Douglas Wilson had a short series of posts on preaching at Blog and Mablog last week.
Here’s a few quotes, along with links.
As always, the points are engagingly and clearly expressed.
Preaching is the authoritative declaration of the Word and will of God, with the intention of revealing Christ to the hearers. Christ is seen through a window, and not painted on the wall. The medium of the preacher is to be Windex, not oil base paint. This definition has three components — the manner, the content, and the purpose of the message. The manner is authoritative declaration. The content is the deposit given to us in Scripture, in all its parts and relations. The purpose or goal is to declare Christ, and make Him known.
Read the rest of What Preaching Is
Some common sins of delivery include the following: 1. Being bored with the material, and therefore being boring with it. 2. Running out of material ten minutes before the end of the sermon, and circling the airport aimlessly until it is time to land. 3. Preaching the whole counsel of God every fifteen minutes or so. 4. Refusing to enunciate. 5. Garbling your point so that you are, like the last of the Mohicans in the deep woods, very hard to follow. 6. Hopping from one foot to the other like you were a cat on hot bricks. 7. Thinking that conviction of sin comes through yelling and upbraiding. 8. Drawing attention to yourself instead of away from yourself.
Read the rest of Pulpit Sins
“Moderation is not the virtue of many. If one man casts a sprinkling of the salt of wit into his sermon straightway some half idiotic brother must set the people grinning all the sermon through. If one, to whom it is natural, is so carried away by his earnestness that his action becomes at time highly dramatic, instantly a certain crew fall to mouthing and posturing as if these things were the great power of God. If one man occasionally spiritualizes, but keeps within the bounds of discretion, they must needs indulge all sorts of fancies till one might say of them as a foreigner said of King James’s favorites preacher, ‘He playeth with his text, patting it to and fro, as a cat doth a mouse'” (Spurgeon, Eccentric Preachers, p. 44).
Don’t Toy with the Text
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