THE PREACHER'S STUDY
For you will be touching the very nerve of their own experience. Then you will go on to show how Paul, by the grace of Christ, turned his limitations to glorious gain, and how any man or woman to-day may do the same.
A useful variant of this method of approach is to begin with some arresting incident or picture from life or literature. Take, for instance, a subject on which you are bound to speak to your people not once but many times, the immemorial question “Does God care?” You might prelude your sermon on this theme with that extraordinarily vivid picture Carlyle gives near the beginning of Sartor—the philosopher gazing out across the city at midnight from his lofty attic, musing on the mingled joys and sorrows, hopes and miseries of the half-a-million human beings huddled round him there: “But I,” he exclaims at last, “I sit above it all; I am alone with the Stars.” Is God like that—an aloof, spectator God? Or you might begin with that youthful outburst in one of Hugh Walpole’s stories. "You know that there can't be a God, Vanessa. In your heart you must know it. You are a wise woman. You read and think. Well, then, ask yourself: How can there be a God and life be as it is?" The great initial advantage of this method is that it vivifies the crucial issue with which you are proposing to deal. Right at the outset in a couple of sentences or little more—as in the vivid strokes of a lightning artist—it focuses the dramatic relevance of the theme, and thrusts it compellingly upon mind and heart.
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