THE PREACHER'S THEME
sooner or later to a sultry air of tedious disenchantment? Does spring, regularly returning year by year, ever become monotonous? Is not its wonder as fresh and unspoilt still as when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy? And are God's mighty acts in history and redemption less enthralling than His mighty acts in nature? Drop dogma from your preaching, and for a brief time you may titillate the fancy of the superficial, and have them talking about your cleverness; but that type of ministry wears out speedily, and garners no spiritual harvest in the end. Therefore settle it with your own souls now that, whatever else you may do or leave undone, you will preach in season and out of season God's redemptive deed in Christ. This is the one inexhaustible theme. "We may call that doctrine exhilarating," writes Dorothy Sayers again, "or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all." I am not counselling you to keep harping on one string, for variety is the very breath of life in preaching. I am insisting on what is paradoxical but true—that the more resolutely and stubbornly you refuse to be deflected from the one decisive theme, the greater the variety you will achieve; while the more you seek variety by wandering from your centre, the faster the descent to bathos and monotony. God's deed in Christ touches life at every point. It speaks to every aspect of the human predicament. It stretches all horizons inimitably. It bursts through
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