THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
system of tabulation is necessary. All you require is a single reference at the top of a page, and a couple of lines of comment. Very often as you turn the pages of such a reference-book you will find that your theme has been given you; and in a dry season you will thank God you have a reservoir!
It is hardly necessary perhaps to point out that there is one obligation which the very act of preaching from the Word of God binds upon us. I mean the duty of exegetical honesty. There are some sermons which, starting out from a word of Scripture, proceed quite flagrantly to violate the intention of the original writer. This practice of importing alien meanings into texts is strenuously to be discountenanced. To say this is not, of course, to suggest that allegorizing is necessarily bad; nor does it imply a rigid and excessive literalism distrustful of all spiritual lines of interpretation. There is no reason why you should not, occasionally at least, extend the reference of a text beyond its immediate setting. For example, when Jesus declared "What God hath joined together let not man put asunder," He was speaking specifically of marriage and divorce. But the principle there proclaimed runs through the whole of life; and therefore you might well preach from that text on some of those other God-intended alliances which we break at our peril—Faith and Reason (so tragically divorced in the long conflict between the Church and Science), Evangelism and Ethics, Justice and Mercy, Freedom and Discipline, Man the Sinner and Christ the Saviour. Or again,
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