An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
You don’t have to know much about Reformed Christians to know that they make much of preaching. The pulpit is at the center of the church sanctuary, the sermon is the central point of the worship service, preaching itself is considered very serious business, and they do a lot of it. But what is it that is most distinctive about the best of Reformed preaching?
I’m Fred Zaspel, executive editor here at Books At a Glance, and that’s our topic for today. Dr. Joel Beeke is here with us again, this time to talk about his new book, Reformed Preaching: Proclaiming God’s Word from the Heart of the Preacher to the Heart of His People.
Joel, welcome back to Books At a Glance, and congratulations on a really, really good book!
Beeke:
Thank you, Fred, good to be with you again.
Zaspel:
First, perhaps you can tell us how this book came about. You’ve been preaching in churches and teaching preaching in seminaries for quite some time, right?
Beeke:
Yes. Actually, I have a rather unique course called Reformed Experiential Preaching, that is, how you preach from the pastor’s heart to the hearts of the people, and I decided that the time had come now that I’m 65 after all these years of teaching this course in many different seminaries around the country and around the globe, to put it in book form and Crossway was gracious to receive it so it’s coming out, God willing, in about six weeks.
Zaspel:
Explain for us why Reformed folk have always made so much of preaching.
Beeke:
Well, the short answer to that is because God delights to dwell with his people in public worship. And the Reformers always believed that God’s ordinary way of building up the saints was primarily through preaching and his ordinary way of converting people, to bring them into the fold, was ordinarily through preaching. So, for example, when the Heidelberg Catechism asks how the Holy Spirit works saving faith in the hearts of believers, the answer is simply this: from the preaching of the Gospel. You pause as you read that answer, don’t you? And you say, “what about reading the Bible? What about reading sound literature? What about fellowship among the saints?” There are so many other spiritual disciplines God uses, but this, Reformers considered to be so much the primary means, they didn’t even bother to list any of the other spiritual disciplines.
Zaspel:
Okay, by Reformed preaching you have in mind, as you’ve just mentioned, specifically, Reformed experiential preaching. Explain for us what that is and what are some of its leading distinctives and features. Go ahead and take a few minutes here for us if you will so we get a good picture of what you are after here.
Beeke:
All right, well, first of all, let me say this book does focus entirely on the experiential dimension of preaching. Students that know me here at the seminary will tell you that I’m always stressing that all preaching must be biblical, doctrinal, experiential and practical. So, I’m only talking in this book about the most neglected of these four, which is the experiential emphasis.
Probably the best way I can get across what experiential means is to use an example in my own life. I was in the Army, Army Reserves, actually, and when I finished my six months of duty my boss came to me on the last day and said, “Well, son, if you’re going to be called back up for war in the next five and half years, you need to remember three things. You need to remember, first of all, how the war should go; you’ve been trained for that. Second, you should remember how wars do go; they never go the way they should go because they’re always bloody and messy. And thirdly you should remember the end goal; you’re fighting for your country.”
Later on, I was thinking that’s a really good paradigm for a definition of Reformed experiential preaching. In preaching, the preacher must preach from his heart how the Christian life should go. Think Romans 8, with all the glories of the Holy Spirit working and witnessing with our spirit that we are children of God and the full assurance. The chapter begins with no condemnation and ends with no separation. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. This is how things should go, and the preacher needs to preach that for all it’s worth, all the riches of the Christian experiential life. Secondly, he also needs to preach how things do go; they seldom go in this life the way they should go. We are still stained with sin; we struggle. Paul groans that the good he would do he doesn’t find himself doing; the evil that he wouldn’t do, he finds himself doing – oh, wretched man that I am. So the preacher must that too, which is Romans 7, with all the struggles of the holy warfare, so that God’s people can identify with that. Then, thirdly, he must preach the end goal, which is to preach the glories of the future home. The best is yet to be, the glories of heaven, the glories of being sin free in Immanuel’s land, married to Christ forever. And all the experiences of the soul are preached, not to end in the soul’s experience, itself, but to trace out God’s work in the soul in order to give glory to God, alone.
Zaspel:
Some preaching seems almost exclusively teaching – instruction in what Scripture teaches. Other preaching seems almost exclusively instructive in how to live, what is right or wrong. Explain for us why this experiential element is so important and necessary – and what the listener is deprived of without it.
Beeke:
The former kind of preaching is biblical, and it’s good. It can do a lot of good. That’s wonderful. The second kind of preaching you mentioned, which is how to live, can be very practical; and that’s good, and we need that as well. But, the experiential element identifies from heart to heart, from the heart of the preacher to the heart of the listener, through the Word of God, how the Holy Spirit works in the soul. And where that is missing, it’s quite possible that you end up with just nominal Christians, because they are not examined in their soul. Experiential preaching is both discriminatory, it separates the true believer from the false believer or the hypocrite, and it’s also applicatory, it applies the Word in the life of the believer. Not just in a practical way; it does that, but in an experiential way; it tells a believer how the Holy Spirit works. And so, you examine yourself and you get comfort from being able to trace it out in your soul. If this is missing, you see, it’s quite possible to say, “Well, I’m a Christian; I grew up in this church and I believe I’m on my way to heaven,” but you don’t live it out and you don’t experience it in the inner man.
Let me give you a quick example. I have a friend who is a pastor and his dad was a pastor, as well, and one day his dad, who is now with the Lord, went into a bookstore and, as we authors sometimes do, he happened to see one of his own books in the store. So he walked over and picked it up because he wanted to look at the price on the back. As he was looking at it, the store owner came up to him and said, “You know, that is really a great book.” And he turned, and looked at the store owner and he said, “Do you know the author?” “Oh, yeah,” the guy says, “He’s really a good author.” “Well, if you had known the author, you would have greeted him when he walked in the door.” You see, he thought he knew the author because he knew the book, but he didn’t really know the man. It’s one thing to know things about Jesus Christ when you read the book, the Bible; it’s quite another to know Jesus Christ, personally. The word, to know, in both Hebrew and Greek means an intimate knowledge. When John says, “this is life eternal to know God and to know Jesus Christ, whom He has sent,” he’s talking about an intimate, experiential knowledge, that I treasure him as my prophet, I know him as my inward teacher. I treasure him as my high priest, who died for me and who intercedes for me, and I’ve experienced the power of that intercession and I treasure that King who rules and guides me and I’ve experienced that he is faithful in doing so. That type of thing.
Zaspel:
My dad was my pastor, growing up, and he used to call this both experiential preaching and inspirational preaching. He emphasized that there’s a big difference between preaching about Christ and preaching Christ. And there’s a difference between preaching about God, and proclaiming his glory in such a way that people tend to sense his glory and, in a real sense, and the best sense of the term, are brought into the presence of God. That’s what you’re after here, right?
Beeke:
That’s right. Let me just pull out one example, from my mind, and I think that will illustrate what you are saying. Let’s say I’m preaching about the doctrine of the intercession of Christ. Now that’s a good doctrine; it’s a neglected doctrine. And I might say, to the edification of the congregation, “This is a wonderful doctrine. Jesus Christ is interceding; he’s remembering you at the right hand of the Father, moment by moment, as Hebrews 7:25 says.” Now, you’re going to say, “That’s a comforting truth; he’s remembering me, that’s comforting.” But how different that is, from saying this: “Dear congregation, Jesus Christ is remembering you, moment by moment at the right hand of the Father. And what a joy that is when you sometimes feel like you are forgetful of him and you are wretched in your prayers and in your poverty of your ongoing sanctification. Sometimes you feel like you can hardly pray to him, but oh, what a comfort in the midst of that agony that you aren’t what you ought to be, that you can cry out to him who remembers you from moment to moment. That where your prayers come to an end, you know that he is still praying for you and therefore, you end in this great praying high priest, and you praise him for his constant intercessions. What a comfort!” That’s experiential preaching. The first is a fact; the second is, what does the believer experience about that fact?
Zaspel:
Amen! Wonderful.
In the second section of your book you examine the preaching of Reformed preachers from the time of the Reformation to the twentieth century, so this experiential dimension has been a feature of Reformed preaching from the beginning. So has this been a typical, standard feature of Reformed preaching generally?
Beeke:
Well, it has been from the early 1500s all the way until the 1830s. When Charles Finney came along with his Free Will kind of preaching, then there were some Reformed Evangelical preachers that got persuaded by some of his techniques and kind of slipped into, “Oh well, I’ll preach in a Reformed way, a bit,” but then when they turn to the altar call or they turn to application, they switch from Reformed preaching to Arminian preaching, and they don’t really preach experientially. Iain Murray has shown in his book, very powerfully, how that up until the 1830s, almost all the preachers, in America at least, were Reformed experiential preachers, so that was typical. Today, it’s not as rare as it was, I think, 20 years ago. I do think the very fact that Crossway wants to do this book is a healthy sign, because all around the world people want a real relationship with God, today. They want vital communion much more than when I began my ministry 40 years ago and I find that very encouraging.
It’s interesting that Francis Wayland, who is a Reformed Baptist minister, wrote in his book in 1857, “From the manner in which our ministers entered upon their work, it’s evident that the prominent object of their lives was to convert men to God. They were remarkable for what has been called experiential preaching. They told much of the exercises of the human soul under the influence of the truth of the Gospel.” Then he lists a bunch of them like: the feeling of a sinner while under the convicting power of the truth, the successive applications of truth by which he was given out of all of his righteousness, the despair of the soul when it found itself wholly without a refuge, its final submission to God and simple reliance on Christ, the joys of new birth, the trials of the soul when it found itself an object of reproach, the process of sanctification, the devices of Satan to lead us into sin, the dangers of backsliding, and on and on he goes. These are various facets of experiential preaching. But then he concludes this way: (this is in 1857, how much more this is true today.) “These remarks show the tendency of the class of preachers which seem now to be passing away.” 1857.
Zaspel:
You mentioned Iain Murray’s book. Which book is that?
Beeke:
It’s called Revival and Revivalism.
Zaspel:
Thanks. What does this kind of preaching require of the preacher himself?
Beeke:
Wow! Great question. Sweat, blood, tears. The experiential preacher throws himself into his work. First of all, he’s passionate; he’s earnest; he’s an earnest man of God. He doesn’t apologize for preaching the whole counsel of God with passion. His whole body, in preaching, conveys, “I really believe what I’m saying.”
It also compels him to be a very prayerful preacher because he knows he can’t give spiritual life to anyone and he’s dependent on God for everything. There’s something about an experiential preacher that is authentic. He’s real. It’s no fake or whiny preacher’s voice. It’s no just kind of staple items, no lists, no excessive use of notes. He speaks from the heart.
And, as Al Martin used to say, an experiential preacher is a growing preacher. He has a large life with God; he has a varied life with God; he has an original life with God. So when people hear him from week to week, they hear a man who they can say (one week, to be sure, more than another, but) “Our preacher is coming to us out of fresh communion with God from the inner closet.
And then I think he’s also got to be a decreasing preacher. A man of God who can really say with John the Baptist, “Jesus must increase and I must decrease.”
Zaspel:
We can’t survey all the many model preachers whose preaching you survey for us in part two of the book, but perhaps you can sample some of these men for us. Who are they? Why were they chosen as examples? And what are some of their outstanding features?
Beeke:
The second part of the book is the largest part of the book and what I wanted to do is show the readers, show the preacher as well as the layman, that this was just typical preaching in ages gone by, in the Reformed Puritan tradition. So I first look, in three chapters, at some of the major Reformers, particularly Calvin and Beza. And then I look, in five or six chapters, I think, at the Puritans. I look at William Perkins and I look at the Westminster Directory, and Thomas Goodwin, and John Bunyan, one of the most powerful experiential preachers. Then I look at the Dutch Further Reformation, which was the parallel movement to the English Puritan movement. Three chapters there. Then I pick out, in successive chapters, two or three leading preachers in every century, like Jonathan Edwards and JC Ryle, and I end up with Lloyd-Jones. What I try to show from these different preachers is different dimensions of how they tackled various experiential subjects. In one I might focus on how they preach conviction of sin; another I might focus on how the soul experiences a way of escape in Jesus Christ; another, how the soul experiences deliverance from backsliding, and so on.
Bunyan, of course, is one of the most dramatic because people under his preaching felt like they were right there in the text, so I look at a few of those sermons, like his sermon on the fig tree. How he has God the Father speaking to God the Son and he impersonates both in his sermon. The Son is pleading with God, “Can I please dig about the tree one more year before I cut it down?” And the father is showing, “Well, okay, I’ll do this, but this is the last opportunity.” He just makes the experiential warnings very clear that you must flee to Christ, right now!
Zaspel:
Some Reformed preachers have been accused of being stuck in the seventeenth century and not preaching to people in today’s world. Whether that is fair or not, it raises a good question: Having learned from these older preachers, how do we bridge to the twenty-first century and make Reformed preaching contemporary (in the best sense of that term)?
Beeke:
Yes, well, the beauty of the Reformers and the Puritans is that in many ways they are perpetually contemporary, but they just use old-fashioned language. So much of what they say, the gist of it, is the same way we would preach today. Now there are exceptions – the way sometimes they called out names. For example, Frelinghuysen would say, “Oh, you painted hypocrites!” I don’t advise a minister to do that today. I would think you could say, though, today, “If this is your life, congregation, then you are really a hypocrite, if you’re not following the Lord, here or there, or whatever.” So, you could do it, and you could do it powerfully, today; but in those days, they didn’t take offense so easily and they were more brazen than we are, for better or for worse. We’re probably too soft, today. But there are ways, of course, that they preached in areas like this, that you would say, “Well, best to avoid that,” but the gist of what they’re saying, make it in contemporary language. For example, in a series of books that we published here, called Puritan Treasures for Today, we take every sentence of a Puritan book and we edit it so it’s written like it was written yesterday. Those books sound just incredibly contemporary, without sacrificing any meaning, really. Now once in a while the Puritans, in particular, are rather quaint and of course you don’t preach like that; and you don’t preach with this many subpoints as the Puritans did because they were educated that way; our people aren’t. I did a talk recently for Westminster seminary on ways to preach like the Puritans and ways not to preach like the Puritans. But, in the main, the experiential emphasis, we need a lot more of what they had, here; but, of course, we need to do it with contemporary illustrations and contemporary language.
Zaspel:
Before we sign off, give us just a broad overview of you book so everyone can know what to expect.
Beeke:
For the first third of the book, I’m laboring to define what an experiential preacher is. I look at a number of different aspects to flesh out that definition and try to make it crystal clear. So about the time you get to page 100 or so, you know the major elements of Reformed experiential preaching, you know what it means to preach from heart to heart, and you know what it means to be an experiential preacher, yourself.
The second part is what we were just talking about, this lengthy section, which is really almost half of the book, on the examples from Church History. From Zwingli, the first Reformed preacher, all the way to Lloyd-Jones.
The last part of the book gives you five or six chapters of how you apply experiential preaching, today. So, you cross the bridge from the old preachers, and you say, “Now, how should I preach experientially, today?” And I deal with things like how you should preach with balance, both objective and subjective; and how you should preach both God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. And then I have a chapter on how application starts with the preacher, that you really got to preach to yourself first of all. Like Bunyan said, “I never preached a sermon I did not smartingly feel in my own conscience.” Then I give examples of how to preach, experientially, about God, half a chapter; about man, half a chapter; about Christ and bringing the Gospel to the heart, a whole chapter; and then I conclude the book with how to preach for holiness, today, with a whole chapter there, as well.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Joel Beeke, author of the new book, Reformed Preaching: Proclaiming God’s Word from the Heart of the Preacher to the Heart of His People. I have to say, it’s really a great book – a gold mine that will certainly benefit any preacher or aspiring preacher. In my view, Dr. Beeke has zeroed in on exactly what is too often missing and so very needed in today’s preaching, and I cannot recommend it too highly. I’ve never seen this subject analyzed so precisely or expounded so well. How this book would have enriched the homiletics classes I had as a student! Taken seriously, it will enrich any preacher’s preaching. If you preach, get this book. If not, at least get a copy for your pastor.
Joel, thanks so much – for your faithful ministry, for this really excellent work, and for talking to us today.
Beeke:
Thank you so much, Fred. I would say to you too, if anyone wants to order a copy from Heritagebooks.org prior to its coming out, we’re giving them away for 50%. So, you’re getting a really good deal, it’s a $40 book for $20.
