“One approaches the hearing of the Word of God not as one approaches the eating of nuts — cracking the shell, eating the meat of the nut, and throwing the shell away. Rather, one approaches the Word of God as one eats grapes — eating the whole thing, skin, pulp, and seeds” (Hughes Oliphant Old, …
The Glory of Words
“God has not revealed himself to our sight but rather to our hearing; he has revealed not his form but his will” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, Vol. 1, p, 39).
A Cardinal Function
“All too often one assumes that the taproot of Christian preaching goes back to the ministry of the prophets; preaching is thought of as the religious concern of the prophets, over against the liturgical concerns of the priesthood. There may have been circles in which this was true, but those who gave us the book …
Are We There Yet?
“As any experienced pastor knows, the secret of leading a congregation is interpreting to the people where one is going and what one is doing and why it is necessary and important to do it” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, Vol. 1, p. 27).
And So It Is
“There probably has never been an evangelist who had a higher sense of evangelism as worship than Virginia’s Samuel Davies. It was Davies who brought the Great Awakening to the South a generation before the American Revolution. The American pulpit has never known a greater orator. For Davies, evangelism was an invitation to the Lord’s …
Christ as Preacher
“If we are truly to understand Christian preaching, we must see Jesus christ as its center. First we must see Jesus as the fulfillment of generations of preaching and teaching that went before him, and second we must see Jesus as the type, or perhaps prototype, of generations of preaching that have followed him. He …
Two Voices
“‘The pastor ought to have two voices: one for gathering the sheep; and another for warding off and driving away wolves and thieves. The Scripture supplies him with the mean of doing both.” Moreover, the believer himself must continually be assisted to mortify in himself those natural tendencies that run continually so counter to the …
And When He Doesn’t, There Isn’t
“In the event of God’s ‘connecting Himself’ thus with the preacher, to make his act of speaking the effective Word of the Lord, a relationship is set up between the human act of the preacher and the divine action of grace which we may call a sacramental union . . . when God graciously comes …
Not Resigning Office
“It must be emphasized, however, in this discussion on the preached Word of God, that the word of the preacher can only become the Word of God through a sovereign and free act of the Holy Spirit, by whose power alone preaching can be effective . . . ‘God sometimes connects Himself with His servants …
Where the Rod of Iron Is
“Thus Calvin applies many of the Old Testament prophecies of the rule of the Messiah amongst the nations to the preacher of the Word, for he regards Christ as acting in this world mainly through the instrument of the preached Word” (Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament, p. 87).