An Able and Faithful Ministry by Garretson James M.;

Author:Garretson, James M.; [Garretson, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781601782984
Amazon: 5842086
Publisher: Reformation Heritage Books
Published: 2014-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Choosing Texts for the Right Reasons

Ministers were to act responsibly in the selection of texts that would be relevant and edifying.2 Texts were not to be misinterpreted or misapplied. Reading into a passage a meaning not intended by the text, however well-intentioned, is to dishonor God’s Word. A minister’s attempt to excite interest or gain respect for his skill in finding things in a text that no one else has found was an interpretative model to avoid. “Never make choice of texts for the purpose of exciting wonder or surprise; or of setting your hearers on the tiptoe of curiosity to know what can be said on such passage,” he told his students. “I have known some preachers who manifested a particular fondness for texts of this kind. It appeared to be habitually their aim, in the outset of their discourses, to have something strange; something unexpected; something adapted to make the people stare at their quaintness or their eccentricity.”

Some, for example, are remarkably fond of very short texts—a single word, perhaps. One preacher delivered a long and learned discourse on the word Amen. Another respectable divine, of our own Church, not long since deceased, in a pulpit but a few miles from this place, took for his text these words from the Prophecy of Ezekiel—“O Wheel!” A third delivered a solemn and interesting discourse on the single word, “Watch.” Dr. Gregory speaks of a preacher who pronounced as his text the name Jehovah Jireh; and another who took the monosyllable “but,” from which he extorted much theological and exhortatory meaning. Dr. Bachard in his work on “Contempt of the Clergy,” speaks of a preacher who, in dividing his sermon made a particular head of his discourse to consist in a formal elucidation of the word “and”; adding, “This word is but a particle, and a small one; but small things are not to be despised, as we learn [from] Matthew 18:10; “Take heed that you despise not one of these little ones.”

Miller believed that passages such as Ezra 1:9 (“nine and twenty knives”), Numbers 4:7 (“the dishes, the spoons, the bowls”), or Canticles 5:3 (“I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on?”) “contain no distinct meaning” as “detached portions of Scripture.” He felt that ministers who use passages like these for their sermons undermine the office to which they have been called:

Now, I would seriously ask persons who manifest this turn of mind in selecting texts, whether, in indulging this disposition, they treat the word of God respectfully? Whether they are not chargeable with making it a mere stalking horse for exhibiting their own ingenuity? Is it not rather acting the part of a mountebank to amuse people, than that of an “ambassador of Christ,” who rises to address men on the most important and solemn of all subjects? And whether any thing of this kind is not unworthy—utterly unworthy of the dignity of the pulpit, and of the reverence due to the holy Scriptures?

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