Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. (1 Cor. 10:12) (The Apostle Paul)

For no one may benefit another with that which he does not have himself.[1] (Augustine)

Eloquence is not something we seek. It’s something that is the by-product of loving the truth, not of careful planning and structuring.[2] (Dave McClellan)

If one of the central values of pastoral preaching is the personal presence of Christ in his chosen messenger, or as it is often called the “Incarnational Principle,” then we must own the maxim that nothing is as important to our preaching as following our Master in daily life and ministry. Make it your business to be an authentic communicator through cultivating a holy life and a sympathetic pastoral ministry. Augustine understood this: “However, the life of the speaker has greater weight in determining whether he is obediently heard than any grandness of eloquence.”[3] Even secular orators like the ancient rhetorician Quintilian knew this: “I am convinced that no one can be an orator who is not a good man . . .”[4]

Exemplify Your Office

Take Paul as your example:

For you yourselves know, brothers, that our coming to you was not in vain. But though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict. For our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts. For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed—God is witness. Nor did we seek glory from people, whether from you or from others, though we could have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our conduct toward you believers. (1 Thess. 2:1–10)

There is nothing more needed in the modern world than men of character, who live what they preach. This is a biblical given, which every good book on the subject of preaching emphasizes amply. The image media have tended to foster is that of the performing preacher—the celebrity. How many are there whose performance in public is betrayed by the awful fact that they are not what they appear to be. The electronic age is filled with such performances. Helmut Thielicke’s searching question should frequently be ours: “Does the preacher drink what he hands out in the pulpit?”[5]

I remember the awful feeling as a young Christian, worshipping in a church where an evangelical pastor was conducting the service before a live television audience. It reminded me of Johnny Carson. Mic in hand, strutting around the stage in the conversational style of the talk show host during the monologue. This performance was not for the congregation. It was a performance for the television audience, and thus undermined the very integrity of which the world, in our celebrity-worshipping, scandal-ridden age, is in such dire need. I believe that this particular man was a man of real spiritual integrity. But his public life undermined his real identity, in a way in which I am sure he was quite unaware. The integrity of a holy life, then, must be exhibited in the very act of preaching. The way a man preaches must not undermine this integrity. We must preach what we practice and vice versa. There must be no discontinuity between his life in the pulpit and his life outside the pulpit. In word and deed, in the pulpit and out of the pulpit, he communicates God’s truth. His secret devotional life with the Lord is always evident in public, especially over the long term. Without communion with the Lord and deep meditation on his message, there will be no spiritual power in his ministry.

The Westminster Larger Catechism, Question #159, is instructive in this regard:

How is the word of God to be preached by those that are called thereunto? A. They that are called to labour in the ministry of the word, are to preach sound doctrine, diligently, in season and out of season; plainly, not in the enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit, and of power; faithfully, making known the whole counsel of God; wisely, applying themselves to the necessities and capacities of the hearers; zealously, with fervent love to God and the souls of his people; sincerely, aiming at his glory, and their conversion, edification, and salvation.

On preaching “sound doctrine” the Westminster divines used Titus 2:7–8 as a proof text: “Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.” Integrity of speech and life go hand in hand. The detection of the least insincerity will mar the reception of the Word: “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4–5). Genuine love for God and the congregation ought to be communicated by every element of the preacher’s life (2 Cor. 5:13–14; 12:15).

Sincerity stands out in this description of biblical preaching as an attribute especially necessary in the age of advertising and televangelism. In 2 Corinthians 2:17 and 4:2 Paul teaches us the true nature of ministerial sincerity:

For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ. . . . But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

What you see is what you get.

This is where the old adage comes into play: “practice what you preach.” This means that before we can hope to see others transformed by our preaching labors, we must internalize the Word for ourselves. Or in the words of Dave McClellan, “. . . building a sermon from the inside out.”[6] Preachers are called to take the preaching portion of God’s Word to heart. The sermon, then, must be “the overflow of a saturated life, a life marinated in Scripture and in this week’s passage.” This prevents our preaching from being divorced from our true spiritual lives, ours first, and the congregation’s second.[7] This requires asking hard questions of the text and of ourselves.

Cultivate Attentiveness[8]

Such concentrated attention assumes freedom from distraction—not easily assumed in our electronic world. Maggie Jackson’s challenging book Distracted describes the disease (dis-ease) in order to focus on the cure—attentiveness, a vanishing human attribute in her opinion.[9] The problem has been growing ever since the sluiceway of electronic information was opened by Samuel Breese Morse over a century and a half ago. If your cell phone is not vibrating in your pocket, a wide screen is attracting your attention in the corner of a restaurant. This is the culture in which we are called to minister. My deepest concern is for ministers of the Word. The torrent of noise and visual distraction unsettles our minds and unsuits us for deep thinking and meditation of any kind. Focusing on how this affects preachers, T. David Gordon writes:

Well, they read the Bible the same way they read everything else: virtually speed reading, scanning it for its most overt content. What is the passage about? They ask as they read, but they don’t raise questions about how the passage is constructed. . . . All of their sermons are about Christian truth or theology in general, and the particular text they read ahead of time merely prompts their memory or calls their attention to one of Christianity’s important realties (insofar as they perceive it). Their reading does not stimulate them to rethink anything, and since the text does not stimulate them particularly (but serves merely as a reminder of what they already know), their sermon is not particularly stimulating to their hearers. . . .

Culturally, then, we are no longer careful, close readers of texts, sacred or secular. We scan for information, but we do not appreciate literary craftsmanship. Exposition is therefore virtually a lost art. . . .

Our inability to read texts is a direct result of the presence of electronic media.[10]

Positioned in our studies—not offices, please—the distractions are around every corner. Long before the Internet became a pace-altering reality, the telephone, and before that, the telegraph, were eating away at the old pace of life. The answering devices, in seeking a remedy for the interrupting tendency of the telephone, have only delayed the sense of urgency that lingers when that annoying beep, beep, beep, beep, beep greets you when you go to make a call. My phone has a flashing red light that adds to the sense of emergency. “Call me, now!” says the phone. Email is worse, because under the guise of not interrupting us, it takes more time than written correspondence ever did. And we are all annoyed when someone fails to respond. I have come to admire those who do not let the tyranny of the urgent, built into email, drive them to respond immediately, if ever. Call waiting is another example. It is like someone barging into line in front of you. But the most well-mannered of family and friends allow it because the technology itself demands it. Inattention by distraction is the default position of modern life and probably humanity itself in its undisciplined form. Attentiveness is an acquired skill that requires intentional practice.

Media commentator Christine Rosen worries that the cognitive bottleneck caused by multitasking will spawn a generation of quick but shallow thinkers.[11] Rosen argues convincingly that what was early on labeled a virtue is now proving to be a hindrance to productivity of all kinds, and even to intelligence and learning ability. Marshaling journalists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, she makes a strong case for considering multitasking a myth. While some are optimistic that the brain will adapt to the new situation, I cast my lot with the biblical notion that part of the givenness of human nature includes our ability to focus our personal intelligence. Rosen speculates about what the rising generation will look like:

The picture that emerges with these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence.[12]

Unchecked by prudent stewardship of the electronic media,

this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.[13]

I think many are already like this.

Writer, literary critic, and teacher of creative writing Sven Birkerts has observed that electronic media tend to “spread language thin, evacuating it of subtly and depth.”[14] Birkerts sagely observes, “Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.”[15] It is here that preachers must be most alert to this cultural peril. How will preachers—distracted in such a world, as we are—be equipped to deal with the most difficult and profound text in history, the Bible? Paul gives us a description of Word ministry that requires the profoundest kind of attention and focus:

Till I come, give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you by prophecy with the laying on of the hands of the eldership. Meditate on these things; give yourself entirely to them, that your progress may be evident to all. (1 Tim. 4:13–15, NKJV)

The frenetic pace cultivated by electronic distraction can only be slowed by dramatically, and intentionally, changing the pace. It makes the blessing of the Sabbath all the more attractive and important.

Thus, preachers must cultivate the power of solitude. This concept first came to my attention through the mystical, countercultural poetry of Gary Snyder. He wrote eloquently of the “power-vision in solitude.” [16] As a fellow mystic in the late sixties, I pursued his vision relentlessly. While my mystical quest left me in a spiritual quandary, I did discover the importance of solitude for reflecting on the meaning of my existence in this crazy world. Ironically, as I used my solitude to seek union with the one (a monistic quest that ended in futility), I learned the beauty and power of being alone with my thoughts.

The modern penchant for “connectedness” often leaves us strangely disconnected from things that count, including our thoughts. It was in a state of utter solitude that I was brought face to face with my own need of a Savior who could liberate me from my sin and the awful prospect of death. Such solitude is often thought to be a sign of being antisocial. Yet I have found it essential to fortifying the most important thoughts and virtues necessary to maintaining healthy human relations. Disconnecting from the ordinary means of communication gives us opportunity to overcome the tendency to the jejune promoted by the electronic environment. Christian meditation is the biblical version of the power-vision in solitude.

The Sabbath is the biblical implementation of rest. The first Sabbath rest recorded in the Bible is not ours but God’s:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Gen. 2:1–3)

This raises the question of just what this resting is. It cannot be sleep for the divine being. It was rather a concentrated enjoyment of the completed work of creation. The Sabbath, made for man—redeemed man in the worship assembly—is characterized by focused attention on worshipping and enjoying the presence of God through the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

The Christian Sabbath offers a marvelous respite from the cares of life, especially from the frantic pace of modernity. Our OPC Directory for the Public Worship of God encourages us, “In order to sanctify the day, it is necessary for [God’s covenant people] to prepare for its approach. They should attend to their ordinary affairs beforehand so that they may not be hindered from setting the Sabbath apart to God.”[17] Spiritual refreshment has, of course, always been necessary for exiles and strangers awaiting the eternal Sabbath. But the sabbatical principle involved in the Lord’s Day, as the first of a new creation, is meant to form the character of the remainder of the week. Since public worship is “a meeting of the triune God with his covenant people,”[18] everything else must stimulate our focus on him. This has never been more necessary than in the present environment.

Therefore, ministers should promote these benefits of the Lord’s Day. We must apply the attentiveness cultivated by biblical Sabbath keeping to every area of life, and practice good stewardship of every human invention to ensure that these inventions foster attention to the important things, rather than distract us from them. This means we must instruct God’s people in the cultivation of thoughtful, attentive lives. Finally, to guard the ministry of the Word, sessions need to protect pastors from distractions of every kind and promote sabbatical rest in their lives.

Pastors, take time to disconnect from every modern distraction. Give your undivided attention to the things that count so that your congregation may know that you have communed with heavenly reality, a sacred “power-vision in solitude.” “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).

My concern is for the minister who claims a single book to be the main course of their soul’s nourishment. King David, a few years before the advent of electronic communication, was no less a very busy man. But he made it his business to step out of the fray frequently, perhaps a habit formed in his shepherding days, to meditate. “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Ps. 1:1–2).

In Acts 19:9 we are told that in Ephesus, when Paul encountered stubbornness and unbelief, “with some speaking evil of the Way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus.” The word translated “hall” is σχολῇ (scholē), the root of our word “school,” which literally meant “freedom from occupation”[19] or leisure for learning. This implies an intentional effort to carve out spaces in our fast paced lives for true meditative learning.

“Meditation” in Psalm 1 is a kind of musing, and musing requires undistracted consideration of God’s communication to us. This involves the carefree element of daydreaming which, combined with the idea of meditation, yields a definition of meditation something like this: “a series of pleasant thoughts, cultivated by removing oneself from distractions, in order to focus one’s attention on our relationship with the Lord.”[20] Even the dictionary definition can be understood eschatologically by the Christian. And while not all meditation on God’s Word is pleasant, for example when it reveals our sin, it leads, through our union with our Mediator, to ultimate pleasantness in communion with our God.

Of course, as in preaching, there is another dimension to meditation (involving daydreaming), that I have not yet accounted for. That is serendipity. Again, the dictionary is helpful:

the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way: a fortunate stroke of serendipity | a series of small serendipities. . . . coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” [21]

When the soil is good, a surprise flower will often appear, unplanted, blown in by the wind, or planted by a bird. Among thesaurus synonyms for serendipity are good fortune and providence. I believe that God created our minds for meditation, with the serendipitous ability to connect ideas in a mysterious way that defies formulation. One example is found in our application of the Word we are meditating upon to our daily lives and relationships.

In the absence of times and places conducive to daydreaming, I fear the famine of good and great thoughts. We chase the muses away, amusing ourselves to death. Without such thoughts, ministers of the Word will necessarily be superficial, perfectly suited to feed the superficial minds our culture is cultivating. Without cultivating deep relationships with God, ourselves, and others, we succumb to the perpetual connectivity of modern life that immerses us in mediated social realities that snuff out our mental solitude and spiritual development. A deficit in mind renewal exposes the Christian to the default position or world conformity (Rom. 12:1–2), the pressures of which are increasing apace.

And it should not escape the reader’s notice that David wrote Psalm 1 and many other poems, called psalms. More than a third of the Bible is written in poetic form. So every minister loves poetry whether he appreciates it or not because it is God’s Word. Plato worried that writing would rob the mind of its furnishings, since the mnemonic orientation of oral tradition would be undermined. Print, hard drives, and the cloud only exacerbate this tendency. The Bible is structured to encourage remembering God’s Word. In the oral culture in which it was written believers had no choice. We, on the other hand, must choose to furnish our minds with material upon which to meditate. Daydreaming without something worth dreaming about will only cultivate empty souls, “like the chaff that the wind drives away” (Ps. 1:4).

A well-lived life can only grow out of a well-cultivated interior. Emerson recognized this when he observed, “The saint and poet seek privacy to ends most public and universal.”[22] David put it this way: “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Ps. 1:3). So, unscheduled—daydreaming—time may represent the most important spaces on our calendars. The serendipity of solitude is imperative.

Also, however, a daily routine of meditation on God’s Word and related literature must be a staple of the minister’s life. A regular place where electronic interruptions are not possible is necessary—no phone, no email, no texts.

Be Earnest

The earnestness of an authentic life must be evident in the very act of preaching. Earnestness is, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus, “serious and intense; not joking or playful; zealous and sincere.” The earnest preacher believes every word he utters. Authenticity requires the message and its communication to dominate our concerns in the pulpit. Love for God, God’s people, and sinners will generate simple language, genuine style, gestures, and emotion.[23]

The greatest impediment to earnestness is pride, which draws attention to self. A professional attitude and tone of voice detracts from the authenticity of the preacher. The entire purpose of public worship, in which preaching is central, is to draw people into the presence of God himself, in adoration and praise. The preacher who does anything less will tend to lack earnestness and will consequently exude inauthenticity. Preachers need to labor to have an “aura of authenticity” in a world which sees very little of it.[24] If the preacher acts outside the pulpit as if his preaching makes no difference in his life, he cannot expect his preaching to make any difference in anyone else’s life.

A closely related word, and one which is often misunderstood, is boldness (παρρησία, parrēsia). It is used ten times in Acts, in connection with preaching the Word. Like unction, boldness is not to be confused with volume of voice or forcefulness of delivery or personality. It denotes a fearlessness and courage which reflects absolute confidence in what is being spoken.[25] The biblical focus is first of all on the message, not the method. But the method must reflect and embody the message. Boldness is the freedom which arises from the certainty that the gospel is true. “Now when they saw the boldness (παρρησίαν, parrēsian) of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

The ultimate test of this certitude was the willingness of the apostles to give up their lives, security, and earthly happiness for the announcement of this message. Paul lived with the threat of death from the beginning to the end of his ministry. Shortly after his conversion and call to the apostolic ministry we are told the following:

But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who spoke to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus. So he went in and out among them at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord. (Acts 9:27–8)

At the conclusion of the book of Acts, we find Paul teaching the gospel in his rooms as a prisoner with this same boldness, using the same word παρρησία (parrēsia), but in the New King James Version it is translated “confidence”: “preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, no one forbidding him” (Acts 28:31). Paul was the genuine article, and everyone knew it from his life and from the confidence with which he preached amidst the fiercest opposition. In other words, his earnestness was evident in his life and in his preaching. His method was a simple reflection of his ultimate confidence in the message, which in turn grew out of confidence in the Messenger of the Covenant, Jesus Christ. “[O]ur gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction (πληροφορία plērophoria). You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake” (1 Thess. 1:5).

Now you may ask, How does this translate into the way we preach? While Phillips Brooks’s definition of preaching expressed in the pithy phrase, “truth through personality,”[26] is an inadequate definition, it does emphasize an important point: let God use your personality, which he gave you, to express his truth with passionate earnestness. Do not imitate another’s style. The personal attributes and gifts with which God has provided you are to be cultivated. Augustine said it well: “That should not be called eloquence which is not appropriate to the person speaking.”[27] This appropriateness included the person’s age, experience, station in life, as well as his natural gifts. “Be yourself” is often enjoined upon young preachers. However, apart from the good idea of letting go of stiff formality, this injunction may seem to imply a lack of effort. Developing your own manner of preaching takes a great deal of conscious effort. Jay Adams sums it up well:

A good preaching style is plain (but not drab), unaffected (but not unstudied) style that gets in there and gets the job done without calling attention to itself. It is clear and appropriate at every point to the message. Content should control this style.[28]

Whatever you do, do not try to imitate the satin smooth style of the media personality.

An excellent book on the subject of earnestness was written in the nineteenth century by John Angell James, titled: An Earnest Ministry: The Want of the Times. At the heart of the word earnest is the idea of “intense devotedness.”[29] James defines earnestness under five headings. First it implies a single object of pursuit. For the preacher this is to herald the glad tidings of salvation to sinners. Second, this object must possess the mind and kindle the heart. Nothing less than a lifelong engagement in preaching the gospel can satisfy the true preacher. Third, the earnest preacher will use every available means at his disposal to accomplish the desired task of preaching. Fourth, everything else will be subordinated to this desired end.

Finally, the preacher will energetically engage in preaching in season and out of season.[30] D. Martin Lloyd-Jones exemplified this sort of attitude toward preaching as exhibited in the effect on the hearers:

There is an element of compulsion in preaching, and people who are there are gripped and fixed. I maintain that if that is not happening, you have not got true preaching. That is why reading must never be a substitute for preaching. You can put the book down, or you can argue with it. When there is true preaching you cannot do that, you are gripped, you are taken up, you are mastered.[31]

Whatever eloquence God grants us must not be aimed at but rather spring from a soul ardently committed to communicating God’s Word.

In practice this means that extensive and laborious preparation must not be shirked. If earnestness and boldness derive ultimately from the message, then the message must be our primary concern. The quality of our preparation is always evident in the act of preaching week in and week out. The arduous work of studying the text in the original languages scouring the best commentaries and theology so that our exegesis brings out the Spirit’s meaning and application, represent the only course for the earnest minister. In an age which lives on the surfaces of reality, which prides itself in superficiality, only deep penetration beneath the surface of the biblical text will avoid the light-weight homilies and sermonettes which we are relentlessly told the market wants.

Avoiding the proverbial use of texts as pretexts does not occur easily. Expository preaching, which I will explore in chapter 11, is a useful antidote to this poison. But nothing prevents it like probing the text through prayer, and meditating in the throne room of the Great King—this will all tell in the pulpit. Without the presence of the God of the text, we will have only ourselves and our opinions to present in the place of worship. Alas, the impulse of marketing the church has, as its stock-in-trade, immediate impressions. This is the secret of its “power.” This is the genius and the danger of marketing. This is the assurance that earnestness will be absent. The unreflective immediacy of electronic “communication” is precisely the environment which we must counter, not imitate.

In all that we may say about the medium of preaching, we must ever be aware of the danger of emphasizing technique or style over substance. In a homiletics class in 1990, Jay Adams warned us of this danger with a story. Marjo was the Bible Belt preacher prodigy who was ordained at age four. The techniques of Pentecostal preaching were drilled into him, and he mesmerized crowds from the beginning. Later he became disenchanted and exposed the sham, pointing to the power of group dynamics. Adams observed, “artfully manipulated words influence people.” Stay close to God, or you will become a Marjo.[32] I have said all of this because we now turn our attention to several crucial elements of “technique.” Properly understood they will not undermine but enhance authenticity in the pulpit.

We must not fall into the trap so aptly described by poet William Butler Yeats in his oft quoted “The Second Coming” (1919), which is not about Jesus’s second coming, but about a world-devouring beast, the apotheosis of the worst features of modernity as Yeats saw them. He wrote:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The preacher must cultivate his convictions in order that he might from the inside out be full of passionate intensity.

Endnotes

[1] Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 89.

[2] Dave McClellan and Karen McClellan, Preaching by Ear: Speaking God’s Truth from the Inside Out (Wooster, OH: Weaver, 2014), 15.

[3] Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 164.

[4] McClellan and McClellan, Preaching by Ear, 33. Quintilian, The Institutes of Rhetoric (Institutio Oratoria), trans. H. E. Butler (London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1922), 355, 357.

[5] Helmut Thielicke, The Trouble with the Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 3.

[6] McClellan and McClellan, Preaching by Ear, 123.

[7] McClellan and McClellan, Preaching by Ear, 125.

[8] Portions of this section are based on Gregory E. Reynolds, “The Value of Daydreaming,” Ordained Servant 21 (2012): 18–20; and Gregory E. Reynolds, “Changing Pace: The Need for Rest in a Frenetic World,” Ordained Servant 18 (2009): 14–17.

[9] Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008).

[10] T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009), 46–47, 49.

[11] Christine Rosen, “The Myth of Multitasking,” The New Atlantis (Spring 2008): 109.

[12] Ibid., 108.

[13] Ibid., 110.

[14] Gregory Reynolds, The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 263.

[15] Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 133.

[16] Gary Snyder, essay in A Controversy of Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, eds. Paris Leary and Robert Kelly (New York: Anchor Books, 1965), 551. “There is not much wilderness left to destroy, and the nature in the mind is being logged and burned off. Industrial-urban society is not ‘evil’ but there is no progress either. As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. A gas turbine or an electric motor is a finely-crafted flint knife in the hand. It is useful and full of wonder, but it is not our whole life.”

[17] “The Directory for the Public Worship of God,” The Book of Church Order of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Willow Grove, PA: The Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2015), I.A.3.a, 124.

[18] “The Directory for the Public Worship of God,” I.B.1, 125.

[19] William D. Mounce, Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament, eds. William D. Mounce and Rick Bennett, Jr., http://www.tecknia.com/greek-dictionary. Accordance edition hypertexted and formatted by OakTree Software, Inc. Version 3.2.

[20] New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “meditate.”

[21] New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “serendipity.”

[22] William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” in The Digital Divide: Arguments for and against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking, ed. Mark Bauerlein (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2011), 316.

[23] McClellan and McClellan, Preaching by Ear, 126–30 is excellent on earnestness.

[24] Joel Nederhood, “Effective Preaching in a Media Age,” class notes, Westminster Seminary California, 1990.

[25] παρρησία also refers to the “right of speech in Roman public assemblies” (T. David Gordon). Thus, in God’s providence Paul was free to preach. In the case of Peter and John (Acts 4 & 5), even when civil/religious authorities forbade preaching, God gives the freedom to preach based on the historical veracity of the message.

[26] Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching: The Yale Lectures on Preaching (1877; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1969), 5.

[27] Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 123.

[28] Jay Adams, Preaching with Purpose (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1982), 105.

[29] John Angell James, An Earnest Ministry: The Want of the Times (1847; repr., Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993), 28.

[30] James, An Earnest Ministry, 31ff, 41ff, 45ff, 49ff, 66ff.

[31] D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, “Knowing the Times: Extracts from an Important New Book by Dr. Lloyd-Jones,” Banner of Truth Magazine 317 (February 1990), 12.

[32] Jay Adams, “Preaching with Purpose,” class notes, Westminster Seminary California, 1990.

Gregory E. Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant. Ordained Servant Online, January, 2024.