To divide a sermon well may be an instrumental art, but how if there is nothing to separate? A mere division maker is like an excellent carver with an empty dish before him. To be able to deliver an exordium which shall be appropriate and attractive, to be at ease in speaking with propriety during the time allotted for the discourse, and to wind up with a respectable conclusion, may appear to mere religious performers to be all that is requisite; but the faithful minister of Christ knows that the true value of a sermon must lie, not in its fashion and manner, but in the truth which it contains.
Nothing can compensate for the absence of teaching; all the rhetoric in the world is but as chaff to the wheat in contrast to the gospel of our salvation. However beautiful the sower’s basket it is a miserable mockery if it is without seed. The grandest discourse ever delivered is an ostentatious failure if the doctrine of the grace of God is absent from it; it sweeps over men’s heads like a cloud, but it distributes no rain upon the thirsty earth; and therefore the remembrance of it to souls taught wisdom by an experience of pressing need is one of disappointment or worse. A man’s style may be as fascinating as that of the authoress of whom one said, “that she should write with a crystal pen dipped in dew upon silver paper, and use for pounce the dust of a butterfly’s wing;” but to an audience whose souls are in instant jeopardy, what will mere elegance be but “altogether lighter than vanity”?
SERMON ILLUSTRATION (BY SPURGEON)
Spurgeon was a master illustrator.
You can use this illustration in your own preaching to describe forgiveness in Christ.
There is a prisoner in the courtroom, and the jury has just brought in a verdict of “not guilty.” The judge bids him go free. There are people in the court who gnash their teeth at him; there are persons in the street who hate him; what does he care? “I have been pronounced ‘not guilty’ by the proper tribunal; the judge himself tells me that I am acquitted; not a law officer can touch me; not the fiercest enemy in the world can drag me into court again. I have been tried and found ‘not guilty,’ and who is he that condemns?”
It is just so with the Christian. Christ’s righteousness is put on him. Christ takes his sins, and when he stands before God’s bar, the eternal voice seems to say, “I see no sin in that man.” How can he? All that man’s sins Christ took away.
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