Of all the books on preaching out there, this is my favourite one.
Published in 1982 by John Stott (1921-2011) who was a pastor to pastors, theologian, integral to the Lausanne Movement, and the author of more than 50 books, this book is an oldie, but definitely a goodie.
At Beulah, I bring all of our preacher’s together (current and aspiring) four times a year for our Preacher’s Learning Community. Between Two Worlds by John Stott is required reading as it’s comprehensive in the theology, art, craft, and calling of preaching.
In my opinion, here are the top quotes from this classic. Enjoy!
- By far, the most important secrets of preaching are not technical but theological and personal. (10)
- We have the same Word of God, and the same human beings, and the same fallible preacher called by the same living God to study both the Word and the world in order to relate the one to the other with honesty, conviction, courage and meekness. (11)
- I thank the long-suffering congregation of All Souls Church, who have been the anvil on which I have forged whatever preaching skills I have, and the church family who have surrounded me with their love, encouragement and prayers. (12)
- Preaching is indispensable to Christianity (15)
- But how shall Christ’s Body be healed? One only means and one way of cure has been given us…and that is teaching of the Word. (20)
- It was the preaching of this divine Word, not political intrigue or the power of the sword, which established the Reformation in Germany. (24)
- One of the greatest gifts a preacher needs is such a sensitive understanding of people and their problems that he can anticipate their reactions to each part of his sermon and respond to them. Preaching is rather like playing chess, in that the expert chess player keeps several moves ahead of his opponent, and is always ready to respond, whatever piece he decides to move next. (61)
- We have no wish to encourage passivity in the congregation. We want to provoke people to think, to answer us and argue with us in their minds, and we should maintain such a lively (though silent) dialogue with them that they find it impossible to fall asleep. (62)
- It is difficult to imagine the world in the year A.D. 2000, by which time versatile micro-processors are likely to be as common as simple calculators are today. We should certainly welcome the fact that the silicon chip will transcend human brain-power, as the machine has transcended human muscle-power. Much less welcome will be the probable reduction of human contact as the new electronic network renders personal relationships ever less necessary. In such a dehumanized society the fellowship of the local church will become increasingly important, whose members meet one another, and talk and listen to one another in person rather than on screen. In this human context of mutual love the speaking and hearing of the Word of God is also likely to become more necessary for the preservation of our humanness, not less. (69)
- There is, therefore, a profound empathy between preacher and congregation, arising from their common faith. The shepherd is commissioned to feed the flock, the steward to dispense to the household. Both sides know this. It is partly for this purpose that they have assembled. Expectation is in the air. So the pulpit prayer before the sermon begins is (or should be) no empty formality. It is rather a vital opportunity for preacher and people to pray for one another, put themselves into the hand of God, humble themselves before him, and pray that his voice may be heard and his glory seen. (81)
- The ‘message’ is God’s own Word. For the people have not gathered to hear a human being, but to meet with God. They desire like Mary of Bethany to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to his teaching. They are spiritually hungry. The bread they desire is the Word of God. (81)
- Thus Word and worship belong indissolubly to each other. All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is the adoration of his Name. Therefore acceptable worship is impossible without preaching. For preaching is making known the Name of the Lord, and worship is praising the Name of the Lord made known. Far from being an alien intrusion into worship, the reading and preaching of the Word are actually indispensable to it. The two cannot be divorced. Indeed, it is their unnatural divorce which accounts for the low level of so much contemporary worship. Our worship is poor because our knowledge of God is poor, and our knowledge of God is poor because our preaching is poor. But when the Word of God is expounded in its fulness, and the congregation begin to glimpse the glory of the living God, they bow down in solemn awe and joyful wonder before his throne. It is preaching which accomplishes this, the proclamation of the Word of God in the power of the Spirit of God. That is why preaching is unique and irreplaceable. (82-83)
- It is when we are convinced that God is light (and so wanting to be known), that God has acted (and thus made himself known), and that God has spoken (and thus explained his actions), that we must speak and cannot remain silent. (96)
- The true preacher is both a faithful steward of God’s mysteries and a faithful herald of God’s good news. (100)
- Scripture is far more than a collection of ancient documents in which the words of God are preserved. It is not a kind of museum in which God’s Word is exhibited behind glass like a relic or fossil. On the contrary, it is a living word to living people from the living God, a contemporary message for the contemporary world. (100)
- “The Bible is God preaching.” – J.I. Packer (103)
- Preaching is not just talk about a Christ of the past, but is a mouth through which the Christ of the present offers us life today. (108)
- The word of the preacher is an attack on the prison in which man is held. It opens the prison, and sets him free. (108)
- “So pray and so preach that, if there are no conversions, you will be astonished, amazed, and broken-hearted. Look for the salvation of your hearers as much as the angel who will sound the last trump will look for the waking of the dead! Believe your own doctrine! Believe your own Saviour! Believe in the Holy Ghost who dwells in you! For thus shall you see your heart’s desire, and God shall be glorified.” – Charles Spurgeon (108)
- The Word of God is the sceptre by which Christ rules the Church and the food with which he nourishes it. (109)
- God’s people live and flourish only by believing and obeying his Word. (110)
- A deaf church is a dead church: that is an unalterable principle. God quickens, feeds, inspires, and guides his people by his Word. For whenever the Bible is truly and systematically expounded, God uses it to give his people the vision without which they perish. First, they begin to see what he wants them to be, his new society in the world. Then they go on to grasp the resources he has given them in Christ to fulfill his purpose. That is why it is only by humble and obedient listening to his voice that the Church can grow into maturity, serve the world and glorify its Lord. (113-114)
- More often than we like to admit, the pew is a reflection of the pulpit. Seldom if ever can the pew rise higher than the pulpit. (115)
- So, if the Church is to flourish again, there is no greater need than a recovery of faithful, powerful, biblical preaching. God still says to his people, ‘O that today you would listen to my Word’ (cf. Ps. 95:7) and to preachers ‘O that you would proclaim it.’ (116)
- Therefore the true preacher will never be ‘a mere speaking tube or trumpet … reproducing perfectly but mechanically the message of God’s written Word’; he must rather be a pastor, ‘who is himself in heart and mind in perfect harmony with the pastoral Scriptures which he must preach.’ Moreover, a good shepherd’s care of his sheep is fourfold – feeding, guiding (because sheep easily go astray), guarding (against predatory wolves) and healing (binding up the wounds of the injured). And all four of these activities are aspects of the ministry of the Word. (120)
- The Bible itself uses a variety of images to illustrate what a Christian preacher is: herald or town crier, sower, ambassador, steward or housekeeper, pastor or shepherd, workman…What is immediately notable about these six pictures is their emphasis on the ‘givenness’ of the message. Preachers are not to invent it; it has been entrusted to them…It is impressive that in all these New Testament metaphors the preacher is a servant under someone else’s authority, and the communicator of somebody else’s word. (135-137)
- We should be praying that God will raise up a new generation of Christian communicators who are determined to bridge the chasm; who struggle to relate God’s unchanging Word to our ever-changing world; who refuse to sacrifice truth to relevance or relevance to truth; but who resolve instead in equal measure to be faithful to Scripture and pertinent to today. (144)
- As Spurgeon once commented, ‘Christ said, “Feed my sheep … Feed my lambs.” Some preachers, however, put the food so high that neither lambs nor sheep can reach it. They seem to have read the text, “Feed my giraffes.’ (147)
- As Bishop Phillip Brooks put it, ‘truth and timeliness together make the full preacher.’ (148)
- Barth answered, “I take the Bible in one hand the daily newspaper in the other.” (149)
- I am not suggesting that the pulpit is the place in which precise political programmes are framed or from which they are commended. Rather that it is the preacher’s responsibility to open up the biblical principles which relate to the problems of contemporary society, in such a way as to help everybody to develop a Christian judgment about them, and to inspire and encourage the opinion-formers and policy-makers in the congregation, who occupy influential positions in public life, to apply these biblical principles to their professional life. There may be politicians in the congregation, or lawyers, teachers, doctors, industrialists, business people, novelists, journalists, actors, radio and television producers and scriptwriters. The pulpit should help them to develop their Christian thinking and so to penetrate their segment of the human community more deeply for Christ. What is certain is that the pulpit has political influence, even if nothing remotely connected with politics is ever uttered from it. For then the preacher’s silence endorses the contemporary socio-political conditions, and instead of helping to change society and make it more pleasing to God, the pulpit becomes a mirror which reflects contemporary society, and the Church conforms to the world. The neutrality of the pulpit is impossible. (167-168)
- Can we find a third way? Is there a way to handle controversial topics in the pulpit which is brave not cowardly, humble not dogmatic, and prudent not foolish? I think there is. It is to help Christians to develop a Christian mind. The Christian mind (an expression popularized by Harry Blamires in his book of that title) is not a mind which is thinking about specifically Christian or even religious topics, but a mind which is thinking about everything, however apparently ‘secular’, and doing so ‘Christianly’ or within a Christian frame of reference. It is not a mind stuffed full with pat answers to every question, all neatly filed as in the memory bank of a computer; it is rather a mind which has absorbed biblical truths and Christian presuppositions so thoroughly that it is able to view every issue from a Christian perspective and so reach a Christian judgment about it. Mr. Blamires bemoans the almost total loss of a Christian mind among Church leaders today: ‘The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. As a thinking being the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.’ (170)
- Preachers should facilitate the recovery of the lost Christian mind. For by our systematic exposition of the Bible over the years we should be giving our congregation a framework of truth. This will include such basic convictions as the reality and loving personality of the living God, the dignity of human beings by creation and their depravity by the fall, the pervasiveness of evil and the primacy of love, the victory and reign of Jesus Christ, the centrality of the new community in God’s historical purpose, the transcience of time and the certainty of the eschaton of judgment and salvation. More simply, a mind may be said to be Christian when it has firmly grasped the fourfold biblical scheme of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, and is able to evaluate the phenomena of life int he light of it. So all our preaching, week in and week out, should gradually unfold ‘the whole counsel of God’ and so contribute to the development of Christian minds in the congregation. (170-171)
- How, then, does this task relate to controversial preaching? How can we help church members to think Christianly about a particular topic of debate? It seems that we have a fourfold duty. First, we must expound with courage, clarity and conviction the biblical principle or principles which are involved, and those aspects of the subject on which God has plainly revealed his will. Secondly, we should seek to summarize fairly the alternative applications which biblical Christians have made, and the arguments they have used to buttress their conclusions. Thirdly, we should feel free, if we judge it wise, to indicate which position we hold and why. And fourthly, we should leave the congregation free, after grasping the principles we have taught and weighing the issues we have sketched, to make up their own minds. (171)
- Our task as preachers, then, is neither to avoid all areas of controversy, nor to supply slick answers to complex questions in order to save people the bother of thinking. Either way is to treat them like children who are unable to think for themselves, and to condemn them to perpetual immaturity. Instead, it is our responsibility to teach them with clarity and conviction the plain truths of Scripture, in order to help them develop a Christian mind, and to encourage them to think with it about the great problems of the day, and so to grow into maturity in Christ. (173)
- We who are called to be Christian preachers today should do all we can to help the congregation to grow out of dependence on borrowed slogans and ill-considered cliches, and instead to develop their powers of intellectual and moral criticism, that is, their ability to distinguish between truth and error, good and evil. Of course we should encourage an attitude of humble submission to Scripture, but at the same time make it clear that we claim no infallibility for our interpretations of Scripture. We should urge our hearers to ‘test’ and ‘evaluate’ our teaching. We should welcome questions, not resent them. We should not want people to be moonstruck by our preaching, to hang spellbound on our words, and to soak them up like sponges. To desire such an uncritical dependence on us is to deserve the fierce denunciation of Jesus for wanting to be called ‘rabbi’ by men. (177)
- This kind of open but questioning mind is implicit even in the ‘pastoral’ metaphor. Sheep, it is true, are often described as ‘docile’ creatures, which may be so, but they are fairly discriminating in what they eat, and are certainly not uncritically omnivorous like goats. Moreover, the way in which the shepherd feeds them is significant. In reality, he does not feed them at all (except perhaps in the case of a sick lamb which he may take up in his arms and bottle-feed); instead he leads them to good grazing pasture where they feed themselves. (177)
- “None will ever be a good minister of the Word of God unless he is first of all a scholar.” – Calvin (180)
- “He who has ceased to learn has ceased to teach. He who no longer sows in the study will no more reap in the pulpit.” – Spurgeon (180)
- Overworked clergy and frustrated laity form a dangerous combination; the Body of Christ does not grow into maturity that way. (206)
- No sermon is really strong which is not strong in structure too. Just as bones without flesh make a skeleton, so flesh without bones makes a jellyfish. And neither bony skeletons nor jellyfish make good sermons. (229)
- The whole process of sermon preparation, from beginning to end, was admirably summed up by the American Black preacher who said, ‘First, I reads myself full, next I thinks myself clear, next I prays myself hot, and then I lets go.’ (258)
- The sincerity of a preacher has two aspects: he means what he says when in the pulpit, and he practises what he preaches when out of it. (262)
- Preachers are not actors, nor is the pulpit a stage. So beware! (272)
- “The true way to shorten a sermon is to make it more interesting.” – H.W. Beecher (292)
- Sermonettes breed Christianettes. (294)
- Neither men-pleasers nor time-servers ever make good preachers. (299)
- “[Courage] is the indispensable requisite of any true ministry…If you are afraid of men and a slave to their opinion, go and do something else. Go and make shoes to fit them. Go even and paint pictures which you know are bad but which suit their bad taste. But do not keep on all your life preaching sermons which shall say not what God sent you to declare, but what they hire you to say. Be courageous. Be independent.” – Phillips Brooks, 1987 Yale Lectures (300)
- The fact is that the authentic gospel of the New Testament remains extremely offensive to human pride, and nobody who preaches it faithfully can expect to escape at least some degree of opposition. (309)
- “The true function of a preacher is to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed.” – Chad Walsh (314)
- The point in all preaching is “to break a hard heart and to heal a broken heart.” – John Newton (314)
- The most privileged and moving experience a preacher can ever have is when, in the middle of the sermon, a strange hush descends upon the congregation. The sleepers have woken up, the coughers have stopped coughing, and the fidgeters are sitting still. No eyes or minds are wandering. Everybody is attending, though not to the preacher. For the preacher is forgotten, and the people are face to face with the living God, listening to his still, small voice. (326)
- A concert audience does not come to watch the conductor but to listen to the music; a church congregation should not come to watch or hear the preacher, but to listen to God’s Word. The function of the conductor is to draw the music out of the choir or orchestra, in order that the audience may enjoy the music; the function of the preacher is to draw the Word of God out of the Bible, in order that the congregation may receive his Word with joy. The conductor must not come between the music and the audience; the preacher must not come between the Lord and his people. We need the humility to get out of the way. Then the Lord will speak, and the people will hear him; the Lord will manifest himself, and the people will see him; and, hearing his voice and seeing his glory, the people will fall down and worship him. (328)
- Only Jesus Christ by his Holy Spirit can open blind eyes and deaf ears, make the lame walk and the dumb speak, prick the conscience, enlighten the mind, fire the heart, move the will, give life to the dead and rescue slaves from Satanic bondage. And all this he can and does, as the preacher should know from his own experience. Therefore, our greatest need as preachers is to be clothed with power from on high’ (Luke 24:49), so that, like the apostles, we may ‘preach the gospel … by the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven’ (1 Pet. 1:12), and the gospel may come to people through our preaching ‘not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction’. (1 Thess. 1:5) (329)
- All of us who are Christian preachers are finite, fallen, frail and fallible creatures, in biblical language pots of earthenware’ (2 Cor. 4:7 NEB) or ‘jars of clay’ (NIV). The power belongs to Christ and is exerted through his Spirit. The words we speak in human weakness the Holy Spirit carries home by his power to the mind, heart, conscience and will of the hearers. ‘It were better to speak six words in the power of the Holy Ghost,’ said Spurgeon once, ‘than to preach seventy years of sermons without the Spirit.’ (334)