Preach Sermons, Not Commentaries

The heart of man is a fortress without a drawbridge. It is so hard and impregnable that it takes divine weapons and skilled soldiers to regularly invade it with the truth. Weekly, men equipped by the Spirit of God urge the dead to live and the sorely tempted to flee to Christ, to cling to Christ, firing God’s very words at their souls to save them. Men are dying; the saints are tempted and weary; has God spoken or not? He has indeed, and men preach sermons proclaiming those words.

These sermon arrows should be burning, precise, and piercing. So I contend that we need fewer lectures from the pulpit — and more sermons, impassioned, agonistic, flaming. We must not content ourselves merely to educate our hearers; we must aim (and strategize) to persuade, move, thrust them into the bright light of reality, where God reigns supreme and his gospel remains the urgent need of every soul.

Sermontaries

Some Reformed preaching has taken on a professorial character. In a landscape of fog machines, casual services, stool-chats, and religious entertainment, we are the Bible guys who really take Scripture seriously. We practice exegesis, not eisegesis. We enjoy original languages and commentaries. We love to study Scripture (and should) but tend to package what we have learned rather hastily into the weekly sermon. Too often, we default to bundling our observations by a title, a few summary headings, extrapolation on points that excite us, honorable mentions to pieces that didn’t, all appended by a few applications.

I’ve come across this so often that, like Adam, I felt compelled to name the creature. A sermontary is a multipoint sermon-commentary, preached sequentially through a section of Scripture. The good versions of sermontaries are true and even insightful expositions — that is, worthy teaching, just not often a great sermon. It teaches us what is there in the text — glorious — but does not rally those points under one main banner or reality. It differs from a Bible study in that only one person talks, and he has done more studying than the rest of us.

Where Arrows Land

As I see it, though the sermontary and the sermon share similar aims, they differ in their means.

Ask the sermontator, and he will answer that his aim is the glory of God and the good of souls. How? By feeding people God’s word through weekly instruction.

Ask a preacher of an older generation, and he will answer that his aim is the glory of God and the good of souls. How? By urging men to be reconciled to God and live for him.

The difference is emphasis. In the sermontary, the Bible is explained; in the sermon, applied. The former places the emphasis on enlightenment; the latter on persuasion. The sermontary sheds light; the sermon brings heat. The sermontary leaves the arrow in the mind; the sermon sends the arrow through the mind into the heart and will. The former teaches the faith; the latter urges the obedience of faith. The first is egalitarian with equally weighted points; the second is complementarian and has a head with supporting ideas. The first proceeds as a scattershot of biblical truths; the second, a sustained, targeted assault at the heart.

The sermontary has virtues. You teach the Bible. You trace thought to thought, word to word. Each part gets its due, and the preacher briefly explains each nugget of truth. The lessons end where the section ends, and if time remains, a thought of how this applies is offered. Again, this holds more value than much so-called “preaching,” but it misses many of the chief virtues of a sermon (which former generations championed) — namely, the sheer force, the laser focus, the aim to fashion the truth into a battle-ram pressing upon the heart and life of the hearer.

We witness the difference in the very anatomy of older sermons.

Truth in Battle Array

Hearing some preaching today gives me the same disorientation I have had watching my children play in the front yard — one moment they are in the sprinkler, the next playing with toys, the next chasing a butterfly, then playing with the toy while climbing a tree to catch the butterfly. Children dash to and fro; a well-crafted sermon should not.

“Children dash to and fro; a well-crafted sermon should not.”

Many of us know in principle that we should send forth troops of thought, imagery, and argumentation with more precision and organization than military generals. We know that untactile directions and scattered soldiers here and there firing at random targets will not win the war. Yet the sermontary often (accidentally) lacks strategic structure. It can feel more like reading through the Proverbs than through Paul — golden truths scattered on the floor rather than a sustained, building argument. The sermontator does not rearrange truths in battle formation; he leans more on the sequence of original verses than the thrust of the present message.

Yet the arrangement of a sermon should be based upon unity. The sermon should (usually) build around a main idea, and the divisions unveil aspects of that idea, progressing to a climax. The unity allows the truth to pick up momentum as it flies from the sling toward the target. Stuart Olyott captures the dynamic:

A sermon should gather strength as it proceeds, and this gathering strength should be expressed in its headings. It should be plain to all that the argument is moving along and that it is gathering force. . . . Each division should make the hearers more and more keyed up about the coming climax. (Preaching Pure and Simple, 94)

He uses just three words to define a good sermon: unity, order, proportion.

Unity means every sermon should bring a troop to assault one wall, accomplish one objective, plant the flag on one hill. It is not several discourses tied together by one long passage read before the sermon, nor a bunch of different flowers thrown haphazardly together by the rubber band of some mnemonic device. It is a bouquet. Baptist brothers, even our alliteration is a poor substitute for conceptual unity. Toads, Tigers, and Toddlers should not be caged together, though each begins with “T.”

Order means that the path through the sermon is not a few pavers dropped at random on someone’s lawn but steps dug into the side of a hill that lead to the scenic view atop. Too many sermons jump from one conceptual paver to the next. “What was the sermon about?” one asks, after hopping for thirty minutes from stone to stone. Because the sermon refused to rally around a main point, the saint is left with a random collection of his or her favorite points. Only the most personally appealing pavers stick in the mind. But if each point follows from the one before, if it ascends somewhere, keeping subordinate points as the steps and the main point as the peak, every hearer will say something like, “Oh, that sermon called us to remember our adoption!”

Proportion means we consider how long each point stands in comparison to the other points and how much energy each truth deserves. Hearers can feel how much weight each point holds. Disproportion is felt. Right?

Unity. Order. Proportion. Olyott concludes, “The worst preacher on earth will improve immediately if he remembers these three words” (85).

Prince of Organizers

Charles Spurgeon, labeled the “Prince of Preachers,” known for his eloquent and energetic sermons, knew these principles and reigned as a very royal organizer.

I confess that I frequently sit hour after hour praying and waiting for a subject, and that this is the main part of my study; much hard labor have I spent in manipulating topics, ruminating upon points of doctrine, making skeletons out of verses, and then burying every bone of them in the catacombs of oblivion, drifting on and on over leagues of broken water, till I see the red lights, and make sail direct to the desired haven. I believe that, almost any Saturday in my life, I prepare enough outlines of Sermons, if I felt at liberty to preach them, to last me for a month, but I no more dare to use them than an honest mariner would run to shore a cargo of contraband goods. (Spurgeon, Autobiography)

We can learn from him. Because he preached from an outline, the main part (though not the only part) of his sermon prep consisted, not in laboring over poetic phrases or crafting pristine manuscripts, but in “making skeletons” — each week, constructing a month’s worth of outlines to find the best one for that one sermon. He painstakingly organized his exegesis and thoughts into a coherent message. This labor enabled the sermon to communicate one main thing — one stunning reality that ought to transform his hearers. (And he came to do this outlining for fun in his spare time, as his son recalled.)

Spurgeon loved to hone his battle tactics. So should today’s pastor. Go and do likewise. Practice making sermon outlines that have unity, order, and proportion. Listen to other sermons, try to reproduce their outlines, and analyze how they did.

Place for Structure

Let’s conclude by examining one of Spurgeon’s sermon outlines, noticing beforehand how he felt about sermontaries.

Spurgeon’s teaching during the service expressed itself in two distinct moments. First came the exposition of the text, which was a reading of the larger context with brief, warm remarks on the verses. And after came the sermon, which may have drawn from the whole context, and certainly contained true exposition under the sermon’s divisions, but focused specifically on one verse which represented one idea of that larger section to be preached. Today, sermontators regard the exposition as the sermon.

“Practice making sermon outlines that have unity, order, and proportion.”

What was a sermon to Spurgeon? Let’s look, for an example, at sermon 2584, “Place for the Word.” Spurgeon preached this evening sermon on John 8:37: “My word hath no place in you.”

He began with the exposition, walking verse by verse through John 8:28–59. For example, Spurgeon commented on Jesus saying in verse 29, “For I do always those things that please him.”

Let us labor earnestly to be able to say that. If there is anything which would not please God, let us have nothing to do with it; if it would not please God, it ought not to please us. Blessed shall that servant of the Lord be, who can sincerely say, “I do always those things that please him.”

He did likewise for the entire text. But then came the sermon on John 8:37, which he preached under the following heads:

I. What place ought the Word of God to have in men’s hearts?
II. Why has that Word no place in many hearts?
III. If you have not the Word of Christ in you, what will come of it?

Notice how the sermon is unified around the main point of what place God’s word ought to have in our hearts. Each part serves the whole. It wasn’t a potluck of observations on all the truths in John 8:28–59; Spurgeon covered that in the exposition. The sermon, on the other hand, has a main idea with subordinate points. From the outline alone, we can discern the unity, see how it progresses, and watch it land at the door of the hearer’s heart in application — If you have not the word of Christ in you, what will come of it?

What was the sermon about? We weren’t there to hear it, and yet we know. We haven’t even read the sermon, and we can answer — all because of the unified and logical structure. The point is not to preach exactly as Spurgeon did; we need not confine ourselves to one verse at a time, for example. But we can strive to imitate his unity, his order, and his simplicity. For the glory of God and the good of our hearers, preach sermons, not sermontaries.