I love to read, you only need to walk into my office, or check my bank statement to see that. I love reading because it means i can talk to people long dead, or people at the very least who i'll never meet. On Saturday evening i listened to Jonathan Edwards preach on justification by faith and on Sunday night i spent a few minutes visiting Perelandra with CS Lewis. I love to read.
Edwards might be the greatest public thinker western Christianity has ever produced. I say 'public' because there's nothing to say that the greatest Christians minds are not currently labouring in tiny churches in Vermont or Venezuela, and 'western' because of men like Augustine and Athanasius. But you get the point. I was introduced to Edwards by John Piper, and the following preaching advice comes from Piper's 'The Supremacy of God in Preaching,' pp 83-105.
1) Stir Up Holy Affections
Edwards' preaching aimed for the heart. Why? Because 'in nothing is vigor in the actings of our inclinations so requisite as in religion.' Edwards didn't just want to produce a mindless expericne, he wanted to raise his hearers affections in tune with the truth he preached. The Gospel should stir our hearts! And he knew that the only true Christian service flows from an affected heart.
2) Enlighten The Mind
When Edwards preached from John 5:35, 'He was burning and a shining light,' his main point was that a preacher must have heat in the heart and light in the mind. Affections that do not rise from an apprehension of divine truth are not holy affections. For this reason Edwards believed that it is 'very profitable for ministers in their preaching to endeavor clearly and distinctly to explain the doctrines of religion.' Brothers, we must shine and burn!
3) Saturate With Scripture
One of the things that strikes me, and challenges me, about reading Jonathan Edwards is how filled with the Bible his preaching and his writing is. This wasn't a man who had a rough idea of a verse, and could fire the keywords into a computer for help. He. Knew. His. Bible! He doesn't read a verse and then give us his opinion on a range of issues, he comes back to the text, again and again. He loved the Bible, and said of it: 'often times in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart...i seemed so often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing food communicated that i could not get along in reading...' The minister, as Edwards said, must be mighty in the Scriptures.
4) Employ Images And Analogies
Most people Edwards is the morose misanthrope of 'Sinners in the hands of an angry God,' a sermon where images are used to great effect, Who can not be moved by the image of a sinner hanging a breath away from the fires of Hell. But if we are to speak of Heaven and Hell in our preaching, and we must, then we must grope in analogy and images to find a way of communicating what is true. Just like Jesus did! Edwards saw holiness as a pleasant garden with fruit pleasing to God, he saw Heaven as a world of love, he saw illustrations as vital to preaching.
5) Use Threat And Warning
'It is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go to Hell' said Jesus in Matthew 5:20. Jesus wanted people of Hell, and allured people to Heaven. And the preacher must do the same.Good preaching will deliver Biblical images or Biblical warnings of Biblical truths. Edwards preaching was full of the dark colours of Hell, and the rich satisfactions of Heaven, and so must ours be. But you can't firighten people into Heaven, so 'holy love and hope are principles vastly more efficacious on the heart to make it tender and to fill it with a dread of sin than slavish fear of Hell.'
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