IS OUR WITNESS FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE?

Jesus Christ stands on trial at the bar of world opinion. Secular, godless, non-Christian society, now uncommitted, now hostile, is in the role of judge. The devil accuses him with many ugly lies. The Holy Spirit is the counsel for the defense. He calls us to be witnesses to substantiate his case.

Christian witness is testimony to Jesus (Acts 4:33). So much so-called testimony today is really autobiography and even sometimes thinly disguised self-advertisement.

Our task is not to lecture about Jesus with philosophical detachment. We have become personally involved in him. His revelation and redemption have changed our lives. Our eyes have been opened to see him, and our ears unstopped to hear him, as our Savior and Lord.

“It is quite futile saying to people ‘Go to the Cross.’ We must be able to say ‘Come to the Cross’. And there are only two voices which can issue that invitation with effect. One is the voice of the Sinless Redeemer, with which we cannot speak; the other is the voice of the forgiven sinner, who knows himself forgiven. That is our part.” (William Temple)

There is no greater need for the preacher than that he should know God. I care not about his lack of eloquence and artistry, about his ill-constructed discourse or his poorly enunciated message, if only it is evident that God is a reality to him and that he has learned to abide in Christ. The preparation of the heart is of far greater importance than the preparation of the sermon. The preacher’s words, however clear and forceful, will not ring true unless he speaks from conviction born of experience. Many sermons which conform to all the best homiletical rules, yet have a hollow sound. There is something indefinably perfunctory about the preacher. The matter of his sermon gives evidence of a well-stocked, well-disciplined mind; he has a good voice, a fine bearing, and restrained gestures; but somehow his heart is not in his message. The preaching of a witness has a spontaneity about it, and infectious warmth, a simply directness, a depth of reality, which are all due to an intimate knowledge of God. So we must hunger and thirst after him.

We shall remember that the real preparation of a sermon is not the few hours which are specifically devoted to it, but the whole stream of the preacher’s experience thus far, of which the sermon is a distilled drop. As E.M. Bounds has put it, “the man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make a man.” (Power Through Prayer, p.11)

THE PREACHER’S PORTRAIT, John Stott