But I don’t want to give the impression that I only enjoy it if there is a large crowd there because some of the most enjoyable times are spent out in the boonies with a relatively small handful of people. We go to some of the Southeast Asian countries that still have communist governments, and there are definite restrictions on these people—I don’t want to go into details on that—but very small groups of wonderful saints of God. I always feel too big, too clumsy, and too shallow when I am with those brothers and sisters.
It’s a wonderful joy to preach to people who keep interrupting you to say, “Could you please go over that again?” In actual fact, they are trying to write everything down. They want you to go from morning to night. I always quit before they do! There is such a hunger.
Advertisement
We translated one of my books into one of those languages. I will never forget the incredible joy that these people had just receiving this simple book. There are not that many people here that experienced that—that is why it went out of print so quickly!
You can see why I go there.
Preaching: What are some things you have learned about preaching along the way?
Briscoe: The man who pushed me into preaching, the first time he said, “Stuart, there is really nothing terribly difficult about it. You study your Bible and then you stand up and you tell people what it says.”
I said, “Is that it?”
He said, “Yeah, basically that is it.” Well maybe I could figure it out.
I was delighted one day in John Wesley’s house in south London to see in a little alcove of his simple bedroom a little desk in a window overlooking London. There was a saying on it that said, “I rise up early, I study God’s Word, and I go and tell people.”
I think I got more sophisticated as time went along. I learned from John Scott that all preaching should be some form of exposition of Scripture in its context. That has been a fundamental belief and principal of operation. You can build on that—there are many different ways of doing it.
In more recent times I have been more and more convinced of the obvious validity of narrative preaching, and I have enjoyed that very much. I was with my youngest son Pete—who’s a gifted young preacher himself. This past weekend we did a men’s conference together and he said, “I think you are discovering a gift that you have not used up until now. That is the gift of story telling.”
The reason I haven’t used it that much is I have heard so much narrative preaching, which seemed to me to simply tell a story then leave it wide open for everyone to determine their truth. Narrative preaching, as I was listening to it, appeared to me like postmodern thinking; and I was very leery of that. But when I really looked at Scripture again, it was obvious to me that most of it is narrative and these stories are there for a reason.
