“Critiquing” the sermon

I am reminded by this story of the burden upon parents when speaking of the sermons they have heard in the presence of their children (referring both to the sermon and the speaking):

A pious lady once left a church…in company with her husband, who was not [a believer]. She was a woman of unusual vivacity, with a keen perception of the ludicrous, and often playfully sarcastic. As they walked along toward home she began to make some amusing and spicy comments on the sermon, which a stranger, a man of very ordinary talents and awkward manner, had preached that morning in the absence of their pastor. After running on in…sportive criticism for some time, surprised at the profound silence of her husband, she turned and looked up in his face. He was in tears. That sermon had sent an arrow of conviction to his heart! What must have been the anguish of conscience-stricken wife, thus arrested in the act of ridiculing a discourse which had been the means of awakening the anxiety of her unconverted husband.  (Quoted from “The Central Presbyterian” in William James Hoge’s Blind Bartimaeus and His Great Physician [London: T. Woolmer, 1881] pp. 79-80)

I have read or heard several preachers employ such illustrations, and they never fail to bite into my soul, both as a preacher who longs to do good, and as one who has himself been guilty of such an attitude, sometimes employing the smoke-cloud of pretended sanctity to silence the voice of conscience.

The fact is, the most stylistically-rotten sermon in human terms, if it contains the truth of God’s gospel, can be employed by the Holy Spirit to awaken, convict, and convert a sinner.  I mourn over how many of the Spirit’s arrows of truth have been drawn out of the souls of men, women, and children, by sarcastic, disaffected, angry hearers, many of whom, in all sincerity, earnestly desire the salvation of those from whose hearts they are brushing off the gospel seed.

HT: Cal.vini.st.