“A preacher can be sincere on the low ground of prudential ethics and morals, but he becomes earnest only when he seeks the salvation of the souls of his hearers” (Macartney, Preaching Without Notes, p. 23).
Why Some Ministers Avoid Some Things
“If the life within the minister’s own heart is not right, it will be natural and easy for him to avoid and omit the great searching truths of the gospel” (Macartney, Preaching Without Notes, pp. 21-22).
A Kindled Heart
“One of the conditions for sucessful gospel preaching is a concern for and desire for the salvation of souls. The prophet said, ‘As soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.’ When the Church ‘travails’ — is moved with compassion, as Christ was, over a lost world — then the Church will bring forth …
Grand Particularities
“From the very beginning, immense pressure was exerted to tone down the gospel and make it something else than an exclusive gospel, to take out of it what Dr. Thomas Chalmers liked to describe as ‘the grand particularities’ of the gospel” (Macartney, Preaching Without Notes, pp. 14-15)
Building to the Top
“The Apostle Paul was fond of what we might describe as the acculmulating climax, or the pyramidical sentence. He delighted in placing one great proposition and truth upon another, until from one grand and solid base he reached an exalted and sublime apex” (Clarence Macartney, Preaching Without Notes, p. 12)
Avoiding the Sermonic Weasel
“Passive and subjunctive verbs and prepositional phrases cut the life out of oral speech. No wonder the narratives of the Old Testament preach so easily. They are alive with strong nouns and active verbs” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 111)
Gospel, Not Hectoring
“The awfulness of human guilt needs redemption, not a lecture” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 86).
The Moment of Resolution
“The crucial moment in the sermon as homiletical bind is not in the ‘asking’ but in the revelation stage when matters are turned upside down, and thereby seen in a new way . . . Most literary plots find their climax in the moment of resolution sometime before the ending” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. …
And Inside Out
“The fundamental mistake of the liberal Protestant pulpit of the last forty years is that it presumes that the gospel is continuous with human experience. It would be closer to the truth to say that the gospel is continuous with human experience after the gospel has turned human experience upside down” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, …
A Long Tunnel is Still a Tunnel
“Unfortunately, the more we know about a subject, the more apt we are to stay locked into our assumptions, and hence to become blind to alternative perspectives” (Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 61).