A Steward of the Secret Things

I am  delighted that the first contribution to my new series on the training up and encouraging of new preachers (see introductory post) comes from Dr Geoffrey Grogan, my former Principal at the BTI in Glasgow. (see Dr Grogan’s book choice made earlier this year).    I asked Dr Grogan for the most important pieces of advice he would give those starting out on the preaching road and this was his reply:

“My three tips assume that the person concerned is already aware of a call to preach. Here they are:

 1. Many Christians today are woefully ignorant of the actual contents of the Bible, but if you are to preach, you must be constantly remedying this.  God may or may not guide you to a Bible college course eventually, but meantime you should concentrate on actually knowing the contents of the Bible. The better you know your Bible, the more helpful a formal course will prove to be.  

 
You should read, read, read and go on reading, and you need to start doing so straight away.  A daily portion for devotional meditation is important and indispensable, but a preacher or prospective preacher needs to go way beyond this. Turn off the television and spend several hours each evening with your Bible open, and make a start TODAY. Use a good sturdy Bible, probably with a hard cover, with good marginal references, and any method - marking, taking notes, circling in red ink any marginal reference that seems particularly significant - any method at all that will impress the inspired text on your memory, your imagination and your heart. Get inside the Bible and ask God to enable you to get it inside you.

I have a friend who is 95 and whose mind is absolutely stored with poetry. He tells me that he has never deliberately learned a poem in his life, but that he loves poetry so much and has read the same poems so many times that the text of them has become rooted in his mind.  Follow his example as far as the Bible is concerned.

Do not be afraid to go off at a tangent.  If you become aware of a link with another passage, turn to that passage for a while and study it, and then come back to your original passage. In this way, you will develop a sense of the unity of Scripture and become more and more aware of Biblical theology, which is very important for a preacher.

You need several hours every evening for at least two years to build a basis for further study. You will want to be building a library of good books, and some of them will be useful at an early stage, but your main concentration should be on direct exposure to the Biblical text. If after serious prayerful study of it the meaning of a passage eludes you, by all means consult a trusted and experienced friend - a minister, seasoned preacher or elder.  

2. Prayerfully consider the relevance of what you are reading to your own life. Each evening ask God to impress some truth on you that will encourage or challenge you and become a focus for your prayer at the end of the day.

3. If a passage particularly grips you, take some time to analyse it in terms of its message, placing the material under several headings and perhaps some sub-headings. I recall once trying to analyse the Epistle to the Galatians and ending up with about twenty headings. I came back to it later and found that in fact I could reduce all these headings to three, each one covering two chapters of the letter. I think though that my first attempt may have been a necessary stage on the way to the more satisfactory second.  Try to bring out the logical development of the message of the Bible book by means of this analysis.”