THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
message of a dozen or a score of verses is faithfully and concisely set forth. A single phrase from Psalm cxxxix or Ephesians i might well provide material for a sermon: but why should you not also make the experiment of taking such a psalm or chapter entire, and grappling with it until you can discern, running right through it from start to finish, one clear line along which to lead your people's thoughts? You will find it a fascinating and rewarding study. Read Isaiah vi analytically, and you may feel an urge to preach on the wings of the seraphim, or the smoke that filled the house: nor is there any reason why you should not obey that urge. Read it as a unity, and there will emerge, clear-cut and decisive, the outlines of a totally different kind of sermon: now, with the whole chapter as your text, you will preach on the three visions which came in rapid succession to the prophet and enter still into the experience of every true servant of the Lord–the vision of God, the vision of himself, and the vision of a waiting world. The point is: do not be in bondage to the tradition of the single text and the isolated phrase. Use the microscope by all means; but do not neglect the wider view and the far horizon, I would even, greatly daring, suggest that you should try occasionally, as a useful discipline of your own mental processes and spiritual perception, to concentrate into one sermon the basic message of a whole book, such as Amos, Hosea, or Revelation. There are tens of thousands of people to-day who are quite unable, where the Bible is concerned, to see the wood for the trees.
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