Can we preach Christ crucified and remain altogether unmoved?

I have not been able to blog for a good while now – I see it is about a month or so!  I have been away from Aberdeen for a variety of reasons lately, including a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in which I led a group from Aberdeen and the NE along with my good friend and colleague Scott Guy, the minister of Northfield Parish Church of Scotland in Aberdeen.  I have also been plagued with the ubiquitous coughs, colds and wheezes that have left me feeling just sufficiently under par when it comes to finding the energy for blogging or doing anything else other than the essentials of everyday work and ministry.

Having said all of that, and feeling the sap beginning to rise once more, I thought I would get back in the saddle and post this challenging comment by John Stott, in which I guess all of us who are preachers are given reason to reflect on the way we feel about our preaching, as well as the way we feel when we are in the process of preaching.  I would have to admit to having delivered more than a few cold ‘lectures’ to my congregation in my time when I ought to have been preaching something that had gripped my own soul and fired up my own passion.

Perhaps as an additional comment to John Stott’s thought, to which I have no objection whatsoever, is my own observation that God’s grace and kindness is so overwhelming, even on those occasions when I have preached without fire or passion, God has chosen to bless people and to draw them to Himself.  His goodness and willingness to save and to heal is not limited or obstructed by the coldness of my heart or emptied of His power to restore on account of the lifeless delivery of my sermon.  For these things we can only thank and adore Him, but in general, John Stott is completely right to ask what the state of the preacher’s heart is when the thought of the cross and of the congregation’s great need utterly fail to move or inspire the preacher himself.

Here is what John Stott says:

Some preachers have a great horror of emotionalism. So have I, if this means the artificial stirring of the emotions by rhetorical tricks or other devices. But we should not fear genuine emotion. If we can preach Christ crucified and remain altogether unmoved, we must have a hard heart indeed. More to be feared than emotion is cold professionalism, the dry, detached utterance of a lecture which has neither heart nor soul in it. Do man’s peril and Christ’s salvation mean so little to us that we feel no warmth rise within us as we think about them?

–From “The Preacher’s Portrait” (London: Tyndale Press, 1961), p. 51.

Soli Deo Gloria