Preaching and Preachers

Preaching and Preachersme one of the greatest problems in connection with preaching, maybepartly because of my nationality! What is the place of nationality inpreaching, indeed the place of nationality and temperament in theChristian life as a whole, the place of nationality and temperament inecclesiology; the place of nationality and temperament in theology?How easy it would be to digress at this point.Whatever the actual explanation of why this has been a great problemto me, I am clear as to the essence of the problem. The danger isthat imagination tends to run away with us and one can easily crossthe line from which it has been helpful, to that point, once more,where it draws attention to itself and you have lost contact with theTruth which gave origin to it. In the end it is the imagination, andyour statement of what you have seen with your imagination, thatinfluences the people rather than the Truth.It is not difficult to find notable examples of this from history.George Whitefield was obviously gifted with a great and exceptionalimagination. Incidentally it seems quite clear from the reading of thehistory of preaching and the biographies of preachers, that the greatestpreachers have generally been greatly gifted with imagination. It hasbeen a part of their gift of oratory and power to influence people,gifts which are God-given. Whitefield clearly used his imaginationfreely, and I think that at times it is equally clear that it ran awaywith him. Take the famous occasion when Whitefield was preachingone day in the house of the Countess of Huntingdon in London to avery distinguished auditory amongst whom was the famous LordChesterfield. Chesterfield was an unbeliever, but he was interested inoutstanding persons and particularly interested in good speaking. Hehad been persuaded to go to listen to Whitefield. The preacher onthat occasion was using his famous illustration of a blind man walkingalong the edge of a cliff with his stick and his dog. At first the blindman was fairly far away from the edge, but he was getting nearer andnearer to it, and below there was a terrible drop which would meancertain death. Whitefield was illustrating the way in which the sinnergoes on and on and gets nearer and nearer to the terrible abyss of the236