It’s 7:55 AM when I flip on the light in my office. I know it’s going to be a busy day with meetings, a missions project to complete, a sermon to prepare, and a youth activity to plan. But instead of plunging into these tasks, I begin what has recently become an early-morning addiction—reading a sermon by G. Campbell Morgan. It’s a habit I’ve had for several weeks now. Armed with a highlighter and pen, I will read out loud, imagining myself among those attentive listeners in the Westminster Chapel in London over a hundred years ago. While I don’t consider myself an authority on Morgan or his ministry, I have already been deeply impacted by his skillful handling of the Word of God.
G. Campbell Morgan (1863-1945)
Perhaps this quotation from a contemporary of Morgan will help us see how compelling his preaching was:
“Still vivid in my mind are those winter afternoons . . . when I heard Dr. Morgan unfold the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel: we felt a tenseness, a magnetic pull, a lift, an atmosphere saturated with terrific intensity; our souls were confronted with eternal and transforming truths that sent us out of that sanctuary cleansed, ennobled and determined to go back to the Book.”
As I read with a view to improve my own preaching and teaching, I noted several features that kept reappearing throughout Morgan’s sermons. I’ve stated these features as principles that can be used to improve your preaching or teaching ministry.
1. Meditate long and hard on the text.
As you read Morgan’s sermons, you will know that he was saturated with the text. He had examined it from every angle, and tried as best as he could to put himself into the mind and experiences of the author and characters in the text.
2. Know the Bible well.
Morgan’s sermons demonstrate not only a thorough familiarity with his sermon text, but with the whole of Scripture. This kind of preaching, I’m convinced, can come only as the preacher reads his whole Bible over and over again—and reads it thoughtfully. When young preachers would ask Morgan the secret of his success, in his own words, “I always say to them the same thing—work, hard work, work.” This impression and the one preceding are, I think, the most important and the most powerful aspects of Morgan’s preaching. This kind of preaching is born out of a deep conviction that the Word of God is totally necessary and totally sufficient for growth in godliness.
3. Lay out a clear division of the text so your audience can easily follow.
In each of the sermons I read, Morgan would always sketch out his main points (there were usually two or three), and then follow through. This gave the audience a helpful “roadmap” to anticipate the direction of the sermon. As a rhetorical technique, Morgan would often arrange his points so that they were progressively shorter, giving his audience a sense of gathering momentum.
4. Walk through the process of discovery with your audience by raising tensions and building curiosity.
Morgan would often withhold his conclusions in order to give the audience a sense of discovery of the text. He would point out apparent contradictions—either within the text itself, or between our experience and the claims of the text. By doing this, Morgan piqued interest of his audience and maximized the impact of the passage when the tensions were resolved and the answers were settled.
5. Use imagination where appropriate, but avoid speculation.
We often see the balance between imagination and speculation in Morgan’s sermons, and he makes it clear where the difference lies. For example, in his discussion of Luke 2:52 (“And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man”), Morgan imagines Jesus as “such a carpenter that children went to see Him, and took their broken toys to Him, and He mended them.” But when it came to answering the important questions raised by the text, Morgan would say, “It is our business to answer it, not speculatively, but in the light of the Scriptures we read.”
6. Make the application personal, probing and passionate.
I could almost feel how electric the atmosphere would have been in the auditorium when Morgan neared the end of his sermon, “The Terms of Discipleship.” He addressed the people earnestly:
“Christ confronts us all and says, ‘If any man would come after Me let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.’ Who follows? You can applaud without following. You can admire without helping. You can be near enough to touch his sacred garment in a crowd, and never lay a brick in God’s city, or strike a blow for God’s victory. I dare believe there are young hearts everywhere that are sighing to help Him. Oh, young man, young woman, was there ever such an enterprise? Was there every anything dreamed of by angels or men so calculated to stir the pulse and drive the heart as the King’s building of the city, the King’s battle for the victory? Will you come after Him?”
7. Preach for a verdict.
Morgan had an elevated view of man’s volitional capacity: “The supreme and overwhelming dignity of human personality is that of will.” Accordingly, he preached to the will. He pleaded for a verdict in the hearts of his listeners. He did not merely present them with options: he showed them the fork in the road. Near the end of his sermon “The Authority of Jesus,” Morgan proclaimed, “There is no middle course for anyone who has stood in the presence of the King.”
Whether you want to improve in your preaching or teaching, or whether you simply want to be deeply stirred by God’s Word, Morgan’s sermons will both inspire and instruct you. Although they are from a past century, they still deserve our attention because they unfold and apply to our hearts the living Word of God.
You may access many of G. Campbell Morgan’s sermons at SermonIndex.com and BibleHub.com.
