HERALDS OF GOD
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But what does it mean—to "preach Christ"? The phrase calls for definition. I suggest that you should go, for the true touchstone in this matter, to the preaching of the early Church. When Henry Ward Beecher began his ministry, he was baffled by a disappointing absence of results and an almost total lack of response. The chariot wheels dragged; there were no signs of an awakening; the indifferent remained sunk in their indifference. But one day the thought gripped him: "There was a reason why, when the apostles preached, they succeeded, and I will find it out if it is to be found out." That was sound strategy, and it had an immediate reward. It would be well for us if a similar experience should drive us back to the New Testament, to search for the secret of the first generation of preachers of the Word. What was this message which consumed these men like a flame, and through them kindled the world?
It is worth noticing, to begin with, what it was not. It was not a theory or an idea. It was not something they had arrived at by the processes of their own thought and research. It was neither an argument with paganism, nor a panegyric on brotherhood; neither ethical exhortation, nor religious edification; neither mystical experience, nor spiritual uplift. It was not even a reproduction of the Sermon on the Mount; nor was it an account of their subjective reaction to the teaching and example of their Lord,
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