HERALDS OF GOD
sion, taking for your text the words in i Samuel, "David encouraged himself in the Lord his God." Instead of starting with a historical introduction based on the Biblical incident, go straight to the experience of your hearers themselves. Your first sentences will arrest their attention, if you speak of the disheartened moods which no one quite escapes, and of those difficult days when work is a weariness and resilience is low, or when life has defeated some cherished hope and dreams have died. Then ask them to observe how one brave spirit faced this very test and emerged victorious. Show them David, as that most moving page of Old Testament biography depicts him, girding himself to meet a succession of adversities that might well have made any man a nervous wreck. Not by the method of the Stoic, who lectures his own soul on the matter of morale; not by the way of the wishful thinker, who practises a comfortable self-deception; not by these did this man triumph, but by letting God in upon the situation, by an act of religious realism that smote the low mood and brought dawn breaking through the midnight of the soul Or again, suppose your subject is Handicapped Lives, and your text Paul's thorn in the flesh. If you begin with a disquisition on the apostle's disability, your hearers may accord you only that tepid interest which a doubtfully relevant theme elicits. But start off from the fact that almost every life is conscious of a handicap of some kind—whether of health, or talent, or opportunity, or personality, or social gift—and immediately their attention is engaged:
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