mentioned to I believe Pastor Carlson I'm I see no indication that when Peter stood to preach on the day of Pentecost when Paul was in a more didactic situation such as you find in Acts 20 I see no indication that he had any kind of manuscript in front of him he didn't even have scrolls of the Old Testament from which to open and allege that Jesus was the Christ and he certainly didn't say now will you all wait a minute while Peter didn't say on the day of Pentecost while my buddies pass out scrolls so you can all check my proof text as I preach to you concerning the fact that this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel so that in the whole ethos of what we would say preaching recorded in the scriptures it certainly is preaching that was not dependent upon any written paper before the preacher well then second word of counsel is aim at reducing the sermon to a one page skeleton to be carried into the pulpit for remember this is our field

General Guideline 2: Aim for a One-Page Skeleton

37:07 of concern how much paper and how do we relate to our paper in the act of preaching whatever length of detailed composition may be undertaken at your desk making an effort to reduce whatever you've done in the way of perhaps even a full manuscript making an effort to reduce it to one page of a clearly definable recognizable skeleton will do many many things to help you to be a better and a more effective preacher first of all it will force you to master the overall structure of the sermon and having mastered it and having it there in front of you on one page it is much more likely that it will be kept forcefully impressed upon your own mind in the midst of the actual preaching of that sermon furthermore it will force you to master what is really vital to your content if you know that there's a point under heading number one large letter A that is crucial and you fully expressed it in the manuscript well if it's critical enough then you ought to be able to carry it with you in your heart and mind and need only a phrase in the outline to trigger that issue that is so critical and if it's not that critical that the only way it can be retained is by bringing

38:37 your manuscript in is probably semi-filler and ought to be taken out in the first place and is probably if not vital may even be irrelevant furthermore doing this will not only help you to master the overall structure and the content but it will keep before you much more likely keep before you the overall thrust of the sermon because you can see on one page from your introduction to your conclusion and application and there's a visual reminder and it's anytime you glance at it that the whole purpose of everything from the introduction down to here is to bring it home to the theater of the conscience and the hearts and the wills the affections of your hearers and so I would urge you to aim at reducing the sermon to a one page skeleton to be carried into the pulpit then as you make your way through your eye can catch the precise place with very little effort you're not having to be flipping back and forth through various pages and you will be able to have a greater sense of liberation from your paper because there just ain't that much paper there to be bound to but if you've got six, seven, ten, twelve sheets of paper there's an awful lot of potential chains ready to reach out and wrap themselves around your eyeballs around your spirit around your tongue but if you know there just aren't that many then there is not an inordinate

40:05 dependence upon that and you'll be much more likely to really labor at these other aspects of being sensitive to that empathetic interaction between yourself and your listeners to be able to read your people to see that person that's going off to sleep that unconverted person that you prayed for on Wednesday night who's out but they're sitting there glassy eyed and you'll be free then on your feet to do some additional invention you're saying Lord help me to get an illustration tell a story something to get that man's eyes whereas if you're bound to your manuscript you might miss that opportunity to do good that grows out of an awareness of the actual situation that is before you as you preach some of the most helpful counsel along this line again is found in James Stewart in his excellent little book on preaching and I read this for your consideration you will be well advised which I'm sure every method of delivery you're proposing to adopt to begin with writing out your sermons fully this is what I quoted in a previous unit on the benefit of doing complete composition in the study and he says this will keep you from diffusiveness ambiguity and redundance it will make for clarity of thought and perspicuity of style therefore establish it as a rule that one of your two sermons each week some would go further and say both

41:35 shall be not merely drafted but written out in full from beginning to end but having your sermon thus completely written what are you to do with it are you to take the manuscript into the pulpit and read it word for word that this method has manifested advantages is not to be denied and then he gives some of the advantages and then he cites some men who are greatly effective in doing this but then he goes on to write there is however another side to this matter the preacher who suffers himself to be tied slavishly to his manuscript is surrendering something a quality of directness and pointedness of versatility and verve and liveliness which he can ill afford to lose there is the ever present danger that the typed or written sermon on the pulpit desk in front of him may act as a barrier between himself and those to whom he speaks Christian preaching strikes notes of challenge and appeal which are almost bound to sound muffled and unnatural where bondage to the written word holds sway the minister of the gospel is essentially a herald of the most magnificent and moving tidings that ever broke upon the world but how should he make the world feel the living

43:03 urgency of the message if he is perpetually fettered and shackled by the tradition of the red discourse R-E-A-D not R-E-D if you dispense with your manuscript and preach freely from a single page of notes sound familiar your sermon may indeed lose something of artistry and literary expression there may be gaps and broken sentences occasionally even murdered grammar brethren cried Father Taylor the sailor preacher finding himself entangled in a sentence from whose labyrinthine subordinate clauses there seemed to be no exit I have lost the nominative of the sentence and things are generally mixed up but I'm bound for the kingdom anyhow end quote you may lose some polished idiom or nicely rounded phrase you may perpetrate many an abrupt and violent anacoluthon you know what that is what matter if you do take courage you're in good company are there no anacoluthistic sentences I practice it but I flubbed it anacoluthistic sentences in the New Testament beginning one way ending another you don't get far in your Greek syntax before you realize this thing anacoluthon especially in the Pauline corpus of literature is constantly there in any case what you stand to lose

44:32 is more than compensated by the gain in personal grip in directness and urgency and reality in the immediate impact of mind upon mind and living encounter of heart with heart so you see brethren when we emphasize and see the integration of these things the necessity of this empathetic interaction these men recognize that what you do with your paper is going to greatly influence your ability to respect those principles and so whenever they deal with the one it's obvious that they are thinking of that which lies behind it and is inseparably joined to it and so I would urge you and urge you to do it in your preaching sessions even here reduce the sermon to a one page skeleton to be carried with you in the pulpit early in my ministry when I was hardly developed as a man let alone as a preacher having started to preach when I was seventeen just coming up on my eighteenth birthday I came up with a I came up with a I cultivated that practice and I'm very grateful to God for it and though with the passing of the years for a number of reasons I have written more and carried more into the pulpit again and again people have commented to me when they've asked to see what I had in the pulpit I said well I would never have known you had that in the pulpit I said no because I'm not dependent upon it and it was some of the disciplines of those early days of preaching from a one page

General Guideline 3: Look at Paper Only When Necessary

46:02 manuscript not a full eight and a half by eleven it was this size and I have some of the outlines of those early sermons preached way back in 1956 and I smile at them but they almost invariably had three heads and there was an attempt to deal honestly with the Bible and there was a blessed discipline of not being tied to my paper and for that I give God thanks so if some of you have gotten started in a different context it may take some real discipline to break the tyranny of the paper and we'll come to that a little bit later and have Spurgeon give us some very helpful counsel well number three look at your paper only as frequently as is absolutely necessary now that I believe is sound counsel purpose of which should be obvious look at your paper only as much as is absolutely necessary it's better to lose an element in precision or elegance of expression than as these authors have reminded us to break the living current between you and your listeners that directness and felt empathy which are crucial in the act of preaching Spurgeon makes a most disarming confession in his chapter on the faculty of impromptu speech in my edition of Spurgeon it's page 142

47:30 and I want us to hear Spurgeon if you're happy enough to acquire the power of extemporary speech pray recollect that you may very readily lose it I've been struck with this in my own experience and I refer to that because it is the best evidence I can give you if for two successive Sundays I take my notes a little longer and fuller I make my notes a little longer and fuller than usual I find on the 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 the things of my thoughts and am not so extemporaneous as I've been accustomed to be there is a direct craving and even an increased necessity for pre-composition if a man begins to walk with a stick merely for a whim he will soon come to require a 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 almost be necessary to your movements although naturally your limbs might be as sound and healthy as any man's Spurgeon recognized and confessed that he found himself developing a dependence upon the paper and the result was there was

48:58 something being lost in that living interaction between himself and his people again listen to Broadus that master in Israel while his immediate subject is that of discussing writing a manuscript at the level of preparation he obviously assumes that that manuscript was going to be carried into the pulpit and this is what Broadus has to say to us this method deprives the preacher's thinking of the benefit of all that mental quickening which is produced by the presence of the congregation he's saying don't even write your sermon out in full in the secret place and giving as his in the study as his argument that it robs you of the benefit of all that mental quickening which is produced by the presence of the congregation as to thoughts which are then for the first time struck out it is true that men of rare flexibility tact and grace can often introduce them effectively in connection with the reading of a manuscript but such men establish no general rule and the great mass of those who read their sermons have to lose such thoughts altogether or to introduce them awkwardly and with comparatively poor effect and besides the distinct thoughts which occur only in the act of delivery there is something more important

50:25 in the warmer color which the now kindled and glowing mind would give to the whole body of thought in those differences of hue and tone which change the mass of prepared material into living breathing burning speech you understand the autumn trees with their many colors all dull and tame beneath the ashen sky but presently the evening sun bursts through the clouds and lights up the forest with an almost unearthly glory no less great is the difference between preparation and actually speaking for every single man who was born to be a preacher see what he's saying what's the difference when these trees were at their peak color they had a fixed amount of pigmentation in every leaf but if the day were like it is today gray and dull without anything being changed if toward the afternoon the skies opened up and the setting sun with its peculiar color began to shine through those leaves the whole scene would be the same but not the same radically different yet not different it's a beautiful imagery that he's using and he says no less great is the difference between preparation and preaching yes the leaf

51:55 of the exegesis is not going to change that is born of careful responsible use of our exegetical tools and the essential structure based on sound principles of homiletics all of the leaves and all of the trees are there but the study is more like those trees in the cloudy dull day but in the act of preaching with a lively congregation and with a heart inflamed with passion and desire to see good done to men and God glorified in his truth and the presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of the gathered assembly is like the clouds parting in the setting evening sun irritating those same trees with an almost supernatural supernatural glow and then he goes on to amplify that and then again hear him as he touches on the relationship of this to the delivery itself as to delivery itself reading is of necessity less effective and in most cases immensely less effective for all the great purposes of oratory than speaking greater coldness of manner is almost inevitable if one attempts to be very animated or pathetic and by the way there he means showing genuine genuine pathos it will look unnatural the tones of voice are monotonous or seem to have a forced variety the gestures are nearly almost unnatural

53:24 because it is not natural to gesticulate much in reading you don't generally sit at your desk at home reading then your wife would come in and say honey I think maybe all this studying has made me mad she'd go to text and not say Paul but call you by your first name and say much learning is making me mad the mere turning of the pages however skillfully done breaks the continuity of delivery in the midst perhaps of some impassioned passage while the preacher's face glows his action has become varied and passionate and has wrought upon him a high degree of sympathy presently his right hand descends and flings over a leaf of the manuscript and the spell is broken we are not we are made to remember what we are doing and reminded that after all this is not living speech but only splendid reading that we are not as a moment ago we seem to feel in immediate and fully sympathizing contact with the burning soul of the preacher but that paper there is between us now you see again these men understood things they knew what it was to feel that living current broken when the man could not say his next paragraph without turning his page and then that sense of immediate interaction between the mind and soul of preacher and listener is broken every man has felt it

54:53 the marvelous magical at times almost supernatural power of the preacher's eye that look how it pierces our inmost soul now kindling us to passion melting us into tenderness and all the better that it is not felt as a thing apart from speech but blends with it more thoroughly than gestures can more completely than music blends with poetry and reinforces with all of its mysterious potency the power of thought and sentiment and sound is now talking about the eye the great place of the eye in preaching now in reading this wonderful expressiveness of the eye is interrupted grievously diminished in power reduced to be nothing better than occasional sunbeams and the breaking out for a moment among wintry clouds in a word reading is an essentially different thing from speaking when well executed reading has a power of its own but it is unnatural to substitute it for speaking and it can at best only approximate never fully attain the same effect and the great principle behind all of that is though we may need a manuscript a manuscript though we may have a one page or two page skeleton before us look at your paper only as frequently as is absolutely

56:23 necessary only as frequently as is absolutely necessary well here's a good place to break and then we'll take up guideline number four and then five and six and then proceed to some concluding practical counsels and then proceed to some practical counsels concerning the reading of quotations not in a lecture on preaching but in preaching itself alright well let's take our ten minute break brother