Preaching and Preachers

The Preparation of the Sermonabout them. I do not know whether all would agree with me in this,but my own experience certainly was that this happened to me morefrequently in the early years of my ministry than has been the casesince. I think that that is entirely due to the kindness of God. Heknown us, 'He knoweth our frame'; and He knows that we need thiskind of help much more at the beginning. Asyou give extra encouragementto children, and do things for them which you do not do laterbecause you want them to grow up, so God, I think, deals with thepreacher. You will find that He will be kind and very gracious to youat the beginning, and will give you texts and sermons; sometimesperhaps a complete sermon will come to you. But then at other timesyou will find that you will have to work it out and labour and sweat inthe way I have indicated. I leave the question of preaching on oddtexts at that.Turning to the preparation of a sermon there are several possibilities.One is that you work through a book of the Bible and just gosystematically through the book. Another is that you work systematicallythrough a section of a book, the Sermon on the Mount or somethinglike that; or perhaps even a portion of a chapter. There are manypossibilities in this respect. Or, as I have indicated previously, you canhave a series of sermons dealing with a particular aspect of theChristian life and living.I have given the example of 'spiritual depression'. Let me say alittle more about that. What determined my preaching of that serieswas really a combination of some of these things I have been mentioning.I have explained how you can accumulate a large number ofskeletons. I had been doing this for a number of years and so I had apile of skeletons. What happened on that occasion, while I was dressingthat morning, was that I was shown that in my pile of skeletonsthere was a ready-made series on spiritual depression. It was not thatthe whole pile dealt with this, but that in the pile there were oddsermons that could be put in order to form a series. This was to mesuch a remarkable experience that I have never forgotten it, and nevershall. I was more or less able there and then, if I remember rightly, to195