And here first I must bring in another word to meet the word "attractive." That word is "faithful."
As a matter of most obvious fact (we noticed it in the previous chapter), there is a false and useless attractiveness, as well as a true. There is the poor and miserable attractiveness--it draws a certain class of modern hearers--of mere brevity; the "ten-minute sermon." There are no doubt exceptional occasions when ten minutes, or even five, may be the right limit to our utterance; but there is something wrong with both sermon and audience if in the regular ministration of God's holy Word the preacher must at once begin to stop. There is again the specious and spurious attractiveness of excitement and froth of manner, or of a merely emotional appeal to perhaps not the deepest emotions, an attraction which has little in it of that divine magnet which draws the will and lifts the soul in regenerate faith and surrender. There is the attraction, tempting, but futile for the true purposes of the pulpit, of the sermon which is after all only a lecture, or a leading article; full of the topics of the day, of the hour; full perhaps of some celebrated name just immortalized by death[32]; but not full of the eternal message for which the pulpit exists. Most certainly there is no divine rule which excludes from the sermon all allusions to politics, to society, to science, to great men; but there _is_ a divine rule, running through the whole precept and example of the New Testament, which keeps such things always subordinate to the supreme work of preaching Jesus Christ.
[32] "I went longing to hear about Christ, and it was only Newman from beginning to end." This was the actual lament of an anxious soul, one Sunday in 1890.
Across all our thoughts how to secure attractiveness, as a co-ordinate line which fixes attention to the true point, runs the word "Faithfulness." The preacher is to be attractive while faithful, faithful while attractive. And he is to be attractive not for the sake of so being, but in order that he may win an entrance for the words of faithfulness, to his Master's praise.
Yes, this is what we are to be as preachers. We are to seek "mercy of the Lord to be faithful." [1 Cor. vii. 25.] We are not popular leaders, looking for a cry, or passing one on. We are not speculative thinkers, feeling out a philosophy, communicating our guesses at truth to a company of friends who happen to be interested in the investigation. We are "messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord." We are in commissioned charge of a divine, authentic, and unalterable message. We are the expounders of a "Word which liveth and abideth for ever," [1 Pet. i. 23.] a Word which man is always trying to judge and to disparage, but which will judge man at the last day. [Joh. xii. 48.] We are the bondservants of an absolute Master, who is at once our Sender and our Message, and who overhears our every word in its delivery.