HERALDS OF GOD
"with five tunes accurately adjusted!" John Keats complained that "Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, unweave a rainbow"; and he might have added that there is a formal type of preaching which all too successfully clips the wings of wonder and unweaves the rainbow arch of the salvation of God. But to maintain that doctrine, as such, is necessarily a dull affair is simply a confession of ignorance or downright spiritual deficiency. Only a crass blindness could fail to see that such a truth as that presented in the sentence "The Word was made flesh" is overpoweringly dramatic in itself and utterly revolutionary in its consequences. "If this is dull" exclaims Dorothy Sayers, "then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be called exciting?"
This, I believe, is the true answer to the anxiety which haunts many a young minister at the outset of his work, the anxiety lest he may exhaust the subject-matter of the faith he has to preach long before his course is run. Take comfort! Enshrined at the heart of the faith are facts of such perennial vitality and incalculable force that you will never, to your dying day, tell more than a fraction of the truth that God has blazed across your sky. "We preach always Him," declared Luther, "the true God and man. This may seem a limited and monotonous subject, likely to be soon exhausted, but we are never at the end of it." Why should you imagine that the stimulating atmosphere of expectation which surrounds you at the opening of your ministry must inevitably give way
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