PREACHERS TRAINING COURSE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 14684, 18 November 1909, Page 5

PREACHERS TRAINING COURSE

Tho thirteenth lecture of the preachers' training course being conducted by ltev. G. Knowtes Smith was delivered on Tuesday evening, when there was a good attendance. Tho subject of the lecture was '• Tho Wooing Note." - Tho preacher, said tho lecturer, must realise that the ultimate aim of all truo preaching is the ealvation of men—salvation from moral stuntedness and spiritual immaturity, and from arrested growth in the direction of the Divine. The strenuous purpose of all vital preaching, is to lift men out of tho bondage of sin and dwarfhooa', and to set them in the fine spacious air and light of the freebom children of God. To do this effectively the proachor must first seek to overcome his own apathy. He must realise the horrors of the bondage from which ho seeks to deliver men. If sin has become a common place, preaching has become a plaything. The preacher must also be possessed of a spirit of sensitive sympathy. If he did not realise the horror of sinful bondage, the wooing or persuasive note in his preaching would be absent. The lecturer suggested that preaching was too unbrokeniv severe. The revised version of the Bible substituted for the severe word " compel " th-3 welcome word "constrain," and constrain was equivalent to " wco." So Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah sometimes laid aside their thunder. 1 In like manner where the thunder had faifed tho lover might succeed. The preacher must appreciate his owii message, and must rigorously ask himself whether ho hated all sin. He must put th& very best of all he could give to the work of preparation. Nothing short of that would bo satisfactory in the sight of Gcd and tho characteristics that should mark a sermon wero that it should bo a direct appeal, wluch, while not minimising the evil of sin, reeks-to save tho sinner with an infinite comoassion of love - steeped in the prayer of faith so that the preacher manifested on expectancy that results would follow ds delivery. But while doing all lie could in preparation, the. nreacher must remember that nothing could take the place of the baptism of fire.