Towards the end of the lectures on preaching by Martyn Lloyd-Jones recorded in his book, Preaching and Preachers, he devotes one session to discussing certain things preachers should avoid. Lloyd-Jones, as many know, was an advocate of preaching through books of the Bible as opposed to preaching a number of sermons on a specific subject. His reasoning behind this objection is that preaching according to subjects

has the tendency to isolate subjects from their context in the Scriptures; indeed ultimately it regards the Scriptures as but a collection of statements about particular subjects. So one atomises the Scripture and forgets the whole; and, surely, the whole is more important than the parts...one loses the sense of the wholeness of the biblical message (245).

Additionally, Lloyd-Jones makes the case that to preach according to certain subjects does not square with a proper understanding of preaching, which I mentioned in an earlier post. This, he argues, is an even more important point than the first.

Why are people interested in 'subjects'? The answer is that they think they know what they need, and they only want to hear about the things in which they say they are 'tremendously interested'.

You must have gathered already that it is a part of my whole contention that they are not in a position, ultimately, to know what they need; and our experience of ourselves in the past, and experience as pastors of souls, teaches that so often their idea as to what they need is quite wrong. Of course the preacher may also be wrong in this respect, but this applies much more to the congregations. It is, I repeat, a part of our whole approach to this matter not to allow the pew to decide the theme of preaching and not to encourage them at all along this line; but rather to give them the whole truth, and to bring them to see that there are vital aspects of which they are ignorant and in which they are apparently not interested at all. They should be interested in the whole truth and every aspect of it, and we must show them their need of this.

Interestingly, Lloyd-Jones remarks that features like this are the heir of nineteenth-century liberalism.

It has often amazed me to notice how churches and preachers hold on to nineteenth-century methods when they have long since bidden farewell to the great truths emphasised especially in the early part of that century. This habit and practice of announcing the subject, and of having a choir, and a children's address—all these things came in during the last century; they were not done before that time. It was all part of that pseudo-intellectualism of the Victorians; and we are now experiencing a kind of hangover from this. I am calling attention to this because I feel that the urgent need today is to break free from these bad habits, this false respectability and intellectualism that was so characteristic of the end of the last century. These things have been dominating our services; and I feel they detract from the preaching of the Gospel and the centrality of the preaching of the Gospel (246-247).

Disregarding the pot-shots he takes at choirs and children's messages, I think he again makes some very valid points for our consideration.