So, sinners that we preachers are, we must be wary of ourselves and the source of our homiletic passion. No marginal annotations: "Weak point here. Raise voice, pound pulpit!"

Scriptural Passion

Despite abuses, the scriptures know of and enjoin a godly passion for preachers of the Word. Paul told the Thessalonians, "Our gospel came to you not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction" (1 Thes. 1:5). Paul wasn't referring to conviction among his hearers, but rather his own conviction ("full conviction," RSV, NASB; "strong conviction," NEB) -- i.e., earnestness and passion. That is the way Paul preached. For Paul, preaching and weeping went hand in hand: "For three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears" (Acts 20:31). This was also Jesus' way on occasion. Do you think that Jesus dispassionately intoned, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing" (Matt. 23:37)? Not a chance. It was a loud, passionate lament.

Scriptural preaching demands a passion that flows from the conviction that what you are preaching is true.

When George Whitefield was getting the people of Edinburgh out of their beds at five o'clock in the morning to hear his preaching, a man on his way to the Tabernacle met David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and skeptic. Surprised at seeing Hume on his way to hear Whitefield, the man said, "I thought you did not believe in the gospel?" Hume replied, "I don't, but he does."17 Precisely! Whitefield's famous passion bore substantial and convincing testimony to the authentic burden of the Gospel he preached. And so it always will be. Where there is no passion, there is no preaching.

At the same time we must realize that the display of passion must be requisite with your personality. There are some people, like the nineteenth-century Scottish elder, who are (by nature) so subdued that if they raise their left eyebrow and one corner of their mouth twitches, they are rolling in the aisles. Passion can be demonstrated when the preacher raises his voice and flails his arms so that it appears he is about to fly away. But it can be equally present when a preacher talks quietly and slowly -- "This is about your soul. It is a matter of life and death."

It is a matter of historical fact that Jonathan Edwards, the author of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, read his sermons, holding his notes in front of his face so he could read them in a normal voice. According to John Piper, Serano Dwight asked a man who had heard Edwards preach if he was an eloquent preacher. The reply was:

"He had no studied varieties of the voice, and no strong emphasis. He scarcely gestured, or even moved; and he made no attempt by the elegance of his style, or the beauty of his pictures, to gratify the taste, and fascinate the imagination. But, if you mean by eloquence, the power of presenting an important truth before an audience, with overwhelming weight of argument, and with such intenseness of feeling, that the whole soul of the speaker is thrown into every part of the conception and delivery; so that the solemn attention of the whole audience is riveted, from the beginning to the close, and impressions are left that cannot be effaced; Mr. Edwards was the most eloquent man I ever heard speak."18