As admitted in an earlier post, I am currently reading John Stott’s Between Two Worlds. In the context of discussing the preacher’s call to study both the Bible and the culture, he quotes Bishop Phillips Brooks, who says:
The preacher’s life must be a life of large accumulation. He must not always be trying to make sermons, but always seeking truth, and out of the truth which he has won the sermons will make themselves…Here is the need of broad and generous culture. Learn to study for the sake of truth, learn to think for the profit and the joy of thinking. Then your sermons shall be like the leaping of a fountain, and not like the pumping of a pump. (180-181)
After having preached a sermon of the “pump” variety yesterday, these words are most relevant. Take heed lest you stand up before a congregation still lost in the fog of your own ignorance!
