Quotes from Expository Preaching Plans and Methods - Chapter 5

Here are a few more quotes from F. B. Meyers book entitled Expository Preaching Plans and Methods (Meyer, F. B. Expository Preaching Plans and Methods. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1910).

I really enjoyed these opening paragraphs. They're a bit longer than most quotes I pull out, but the paragraphs are worth the read:

The benefit of the Expository Method to the preacher is immense. In the first place it saves him from the search for a subject or text, which is sometimes extremely tiresome and wasteful of his time. There are times when for hours nothing bites. The mind cannot settle. It visits flower after flower without extracting a drop of honey. But there is small danger of this when Exposition is the preacher s rule.

Probably on Sunday night, when the family has dispersed, he will take his Bible in hand and turn to the paragraph next in order to that from which he has preached during the day. The emotions that have wrought within his soul have not died down. The sea still heaves with mighty billows. If his sermons have failed, he sees where
and why, and girds himself with desire to lay emphasis on the neglected truth ; or if his sermons have succeeded, he is desirous of carrying forward the impression to further results. He can see his congregation still facing him, or can feel them tugging hard at his heart and brain. The reaction has not set in. The glow of the day still lingers on the mountain peak, and he is standing there, though he realizes already that to-morrow he may be still descending into the valley beneath. This is the hour when, with the light of the Holy Spirit illumining the printed page and his soul, he cons the paragraph next in order, until probably its salient features, its lesson, or its pivotal sentence grips him.

He has his scrap of writing paper at hand and makes a few rough notes. There is yet no coherency or connection between those fragmentary jottings. In jumbling disorder they have tumbled from his hand, and lie there in confusion. A word, an anecdote, a reference to some recent reading; they are there as the hues of a gorgeous sunset, caught by a lover of nature s most radiant hours, may lie hidden under the jottings of his notebook. (95-6)

On commentaries Meyer writes:

We must not appropriate a man's expression of thought, this is his own, but thoughts, so far as we appropriate them, and allow them to grow in the soil of our own mind, and reproduce them selves after their kind, become ours. We are free to use all truth which has germinated in ourselves and drawn on the resources of our soul. It is in this sense that commentators serve us they set us thinking. (99)

A few more quotes:

After the preacher has stated the main thesis of his sermon, there should be a little time spent in showing that it is consistent with reason. It may be above reason, but it is not contrary to reason. (101)

The speeches of great orators and preachers generally excel in the lucidity of their presentation of their valid claim to the assent and consent of the reason. (101)

The gateway through which truth comes to them[the imaginative, poetic mind] is made of pearls saturated in a very phantasmagoria of splendour. (103)

But the end of all preaching is to obtain the assent of the will. We are not what we think or feel or imagine, but what we will. The will is the keeper of the citadel. It is our innermost self. Until that yields, nothing is yielded. Until that is surrendered, nothing is really gained. (106)