Issue 05 Preaching to the unconvertedBlog | The plus of the Spirit
The plus of the Spirit
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 09.12.15
Twenty years ago I completed a course in homiletics as part of ministerial training. That course has had a huge impact on my preaching over the years.
Clearly, I’ve learnt many things about preaching in the past 20 years. Nonetheless, three lessons I learnt back then have never been surpassed:
c If you can’t express in a single sentence what your sermon is about, neither can your congregation.
c Inspiration and perspiration are equally important elements of sermon preparation.
c You can never entirely account for the ‘plus of the Spirit’ but prayerful preachers should expect it. The ‘plus of the Spirit’ is a way of describing that phenomenon whereby a sermon has an impact beyond that which the preacher could anticipate. Sometimes the ‘plus of the Spirit’ may be as evident to the preacher as to the congregation. In such instances preachers may feel especially enabled by the Spirit, and words on a page become words of life.
Far more often in my experience, the ‘plus of the Spirit’ is not immediately evident to the preacher. When a person thanks you for saying something in a sermon which you cannot remember saying, or was at best a throwaway comment, but which for that listener was the most profound element of your sermon, you have experienced the ‘plus of the Spirit.’
On numerous occasions I have preached what I thought was a poor sermon only to discover later how deeply it connected with the congregation. I can only conclude that somewhere between my speaking and the congregation’s hearing, the ‘plus of the Spirit’ transformed feeble and mediocre words into words of life.
As I reflect on the importance of the ‘plus of the Spirit’ two things strike me. The first is how important it is that preachers’ words are in fact infused by the Spirit’s power. Our words, despite inspiration and perspiration,
