Persuasion without Manipulation: Conservative Preaching without being boring, or The Beautiful Sermon

The great danger in speaking on how not to be boring is that it places you under unusual scrutiny, as if you had chosen the topic, “How to be Enormously Charming.” As I speak on avoiding boredom, I may well get the comment afterwards, “Physician, heal thyself”. So let me pre-empt all that and confess that this session comes from one who has inflicted boredom upon his listeners more times than I wish to admit, and that much of today's talk can be filed under 'autobiography'. But I will say that have taken an interest in the methods of interesting preaching, and hope that I can serve you today.

When it comes to gaining and maintaining interest in our sermons, the particular problem that faces Christian preachers is that the source of boredom is not always the same. When it comes to the public speaking that communicates God's Word, boredom can result from a defect in the speaker or a defect in the listener, or both. The defect in the listener is what the writer of Hebrews called their dullness. Scripture is filled with the phenomenon of people who have ears to hear, but do not hear. They have functioning auditory capacities, but little to no spiritual receptivity. When a person is bored with what God says, which is synonymous with saying, bored with Truth, the problem lies in the heart of that person. We meet the priests in Malachi's day who said of the things of God, “Oh what a weariness!”. This is either immaturity brought on by disobedience, or the absence of a new nature which would find relish in the truth. This boredom is really a form of rejection, a chosen indifference towards truth.

When this kind of heart is listening to the message, there is no way of overcoming its boredom except by changing the very nature of the message. Gaining the interest of someone who has a deliberate lack of interest in truth will require a technique subversive to the truth. We find Paul emphatically disavowing this kind of preaching when he says, “For we are not, as so many, peddling the word of God; but as of sincerity, but as from God, we speak in the sight of God in Christ.” (2Co 2:17)

The word in the original translated peddling referred to the activity of a petty retail-merchant, by implication the person who seeks profit by selling anything. This is the preacher who commodifies the message, feeling out, like any shrewd marketer would, what message, and what rhetorical techniques, will work most effectively on the appetites of his listeners. He subverts the message for personal gain: either larger crowds, or financial reward, or fame. The preacher who stoops to this level has left his calling as a herald of truth, and has become an entertainer, or a motivational speaker, or a life-coach, or possibly a religious celebrity. If a crowd has become bored with truth we preach, then if we wish to gain their interest, the only remaining option is to make them interested in ourselves, the speakers. And this is precisely what Paul says a faithful minister does not do, writing in 2 Corinthians 4:5 “For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus' sake.

Faithful Christian preachers do not believe in gaining the attention of their listeners by any means. Those who are bored with truth have a heart problem that no public speaking technique can fix. Paul said, to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; (Tit 1:15) On the other hand, the hearts represented by the fourth soil in Christ's parable, those good and honest hearts do not need to be manipulated to gain and retain their interest in the truth. We know that these hearts become that way through the Holy Spirit's work of regeneration, and his ongoing work of

1 illumination. This agrees with the order of John's words: “They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1Jo 4:5-6)

But having said all that, it is all too tempting to say to your bored audience, “If you were good people, you would find me interesting.” Good and honest hearts can be bored with a sermon, not because they find the truth boring, but because they find the communication of that truth boring. Indeed, their patience with the boring presentation points to their willingness to endure a faulty medium because of their underlying, and frankly resilient, relish for the message. So we dare not use the inherent relevance of truth and the innate spiritual hunger of the regenerate as an excuse to erase the distinction between revealed truth and our presentation of that truth. The Thessalonians received God's Word as God's Word, which is what we want from our hearers. But we also want to love our hearers and serve them by presenting the truth in palatable, digestible and nourishing ways.

So, if we are experiencing waning interest in our sermons, how do we know whether the problem is with our listeners' hearts or with our communicative abilities, or perhaps a combination of both? Since we cannot see into the hearts of people, we have to focus on what we produce, and trust that it will have free course and be glorified in the right hearts. If we are producing the right kind of sermon, it will gain and retain the interest of the right kind of heart.

I suggest the harmony of appealing to the good listener with excellent rhetorical technique while maintaining the integrity of the message lies in something conservatives want to conserve and propagate: beauty. Beautiful sermons are those which transmit truth faithfully, while attracting the interest of the good and noble heart. We can say then that if a sermon is beautiful, it will be overcome boredom without sacrificing truthfulness.

Now I know that might sound odd, and the notion of beautiful preaching may take some defining and defending. We hear mostly about accurate sermons, compelling sermons, powerful sermons, we rarely hear about beautiful sermons. We may even wrestle with that descriptor– thinking that given the urgency of declaring God's counsel to the world, the very last thing we need is a discussion of how to decorate or prettify our sermons.

Indeed, on the surface, it might seem that Scripture itself discourages thinking of sermons as beautiful. Paul's defense of his own preaching in 1 Corinthians 2 appears to have this ring to it. The Corinthians were enamored with personality, and particularly with personalities that appeared to have knowledge. The professional rhetoricians of the Graeco-Roman world were celebrities in their day. Paul responds to some of these worldly expectations when he writes

And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. (1Co 2:1) And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, (1Co 2:4)

Was Paul condemning beautiful speech, and saying that eloquence was hostile to the Gospel? John Calvin wrestled with these verses, as someone who had been thoroughly trained in classical rhetoric. He wrote, “Paul would not be so very unreasonable as to condemn out of hand those arts, which, without any doubt, are splendid gifts of God.” He goes on to say we must consider the context of the Corinthians foolish eagerness for high-sounding words. And then Calvin finds a balance. “If the Apostle's preaching had rested exclusively on the power of eloquence, it might have been overthrown by superior eloquence, and besides, no one would pronounce that to be solid truth which rests on mere elegance of speech. It may indeed be helped by it, but it ought not to rest upon it.”

The Christian sermon distances itself from the self-consciously clever rhetoric, of vain verbal polish. For this is just appealing to another appetite in man, the much darker appetite of pride, or in the Corinthians' case, the appearance of knowledge. I suggest this is not beauty, but gaudiness; this is not what Philippians 4:8 describes as lovely, but rather a self-indulgent extravagance. Now, I am not sure that in our era of general dumbing down of communication, and of praise for the colloquial style that overly high rhetoric is a danger we are all precariously close to falling into. But I point this out, because once we begin speaking about beauty in sermons, this is the common objection.

We can say that Scripture is not hostile to eloquence per se. But eloquence is not what we mean by a beautiful sermon. It may form part of its overall beauty, but eloquence is not a sermon's beauty. So what is a beautiful sermon?

I'm going to attempt sketch a description of the beautiful sermon, not as though I had already attained, but as one who presses toward the mark. And I am going to borrow some ideas about beauty from Thomas Aquinas, not because I think he is the final word on beauty, but because I think his descriptions of beauty are helpful and true as far as they go. And using them, we can suggest that a beautiful sermon has the three elements which Aquinas used to describe beauty: clarity, symmetry, and integrity.

I. A Beautiful Sermon Has Clarity

When Aquinas used the idea of claritas, he was not primarily referring to communication that is concise or understandable. Aquinas did not use this word univocally. But a summary idea might be: clarity is the brightness or radiance of something that allows it to be seen as it is.

A beautiful sermon is one which firstly, allows the glory of God in the Word of God, to shine forth. God's Word is compared to the beauty of light.

The entrance of Your words gives light; It gives understanding to the simple. (Psa 119:130) Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path. (Psa 119:105) And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place (2Pe 1:19)

The light of God's Word is beautiful in itself. The Bible is not like the Koran with its 114 surahs with little continuity or structure. It is a literary wonder, filled with gripping narratives, exquisite poems, marvelous wisdom, mysterious prophecy, intimidating apocalypses.

The preacher crafting a beautiful sermon is concerned to allow the beauty of the actual form of God's Word to shine through. He pays attention to the very words in the original, the choice of words, the metaphors, the repetition, the parallelism in the poetry. He notes the meaning of grammatical features, the flow of argument, and the main point of the passage. He sees it in its logical context within the book he is preaching from. He places this into its rich historical context, understanding the circumstances of the original author and his original readers, the culture and customs that explain the meaning of this text.

I suggest the form of a beautiful sermon is demanded by the very nature of the message – which is a proclamation of God's glory. Those who believe that expository preaching is the form that best honours the authority of God's Word are agreeing that the first task of a sermon is to simply allow the radiance of God's Word to emerge.

The radiance of God's Word does come through a lens though, and the lens is the preacher. A preacher is not simply a commentator on each verse, relaying the light in a supposedly neutral fashion. No, God has ordained that the light of His Word should pass through the lens of preachers. The preacher is to focus this beauty with demonstration and explanation, but he then also brings persuasion to the task. He focuses this light with insight, showing God's people why this is in God's Word, why it is important, what kind of world we live in if this text is true. He has not only studied the text to bring out its meaning, he has meditated deeply on the text, on its significance so as to bring insight. He sees connections between ideas, and points out the unity, grasps the relationship of individual parts to the larger system, he weighs truths up in terms of importance, he spots objections and answers them, he brings balance to what could be taken wrongly.

I am describing an exegetically driven, expository sermon filled with insight into the text. In classical rhetoric, this part is called invention. You may not have heard sermons like these described as beautiful, but sermons that allow the light of God's glory to shine are beautiful.

But a second quality of beauty is necessary.

Often enough, we hear the preacher who has allowed God's glory to come through the passage, and for that we are nourished and grateful, but there is something missing. We find that we were straining to gather all he said, arrange it into a hierarchy of ideas, and understand the progression of ideas. The light has been bright, but not focused.

Preachers like this think mostly of what they mean, and little of what their hearers will hear. They mine the rocks of Scripture and dump the raw ore into a speech. Interesting preachers are not mere miners; they are jewelery-makers, too. They go beyond understanding their material to shaping it into an attractive form. In other words,the clarity will really only be seen if a sermon has the second element of beauty, which is symmetry.

II. A Beautiful Sermon Has Symmetry

In Aquinas, this was consonantia. Aquinas used this term to refer to symmetry or harmony within something, related to its end. Something is beautiful, Aquinas said, when the different parts are proportionate among themselves and proportioned also in respect of some unifying whole.

A sermon has different parts of its rhetorical structure: introduction, transition, propositional statement, major divisions of the main idea, within which will be forms of explanation, illustration, application, and finally a conclusion. Just as poets work with rhyme, rhythm, meter, alliteration, so preachers too work with this form. And a beautiful sermon wisely shapes this form so that the light of God's Word remains focused throughout.

Some preachers forget that public speaking is very similar to music. Music is really sound over time, with listeners aware of themes, development, progression, climax and resolution. Preaching is also a linear kind of event, a long stream of words over a period of time.

Few people in the act of preaching sense how time is passing for their audience. The nerves, the adrenalin, the effort to remember, the effort to stay on topic seems to divert the brain's focus almost entirely away from its own sense of the passing of time. Like the child absorbed in his digital game, he no longer notices the moments passing. An hour may as well have been five minutes. For the audience, the experience is the reverse. Focusing on one speaker, and trying to comprehend his words takes a deliberate effort of filtering out inward and outward distractions. If the speaker is hard to follow, uninteresting, or deplorably dull, the effort doesn't add up. The listener's brain is crying out to be set free to fritter from thought to thought, take in all the visual stimuli in the room (besides the speaker), think about recent events, solve pressing problems, do some forecasting, think about the speaker and his motives, or just settle into that vegetative state that men so enjoy when they go fishing. If the form of the sermon is less rewarding than all the distractions in the room, the seconds seem like minutes, and the minutes seem like hours.

Unless the words and ideas of a sermon are packaged and organized for the mental convenience of the listeners, it becomes a lot of verbiage with no form. Without clear structure, listeners are being asked to do something that should have been done by the speaker: sort the information out into a kind of hierarchy, and place explanatory or peripheral information where it belongs. Instead, it comes at listeners like soup without a plate, and most people are not going to work hard to lap up soup splattering everywhere. Without clear form, people begin to suffer a kind of disorientation. They are 'lost', and by that they mean they can no longer understand what you're saying at a given point in relation to the rest of the lesson. The parts no longer relate to the whole. When a speaker does this frequently, you'll hear people remark, “I simply can't follow him.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote to an aspiring writer, “I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.” The same is true for listeners. If there is a gap, they will take it. If a speaker's thoughts seem to meander, if the structure becomes too difficult to discover, if there is no clear progression of ideas and thought, if no clear main idea dominates, those sheep will escape.

A beautiful sermon must be crafted with a strong sense of empathy for the listener, what it will be like to follow this sermon form beginning to end. So in this phase of arrangement, the preacher finds an introduction that begins with your listeners, using a fictional or historical story, appropriate facts, humor, shared experience. There is then a natural transition to the main point of the sermon, which the preacher promises he will point out. That main point or propositional statement is like rain that wets everything in the sermon. A steady drizzle of the idea should come through, even when we detour or take unexpected turns.

A good method for giving your listener a clear idea of structure is to take the main idea or proposition and divide it into sections. He then announces both the number and the names of his sections. “Tonight we''ll see how Paul describes three dangers to our faith.” “We need to study the four opportunities that James tells us trials will bring our way”.

Not only should the structure be announced in advance, but it should be made plain throughout. When coming to a major division, or to one of the elements of the noun summary, some kind of transitional statement should draw attention to that. In the end, a conclusion that does more than restate everything, but summarizes with a challenge, or a series of questions, or a final illustration.

This kind of symmetry in the form of a sermon is the second attribute of its beauty. The heart that God has opened to the Word, will welcome this kind of sermon with interest, because it understands how to shape complex ideas over a fair period of time.

A sermon is beautiful when the light of God's Word comes through the preacher with sound exposition. It remains beautiful when that truth has a symmetrical form, a form harmonious with how the human mind experiences it. But it is possible to have these two aspects, but fail to be beautiful in the fullest sense. Sermons like these, lacking the third element, will rightly be called dry, bookish, or dull.

Our third point on beauty leads us to some less-travelled ground.

III. A Beautiful Sermon Has Integrity

Again, Aquinas means this in a particular sense. Integritas for Aquinas meant that something had nothing lacking from its essential form. What it was intended to be by God is its ideal form, and when it does not lack or add something extraneous, it has this completeness, perfection or integrity.

So how do we know if a sermon has this wholeness, this being what it is supposed to be? To answer that, we need to remind ourselves of what a sermon is.

Augustine admitted that a sermon is a unique rhetorical form. It does not correspond to any of the ancient rhetorical forms, but is unique. The Christian sermon is somewhere between poetry and argument. It articulates ideas, but seeks to communicate those ideas in ways that the prepared heart begins to feel the affections appropriate to the text.

A sermon is a act of corporate worship, where God's people are not only instructed and renewed in their minds, but respond to God in the very moment of communication. Jonathan Edwards once explained this when people complained of too many sermons, an 18th century version of information overload. This is what Edwards said in response:

“Tis objected that when sermons are heard so very often, one sermon tends to thrust out another; so that persons lose the benefit of all: they say two or three sermons in a week is as much as they can remember and digest...Such objections against frequent preaching,.., are for [lack] of duly considering the way that sermons usually profit [listening to them]. The main benefit that is obtained by preaching is by impression made upon the mind in the time of it, and not by an effect that arises afterwards by a remembrance of what was delivered. And though an after remembrance of what was heard in a sermon is oftentimes very profitable; yet, for the most part, that remembrance is from an impression the words made on the heart in the time of it; and the memory profits as it renews and increases that impression”

In other words, a sermon is not an information transfer from one brain to another. A sermon is an encounter with revelation, so communicated that the listener is deeply affected. That impression, the evocation of holy affections during the sermon is precisely what will aid retention of the knowledge, and more than likely bring about application. We hope that well structured outlines, clever titles, alliterated main points or memorable illustrations are what will cause retention in our listeners, and they may certainly assist. Edwards argues that the first changes in the listeners should be taking place during the sermon, responses of hope or trust or joy or conviction or admiration or fear. And the deeper, or more lively these affections, the more likely that the change will be carried over after the sermon is over.

Remember, Edwards never divorced the mind and the heart, understanding and affection. He rejected heat without light, emotion for its own sake, undirected and unformed feeling. He is arguing that rightly presented, a sermon persuades not merely by convincing our reason, but also by evoking the affections, the lively inclinations of the will.

But how shall we do this, without falling into the traps of manipulative emotionalism, arrogant confrontationalism, or general pulpit theatrics? How do we raise the ordinate affections of our hearers lawfully?

First, the preacher must be deeply in earnest. No artificiality, dramatizing or deliberate manipulation of people's emotions is permissible in the pulpit. The preacher is to be a man who believes and feels the text and is himself in submission to its truth. He is to be a good man speaking well, and only if he is allowing the Word that he studies for sermons to first make the impression on his own soul, will he be in earnest. It is his Spirit-filled walk with God that the Holy Spirit can greatly use in the pulpit.

Second, the sermon that will make this kind of impression on listeners is achieved through deliberate wordcraft. A.W. Tozer said this of our use of language:

“For the very reason that God has committed His saving truth to the receptacle of human language, the man who preaches that truth should be more than ordinarily skillful in the use of language. It is necessary that every artist master his medium, every musician his instrument. For a man calling himself a concert pianist to appear before an audience with but a beginner's acquaintance with the keyboard would be no more absurd than for a minister of the gospel to appear before his congregation without a thorough knowledge of the language in which he expects to preach.”

When sermons lack this element, the adjective we use of them is 'dry'. Truth was conveyed, but at no moment in the sermon, did the language delight, or soar, or open up new vistas. Is the imagination called upon, through the sheer use of language. When Tolkien describes the death of Aragorn, his language evokes a deep longing to see this kingliness, perhaps stirring in us a partial vision of how Messiah will appear to us when he writes, “Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.”

Yes, we are living in an age where the colloquial tone is praised, and so we must beware of how easily our attempts here can seem pretentious. And not every man's eloquence will be identical. Not identical, but equivalent – consider the differences and yet equivalences in the sermons of Isaiah, the sermon of Paul on Mars Hill, the sermon that is the book of Hebrews, the sermon of Peter at Pentecost, the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux, Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones.

This kind of beauty is in short supply. Instead, modern evangelical sermons are full of evangelical jargon. We hear about incentivizing strategies to help us do our vision-casting. We hear about kingdom-focused, Gospel-centered, missional living, core-values, being relational, and authentic living in the way of Jesus. But this language is barren.

I have heard some say that preaching is logic on fire. I would prefer to call it poetic persuasion, eloquence in earnest. It works with metaphor and analogy to fire the imagination of our hearers, and enable them through the sheer power of the choice phrase, metaphor or word-picture, to see and feel the glory of what is being said. How do we develop such a skill? Tozer, who had only an eighthgrade education, gave this advice:

“Good speaking as well as good writing has its pitch, its tempo, its balance and rhythm, its tone and timbre. And these things cannot be learned in the popular sense of the word; they can only be acquired by unconscious imitation. If we listen long and sympathetically to someone who uses English with style and artistry, something of his art will seep through the pores of our minds and improve our own style greatly. .. Some...may want to know who the "masters" are to whom I have referred, and what books I recommend to develop verbal skill. Here are a few: John Bunyan for simplicity; Joseph Addison for clarity and elegance; John Milton for nobility and consistent elevation of thought; Dickens for sprightliness (start with the Christmas Carol); Bacon for conciseness and dignity. In addition to these I would recommend Robert Louis Stevenson, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Also the poetry of Wordsworth, Bryant, Blake, Keats and Shelley.”

Tozer avoided being an echo-chamber for his contemporaries by reading more widely and broadly that most of his contemporaries did.

A man in earnest using imaginative language skillfully must of course do a third thing. He must work hard to become a better public speaker. His earnestness and skillful wordsmithing must not be obscured by poor delivery. He pays attention to pace and pause, to pitch and projection, to natural gestures, eye contact, facial expressions. He should give himself to deliberate improvement in these areas. Demosthenes run uphill while speaking to gain breath control. Churchill practiced Tozer blew up balloons to deal with the nasal quality of his speaking. Some cross-training is inevitable and necessary here.

How does a man both practice these things, but avoid artificiality? As Christian preachers, our goal is to feel the very affections that the text demands, and to communicate them through the personality that is ours. Yes, the beauty of a sermon is going to look different in different preachers, just as it does in different poets and musicians. Practising our delivery is with the goal of removing our communicative deficiencies and quirks, developing better, less distracting ways of winsomely communicating the affections we wish to evoke in others.

One of the greatest privileges of preaching is just that: that in the act of preaching, we get to re-live the impression that the text first made on us, and often in a more concentrated fashion. Through us comes not simply the facts from God's Word, but the feelings, not only who God is, but what He deserves. We become concentrated channels to express the responses to God. When this is present, I suggest it is the integrity of the sermon, its wholeness, its perfection, that it poetically persuades, has imaginative impact.

And all this must come, not at the relaxed pace of crafting a poem of ten lines over six months but in the midst of ministries where the average week will include counseling, leadership meetings, answering correspondence, discipling, preparing other studies and lessons, doing church administration while trying to have a happy and godly family and a reasonably healthy body. Our Sunday deadlines never stop looming, and the needs in ministry never stop coming. And that is to perhaps teach us 2 Corinthians 4:7

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.

God's Word conveyed with insight is not boring to a good soul. Clarity in sermons is beautiful. God's Word wisely arranged is not boring to a good soul. Symmetry in sermons is beautiful. And God's Word delivered well in earnest with evocative language is never boring to a good soul. Integrity in sermons, that poetic persuasion, is beautiful. May we conserve and propagate the biblical and historical act of beautiful preaching.

David de Bruyn