Yesterday I picked up a copy of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' book, Preaching and Preachers, from the school library. It is a collection of lectures on preaching that Lloyd-Jones delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1969. Anyone who has heard of Lloyd-Jones knows of his reputation as a powerful and faithful preacher of the Gospel, and so his insight on preaching is worth reading.

I've hardly been able to put the book down; on almost every page I feel as if there is something worth posting here. Naturally, I won't do so, but instead will offer just a few of the many good things worth thinking about. Consider this (rather lengthy) passage:

Any true definition of preaching must say that [the preacher] is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is 'an ambassador for Christ'. That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person, and he is standing there as the mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address these people. In other words, he is not there merely to talk to them, he is not there to entertain them. He is there—and I want to emphasise this—to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds, he is there to influence people. He is not merely to influence a part of them; he is not only to influence their minds, or only their emotions, or merely to bring the pressure to bear upon their wills and to induce them to some kind of activity. He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the soul of man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical manner...[Preaching] is not the mere imparting of knowledge, there is something much bigger involved. The total person is engaged on both sides (53-55).

To illustrate his point, Lloyd-Jones draws an illustration from the Greek philosopher, Epictetus, whose insights parallel the words of Jesus in Luke 5:31-32. He says,

A young philosopher went one day to Epictetus to ask him for advice. The reply Epictetus gave him is very good advice also for preachers. He said, 'The philosopher's lecture room is a surgery. When you go away you ought to have felt not pleasure but pain, for when you come in something is wrong with you. One man has put his shoulder out, another has an abscess, another a headache. Am I the surgeon then to sit down and give you a string of fine sentences that you may praise me and then go away—the man with the dislocated arm, the man with the abscess, the man with the headache—just as you came? Is it for this that young men come away from home and leave their parents and their kinsmen and their property to say, "Bravo to you for your fine moral conclusions"? Is this what Socrates did or Zeno or Cleanthes?'...

[The people of a church] do not come just as minds or as intellects, they come as total persons in the midst of life, with all its attendant circumstances and its problems, and its difficulties and trials; and the business of the preacher is not only to remember that but to preach accordingly. He is dealing with living persons, people who are in need and in trouble, sometimes not consciously; and he is to make them aware of that, and to deal with it...

If people can listen to us without becoming anxious about themselves or reflecting on themselves we have not been preaching...that is what preaching is meant to do. It addresses us in such a manner as to bring us under judgment; and it deals with us in such a way that we feel our whole life is involved, and we go out saying, 'I can never go back and live just as I did before. This has done something to me, it has made a difference to me. I am a different person as the result of listening to this...

Preaching is that which deals with the total person, the hearer becomes involved and knows that he has been dealt with and addressed by God through this preacher. Something has taken place in him and in his experience, and it is going to affect the whole of his life (55-56).

Just recently I finished reading James K. A. Smith's book, The Devil Reads Derrida, in which he pointed out that in the book of Acts, public disturbances would arise and whole cities would riot when the Gospel was preached. The poignant question, of course, is whether or not we still preach the same Gospel. Our preaching of the Gospel must radically transform hearts and minds, such that people are constantly challenged to surrender their whole lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.