Serious Preaching by Jim Elliff

I have been considering for some time the desperate condition of preaching in the West. I have even toyed with the idea of writing a booklet entitled Serious Preaching. Such preaching is out of vogue, but I still believe in it. Please know that I’m not talking about serious sweating. It used to be said that if a man didn't fill his hanky with sweat, make himself hoarse with screaming and wind up walking on about two inches of his pants cuff, he hadn’t really preached at all! Billy Sunday, the baseball-player-turned-evangelist of the early 1900’s, was like that. But, with all the humor and quaintness of his message and style, after reading his sermons (and even hearing one on tape) I am left empty. He could rivet a sinner with words like a machine gunner, he could wave his chair and compel them to listen, he could lure them down the “sawdust trail” (his words, by the way), but all in all, nothing very important was said. It is easy to wave a Bible and yet never preach it. There are many who have fought hard for the inerrancy of Scripture who don’t sufficiently break open the Bible they fought for. No, What we need is doctrinal preaching...real solid truth.

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