Last week, I had written about an old preacher who had prayed for me when I was working a medical intensive care unit before he passed on.  My mind has been drawn to that event several times since I wrote about it.  Around that same time, our church hosted a preaching workshop that was an effort to help bivocational pastors with resources and inspiration to help with preaching.  I suppose that as the miles have clicked up in ministry, I have come to an observation that if we are called to preach, if we believe that preaching is important, and if it is one of the most regular things that pastors do, why aren’t their more efforts to help us get better at it?  I have preached more than my share of “bad” sermons, but it is not because I have neglected the efforts to improve.  I cannot even count the number of books I have read on preaching, the Logos mobile ed units I’ve worked through, the You Tube videos that I have watched, and have listened to probably thousands of sermons.

While prayer is certainly a great key that needs to be practiced in our preaching, prayer alone will not necessarily make me a better preacher.  It will make me a holy preacher, a sincere one, and a consecrated vessel but it will not make me a better preacher.  One of the very important matters of good preaching is the content that a preacher is willing to give himself to.  This is mostly in the avenue of reading and studying.  Reading and studying are necessary and critical habits that will help a preacher to become better.  Both matters are the “work” of a preacher if you want to put it in that category.  Reading for a preacher is not a passive matter but it is one where I hope that you are reading with a highlighter, a pen, a journal, book flags, and perhaps even notecards.  I have found that the cheap Exceed journals from Walmart are good investments for preachers.  Take a Sharpie and markup the text block of the journal so you can see what the content of it is.  For instance, write “9/25 The Life of Jesus,” or “9/24 The Life of David,” or “Spiritual Warfare 5/24” that way you can see what the content or subject of the notes that you have handwritten inside of that journal.  I have another one that I have been carrying around for a while that says “Sermon Seeds” and on the pages inside it has a date, maybe a Scripture, an illustration, or a book/page reference from a commentary that I ran across something that I want to go back to again and develop into a sermon.

One of the statements that J. R. Ensey made in my TBC days has never left me:  Poor preaching is a heavy cross for a church to have to bear.  I believe that!  Furthermore, while there are certain levels of skill involved in preaching, I believe that every preacher can get better at his calling and his craft if he is willing to put some effort into it. 

During that preaching seminar that we hosted, the speaker told me about a publishing company that focused on reprinting old holiness authors and their books.  It was Schmul Publishing in a small town in Kentucky.  They had a quarterly subscription system that you could take part in.  This was in the days long before the internet created easy commerce as it does now and you were billed and had to send them a check.  Over the years, I have actively supported their company and have around 300 of their books from various writers on a wide range of subjects.  Almost always, I have benefited from their work and have books in my library that aren’t easily found.

One of the things that you will find in the old holiness writings is a very intelligent and sometimes creative use of typology.  Their use of OT types to illustrate NT principles showed their familiarity with the Bible.  All of these preachers were Bible readers and Bible students.  Most of them had very few reference works available to them except for concordances and dictionaries.  They learned the art of biblical meditation and allowing the stories to be turned over and over in their souls to be able to preach clearly to their congregations.  When you read these books, you can see how free their minds were from the modern distractions that sometimes can hamper our own spiritual growth.  The following books are examples of what I am writing about, and you can certainly judge a book by its title:

Chester Briggs—The Canaanite Exterminated

Beverly Carradine—Fish University  (A study on Jonah)

J. Harold Greenlee—Words from the Word

A.M. Hills—Backsliders and Worldly Christians  (A study on Lot)

Jones—Sin a Detective

George D. Watson—Spiritual Ships; Holiness Manual & The Seven Overcomers

There are several books about the trip of a saint out of the world expressed by the stories of the Israelites leaving Egypt.  I think that I benefited from these books because they are short devotional commentaries.    

Martin Wells Knapp—Out of Egypt into Canaan

Daniel Steele—The Book of Joshua

The old Wesleyan writers were very strong on the quest and hunger for holiness.  As you read on the theme of holiness, there is an almost palpable feeling of a quest for holiness.  I have thought of it in this way several times; it’s as if they are mountain climbers trying to summit a mountain.  My soul and mind grieve when I hear the mockers these days want to classify this kind of desire as legalism!  I think the real matter is that the modern church has drifted so far that we have lost sight of the importance of private prayer and worship and soul piety that our forbears experienced in their own lives.  It is not a monastic approach to life but rather it is a longing and hunger for the purity that only holiness and relationship with God can bring to us in this fallen world.  I am listing some of these books on the theme of holiness, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg as to what the folks at Schmul have to offer:

Wilber T. Dayton—Entire Sanctification

Thomas K. Doty—Lessons in Holiness

W. B. Godbey—Godbey on Christian Perfection

W. B. Godbey—Christian Perfection and Deeper Things

A. M. Hills—Dying to Live

J. M. Humphrey—Daily Guide for the Sanctified

This publisher has also worked diligently to preserve the lives of these preachers on the printed page through biography.  I cannot tell you how many times I have been inspired by reading about these old preachers and their wrestling in prayer, their discipline in study, their consistency in preaching, and the way they faced adversity.  Some of these are as follows:

Peter Cartwright—Autobiography of Peter Cartwright

A.M. Hills—The Life of Charles G. Finney

Martin Hotle—Snapshots of Lives with Impact

Gene Long—S.I. Emery

Meredith—Jesse Lee:  A Methodist Apostle

Tipple—Francis Asbury:  The Prophet of the Long Road

Francis Upham—Thomas Coke

Along with these titles there are numerous collections of sermons, special topics such as music, and various Bible studies that I have found useful over the years.  I am once again brought to a place of thankfulness for a print library!  You should contact them and invest in their work!                              

Thanks for reading. . .

Philip Harrelson