HERALDS OF GOD
constrained to say "There is a man who has been with Jesus!"
This, of course, is not to say that you are to keep talking about your own soul, or dragging your secret experiences into the light. Emphatically not: such self-exposure in the pulpit is apt to make all decent men and women squirm, and the note of autobiography soon becomes mawkish and insufferable, "Stand out of the way," men feel like saying to such a preacher, "and let us through to Jesus!" But if self-obtrusion is to be discountenanced, the fact remains that the only sermon the world wants to hear is one that throbs with the vitality of first-hand knowledge and experience. This alone carries authority and conviction. This leaves men saying, "God spoke to us to-day."
Therefore it is essential that, right on to the very end of his ministry, the preacher's own vision of God in Christ should be a growing and expanding thing. No doubt the last sermon that you ever preach on earth will contain the same Gospel with which you first launched out on the day of your ordination. Yet surely there will be a difference. For all along the road, God will have been speaking to you, enlarging your experience with new disclosures of His grace. And if, as we have seen, authority is born of personal apprehension of the truth, it is well to remember that such apprehension is never final: it is always, as Hosea expressed it, a "following on to know the Lord." God asks no man to face to-day in the strength of yesterday's grace, or to hoard for his sustenance to-
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