A course of lectures on preaching by RL Dabney (Available from Amazon or free here)
Dabney continues giving us cardinal requisites of good sermons.
This week we learn that a sermon should include:
(i) movement;
(ii) point;
(iii) order.
I enjoyed Dabney's encouragement to be orderly in my sermons: 'Every one has heard the line of the English poet : "Order is heaven's first law." There is a truth contained in these words, and it has an important relation to this subject. The plan and work of our Creator are methodical in all their parts. Law rules everywhere ; all the powers of nature are so constituted that they cannot customarily act at all, save in accordance with their law. This is true of the powers of the human spirit. And this fact points us at once to the general consequence, that if we wish a fellow-creature's soul to apprehend and feel a group of thoughts and motives, these must have their method, and that, a method conformed to the law by which his spirit acts. Accordingly, we find that it is a spontaneous demand of the human mind that there shall be order in what it views. Disarray is displeasing to it. A heap of stone and timber is not an architectural structure, but an unsightly mass of rubbish. A mixture of brilliant gems is not a mosaic picture, but a quantity of pebbles, and the richer their colours the more dark and confused is the mass. A mob of men is not an army. The atoms of this mighty universe, without an orderly connection, would be only a vast nebula of dust. Have not the poets, ancient and modern, found in chaos the strongest conception of that which is repulsive and abhorrent in matter ?'
Be like God and be orderly in your sermons.
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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