Presentation on Stott's "Between Two Worlds"

My task today is to present to you John Stott’s thoughts on preaching from his book “Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century.” It may seem strange to talk today about preaching in the world as it was at the end of last century, but as we will see, though printed in 1982, Stott’s book and his thoughts on preaching are quite applicable to our modern day.

The book is presented in eight chapters, and though there are no breakdowns beyond that, the book really has two distinct parts.

Stott begins by talking about what preaching is. That is the first four chapters where he offers an overview of the history of Christian preaching, contemporary objections to the usefulness and necessity of preaching, the theological foundations for preaching, and, as he calls it, how preaching is building a bridge between the text and your hearers.

The second part is the final four chapters where Stott moves from the “what” of preaching, to the “how” of preaching. In these chapters, Stott discusses the study habits of the preacher, how to prepare a sermon, how to deliver a sermon, and finally, how courage and humility are needed in order to stand against the spirit of the age and preach as we are called by God.

From the very first paragraph, Stott offers his reasons for addressing the issue of preaching today. Since Christianity is a religion based on communication - on God’s communication to people through the Word of God itself - we are to continue to communicate the truth of God.

It is through the Word written and preached that God still speaks, it is through the Word that His Spirit bears witness to Christ.

It is how God reveals Himself, and His works, and His salvation even today. For Stott, without the ministry of the Word, Christianity will have lost part of its very essence. Preaching is a major element to what makes Christianity distinct.

That is why preachers have an obligation to preach. We must speak what God has spoken. We are heralds of the Gospel. This has been true since the very founding of our religion.

Hence, Stott begins his history of preaching with Christ Himself. He was the first Christian preacher. He made the public proclamation of the truth of God essential for the church. And He set the example for His disciples. They, too, gave priority to preaching. We can read all about in the book of Acts.

And the emphasis on preaching did not die with the first disciples. The church fathers emphasized preaching in their ministries. We have the writings to prove it. From the Didache, to Justin Martyr, to Tertullian and Irenaeus, the early history of Christianity was, as the great historian Eusebius put it, able to be summarized as two centuries of preaching.

Stott then fast-forwards to the medieval church, where men like Francis of Assisi and the famous friar Dominic laid great emphasis on preaching. Stott describes it as a “surprising emphasis” of the Mendicant Orders.

Stott then moves to the Reformation, beginning with its forerunner, John Wycliffe. The foundation he laid was built upon later by Luther and then by Calvin and Latimer, all who made the preached Word central to the worship service.

And as he lays out this history of preaching, Stott makes sure to include men from various denominational traditions to show, as he puts it, how “the impressive unanimity of their conviction about the primacy and power of preaching,” spanned across the whole spectrum of ecclesiastical traditions.

From Puritans like Cotton Mather, to men such as John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Charles Simeon. To Baptists like Charles Spurgeon to Presbyterians like Charles Hodge, and into the 20th century with Anglicans like Donald Coggan, Romans Catholic like Karl Rahner, and Calvinists such as Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in all these traditions, preaching was viewed as essential for the church.

This is Stott’s historical basis for his views on preaching.

He next moves on to contemporary objections to preaching. And this is where I found that his observations from 1982 were still so relevant today. He speaks of the disenchantment with preaching among professing Christians.

This is how he starts the chapter:

“The prophets of doom in today’s church are confidently predicting that the day of preaching is over. It is a dying art they say, an outmoded form of communication...not only have modern media superseded it, but it is incompatible with the modern mood...the sermon no longer enjoys the honor which used to be accorded to it.”

That could have been written this year.

He then goes on to speak of what he calls “sermon-tasting” which he defines as that “reprehensible kind of ecclesiastical pub-crawling, which involves erratic churchgoing…with a view to sampling and subsequently comparing…preachers.”

That could have been written this year.

Stott also laments the overuse of technology and the human tendency to consider it the best means of communication.

That could have been written this year.

Of course, when he wrote this, television was the superlative example of this. But television, he believed, made people lazy, isolated them, desensitized them, dumbed them down, and disordered them morally.

He also thought TV had become an addiction for many people.

He then makes a plea for parents to watch very closely what their children are taking in through such technology.

I wonder how Stott would have felt today with the saturation of social media in our day.

I wonder what he would say to parents since the ubiquity of smartphones and the popularity of Tiktok.

I also wonder how he felt after the turn of the century when isolation and individualism both within and outside of the church proliferated themselves at an unbelievable rate.

Well, it turns out these things didn’t start this century, or even in the twentieth century.

Stott speaks of the “modern mood” in the quote I just gave. Well, he goes on to describe this as a “self-conscious revolt against authority.” He says that even when he wrote this, this mood was nothing new.

He identifies it as an Enlightenment virtue that only got worse century after century.

Along with this anti-authority mood, individualism was cemented as a virtue at the same time. Stott laments the fact that so many people feel that an idea’s truth is dependent upon one’s personal and subjective authentication of it.

Both this resistance to authority and dearly-held individualism push back against preaching because it pushes back against the very Word of God.

So how do we, as preachers, combat this?

First, we need the conviction that the human mind, according to Stott, “is only free under the authority of the truth, and the will under the authority of righteousness.” Both truth and righteousness are epitomized in Jesus Christ.

Do we believe it?

Then Stott says we need to remember that we believe what we do, not because it “seems” true to us, but because God has revealed it to us. We also need to remember where the locus of authority is. We preach to demonstrate that the authority behind our preaching is not ourselves, not in our office, and not in the church, but only in the Word of God.

We also must recognize that the Gospel - regardless of the spirit of the age - and regardless of the age - is most relevant to everyone.

These beliefs will enable us to proclaim the Gospel with confidence, even in the face of opposition.

But Stott doesn’t stop there. He encourages what he calls “a dialogical approach” to preaching. We are not monologuists. We want to provoke questions in the minds of our hearers, and then go on to answer those questions.

What a great description of of what preaching is!

He also exhorts preachers to instill confidence in the Gospel in our congregations. We need to recover conviction, he says, in our churches. People need to know that they can be certain about the truth of the Bible - so our preaching has to reflect that conviction in us.

Finally, he reminds us of the importance of prayer. And we will pray, he says, if we are reliant on the Holy Spirit to affect, through our preaching, a change in those struggling to break free from the spirit of the age.

After offering a historical basis and encouraging us to push back against the objections to preaching, Stott addresses the theological basis for preaching. He speaks of effective preaching and says:

“The essential secret is not mastering certain techniques but being mastered by certain convictions. (Repeat) In other words, [Stott says] theology is more important than methodology.”

I could not agree more.

So, since this is about theology, Stott offers five theological arguments in support of his view.

First, he addresses theology proper. It is our doctrine of God, he says, that will determine what kind of sermons we preach. We need to believe, then, that God has both spoken through His Word and acted in history. In fact, Stott calls God’s acts in history His way of “speaking through historical deeds” - and they are every bit as essential as the Words He has spoken.

Second, Stott discusses our Bibliology. We need to believe that the Bible is God’s Word written. And he masterfully ties this in with his doctrine of God. He says it is one thing to believe that God has acted in history to reveal Himself - supremely in the Person of Christ - but that it is another to believe that God has spoken through the prophets and apostles that wrote the Bible.

He stresses the need to believe, in his own words: “that the divine speech, recorded and explaining the divine activity, has been committed to writing.” God has put His own words into the minds, mouths, and pens of mere humans, so that what they communicated was at one and the same time their communication and God’s communication.

The Bible is a divinely human book, you could say.

But Stott doesn’t stop there. He insists that though these men who wrote the Bible lived thousands of years ago - and that God worked through them thousands of years ago - that the Bible is nonetheless applicable - and accessible - to us today.

Through the Bible, the Holy Spirit bears witness to God - both His Words and His deeds - and gives us understanding of it. So God still speaks through what has been written.

The Bible is not just a collection of books and documents that preserve the words of God or the record of His acts. It is not, as Stott says, a museum that exhibits relics. It is, rather, a living word from a living God to living people. It is a message for us and those of all time.

Now, while Stott’s Biblical interpretation displays an older understanding of Biblical Greek and how it functions, much of his appeals to Scripture to back his assertions up are nonetheless valid. The Bible reveals itself, he says, as a book relevant to a contemporary audience, no matter when they are.

And this, Stott says, makes the Word of God powerful. And this is where he offers encouragements to the modern preacher. We must believe that God’s Word is

relevant,

accessible,

and applicable,

Because if we don’t believe these things, we would have to preach in our own power. We would have to act rather than God.

But if we are assured of God’s power, and that it works through His Word written and preached, then we will allow God to speak and to act through our preaching. And through His power, God will act in salvation. His word preached saves.

Third, Stott addresses ecclesiology. The church is dependent upon the Word of God and the power worked through it. We are sustained and made holy and made new, day by day, through the Word. The church grows because of the Word of God.

Without saying it directly, Stott here clearly instructs preachers to remember that we preach to the church first. Our preaching is for the flock of God. They must be fed by our preaching. Their welfare depends upon their hearing God speak.

This is instruction in experiential preaching at its best.

And Stott goes on to blame the decline of Christian living on the decline of Christian preaching. In his words, “seldom if ever can the pew rise higher than the pulpit.”

This is why our theology of the church must affect our theology of ministry.

Stott addresses this next - our theology of what we are as preachers.

We are not Old Testament priests or Roman Catholic priests. Our ministry is not God-ward, that is, we don’t represent the people to God. Rather, our ministry is to be directed towards the Church. We bring God’s Word to them.

This is the special and particular call of preachers. We are ministers of the Word. Through us, God ministers to His people by His Word. Nothing is more important than that pastors faithfully preach the Word of God - the pure Word of God - to God’s people.

And nothing is more harmful to the church of God than unfaithful preachers.

Fifth, Stott moves naturally from our theology of preachers, to our theology of preaching. He says, “it is my contention that all true Christian preaching is expository preaching.” Our calling is to do nothing more and nothing less than bring out of the text what God has put there.

There are practical benefits to understanding preaching this way. First, it restricts preachers to the Biblical text. Second, it demands integrity in the pulpit - we must only communicate what the Biblical authors intended to communicate.

Third, this theology of preaching instills confidence in us to preach. We can be bold and preach with authority, because we are not preaching our words, but God’s words.

If we have sound theology concerning our doctrines of God, the Bible, the church, the preacher, and the nature of preaching, we will not be deterred by the modern opposition to preaching.

We will fulfill our calling with confidence - confidence in the Word, confidence in God, and confidence that He still speaks.

Stott then in the fourth chapter makes his assertion that preaching is, at its heart, what he calls “bridge-building.” That is, we are to build a bridge between the text and our hearers. We are to preach the message given, but preach it now, to a modern audience.

We must not merely be expositors of God’s Word, Stott says we must also be communicators of the Word. We must be the bridge between the “what” of the text, and the “so what” of the text as I like to say.

We need to communicate the Word of God so that God’s truth flows out of the Scriptures and into the lives of those to whom we preach.

But be warned: today - as in 1982 when Stott wrote this - and maybe even more today! - there are inherent dangers in approaching preaching this way.

What are these dangers?

First, we can fail to appreciate and learn from the bridge-builders of the past.

Second, we can start to believe that it is up to us to give the Bible relevance to the modern person and allow worldly wisdom - that spirit of the age Stott spoke about earlier - to guide us in our preaching.

These mistakes can lead us into one of two extremes - we can so focus on historic Christian orthodoxy and be so afraid of sounding like the world that we stand on the Bible side of the gulf and don’t make the bridge to the modern person. We can preach without ever making contemporary application.

Or, we can stand on the other side of the gulf and let a desire for relevance keep us from using the bridge to go to the Bible. We can get caught up in contemporary concerns to the point that we don’t point our hearers back to the truth of the Bible.

To be faithful to the Bible and to our calling, we have to build the bridge between the two. We have to show why what God has said and what He has done is so very relevant for today.

After all, this is, Stott says, what God Himself did. He built a bridge to reveal Himself in the Person of Christ. He took on our humanity, but never abdicated His deity. He was, so to speak, Himself the bridge between the two. He spoke divine content, but in the context of those to whom He came.

So, too, we must preach the divine word in a way that contemporary people can understand.

The question is, how do we do this? How do we build the bridge?

First, Stott warns us that in order to do this, we must never overestimate the intellect of our hearers, but never underestimate it either.

Then, he insists that we boldly handle the questions that face our contemporary hearers. And this is because the big questions never change. People still need answers to their questions about their purpose and significance. They need to know where they come from and where they are going.

They want to know what life is all about.

And we answer them best, according to Stott, by preaching Christ.

In his own words:

“The One we preach is not Christ-in-a-vacuum, nor a mystical Christ unrelated to the real world, nor even only the Jesus of ancient history, but rather the contemporary Christ who once lived and died, and now lives to meet human need in all its variety today.”

By this Stott does not mean what modern prosperity preachers mean when they speak of Christ meeting needs. Rather, Christ addresses everyone’s ultimate need. People of His day, and people of our day.

But we must also apply Christ and His work to our hearers in a way that’s relevant. We need to persuade them to believe Christ is relevant to every situation. Because there are ethical implications to the Gospel.

Stott discusses four spheres of life that these ethical implications touch, which includes pretty much everything.

First, there are personal implications. Those things that apply to each of us.

Second, since we preach first to the church, there are implications for all of us as part of the church. Corporate implications within the church.

Third, there are domestic implications. The epistles offer a lot of application of the Gospel to our home lives.

Finally, there is the widest sphere, which is how the Gospel has implications for us and the church as part of our communities as well as the wider world. This does not mean that we preach politics or modern ideas of social justice.

As Stott says, the pulpit has influence over these things without ever speaking a word about these things. Rather, we are to show how the Gospel has implications for our function in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, in society at large, and in the world.

Ultimately, we must show our hearers how to do all they do - at church, at home, or wherever they are and in whatever context - we must show them how to do all they do as Christians.

We must teach them the truths of the Bible so that our hearers develop a Christian mind and grow into Christian maturity. We need to communicate so that they can develop their intellectual and moral powers - to grow them in discernment and wisdom.

And, Stott says, if we preach the Word of God with integrity, we will lead those who hear into maturity.

And with that, Stott concludes the first part of the book. He addresses the “what” of preaching by laying both a historical and a theological foundation for his view of preaching, and now turns to the “how” of preaching.

And he begins with a discussion of the preacher’s study. And he doesn’t mean the studying we do of the passage we are going to preach this coming Sunday. He is talking about our habit of ongoing study as pastors and preachers.

But he isn’t just referring to how we study the Bible. Remember, we are supposed to be bridge-builders. We can’t stand on one side of the chasm.

As Stott puts it:

“To withdraw from the world into the Bible (which is escapism), or from the Bible into the world (which is conformity), will be fatal to our preaching ministry… It is our responsibility to explore the territories on both sides of the ravine until we become thoroughly familiar with them.”

As it has been said, we must be able to accurately exegete not just the Bible, but those to whom we preach it.

Stott then looks at each of these in turn. He begins with our study of the Bible. As the primary responsibility of the pastor is as a minister of the Word of God, we have a responsibility to study the Word of God regularly.

And Stott lists three characteristics that should define our Bible study habits.

First, our study must be comprehensive. We cannot casually dip into the Bible sporadically. Neither can we read just a few books - our favorite books - or just the New Testament - over and over again. We need to study the whole counsel of God.

Remember, we want to help our hearers develop a Christian mind. We can’t do that without developing one ourselves. And the only way to do that is to saturate ourselves with the Scriptures.

But that isn’t enough. We can’t come to the Bible with our minds already made up on what any given passage means. We can’t let our theology dictate how we read the Bible, but the Bible has to dictate our theology. That’s why, second, Stott says our Bible study must be done with an open mind.

We have to come to the Bible with a great desire that God will speak to us through His Word, and with a great desire to heed what He says. According to Stott, this means that we have to be willing to open our minds enough to risk hearing what we might not want to hear.

We have to risk hearing from God in ways that might alter our theology, or alter our lifestyles.

There is a very real danger for pastors and preachers. We read the Bible so much that we can stop really hearing God. We already know what this or that chapter says and what it means - or so we think - and we don’t read to hear God speak anymore.

I have fallen into this trap myself and have to fight the temptation to do it again.

Let the Bible speak to us no matter how many times we have read it.

And that leads into Stott’s third characteristic of our Bible study. We have to come to our Bible expectantly. We cannot become so spiritually stale, as Stott calls it, that we don’t expect God to speak to us through His Word.

Let us, rather, expect to hear Him - to be taught - to be sanctified - when we study His Word. Otherwise, why are we studying?

Comprehensive, open-minded, expectant - as preachers, these should characterize our study of God’s Word.

Stott then encourages the preacher to read widely outside of the Bible. He advocates for reading good theological books - even those we might not agree with. We need to know what the theological debates are, and have been.

He advocates for reading history and biography. Let us not forget the bridge-builders that came before us. Let us stand on their shoulders as we study.

And he then turns to our study of the modern world - where we want to build our bridge to. Without an understanding of the contemporary world, we will be isolated on the Bible side of the chasm we want to span.

Stott asserts that “the best preachers are always diligent pastors, who know the people of their district and congregation, and understand the human scene in all its pain and pleasure, glory and tragedy.”

We need to know people, especially those who sit under our preaching.

So we need to study widely - we need to know what is going on in the world, in our states, in our towns, and in our neighborhoods.

And we need to study our people - the flock God has entrusted to us - because we know how to bring the Word of God to bear on them and their lives in the modern world.

This is how Stott says, we will keep “our preaching… fresh, faithful and relevant, yet also simple enough for people to understand.”

Stott then focuses on sermon preparation in the next chapter. He is an advocate of thorough preparation and opposed to extemporaneous preaching, or at least to those types of preachers who resort to it because they are “too lazy, too proud or too pious to prepare their sermons.”

Stott believes that the great preachers of history - those who have influenced the church, and those in their own generations - have been advocates of thorough sermon preparation.

So, Stott offers some advice for thorough preparation.

First, he discusses the choice of the text to be preached. Though, as we have seen, Stott considered all true preaching to be expository preaching, he leaves room for how that is done. He does not insist on consecutive preaching through books of the Bible.

So once a text is chosen, however that is done, the preacher needs to let God speak to him through the text by meditating on it. He says to “read the text, re-read it, re-read it, and read it again.” As the preacher meditates on the text, he should ask not only “what does it mean” but “what does it say?”

And, as meditation happens, we should be writing down what comes to mind. And after we have meditated deeply and often, we should review our notes to isolate the main theme, or the dominant thought of the text. This is because, Stott says, we should aim to convey one major message with each sermon.

Once we have discovered the dominant thought, and therefore the major message of our sermon, we must then organize every other thought to serve that main thought. This will determine our structure and the words we use, and even the illustrations we choose.

Stott spends considerable some time talking about words in this section. He says “it is impossible to convey a precise message without choosing precise words.” We need to use words that are simple and clear.

To this end, Stott advocates for writing out our sermons. Even if we go into the pulpit with an outline, just a few notes, or nothing - we should work out the words we want to use to be as concise as possible.

We also want our words to be vivid - they need to bring images to the minds of our hearers.

Finally, we want our words to be honest. By this Stott means that we should not over-exaggerate or use so many superlatives that they have no effect. He calls preachers to be clear, direct, concrete, and as simple as possible when choosing the words we will speak.

Then, Stott says the introduction and conclusion should be written - only after the rest of the work has been done. He calls introductions essential to the message. And in our introductions, he suggests that we “start where people are, rather than where we hope to take them.”

As for conclusions, Stott advocates for a summary of the application of the text. He says application should be given throughout the sermon, and then as we conclude, we remind our hearers of the application they have already heard.

Through the whole sermon, Stott wants preachers to remember that they aren’t just telling, they are persuading. This will help us in every aspect of the sermon.

Finally, Stott calls for prayer over our messages. He says we should be praying before we begin our preparation, during our preparation, and after our preparation, including prayer the morning we will deliver the sermon.

Prayer is an essential element of sermon preparation, and we have to be careful not to exclude it at any point in the process.

In the seventh chapter, Stott addresses delivery. He aptly titled this chapter “Sincerity and Earnestness.”

However, the delivery of a sermon is not just about what happens during the preaching. A preacher needs to mean what he says in the pulpit, but that means he has to live it out at all times.

But that doesn’t mean the preacher speaks as if he has been fully sanctified and doesn’t ever stumble. Quite the contrary, the sincerity Stott calls us to, means we are honest about our failures. While we don’t turn the pulpit into a confessional, as Stott says, “to masquerade as perfect would be both dishonest… and discouraging to the congregation.”

Nevertheless, the preacher must strive for holiness in his own life if he is to preach effectively to others. There is not just a theology behind effective preaching, but there is a lifestyle behind effective preaching.

Stott says: “Hypocrisy always repels, but integrity or authenticity always attracts.”

Stott then talks about earnestness, which “goes one step beyond sincerity.” He defines sincerity as meaning and doing what we preach. He defines earnestness as feeling what we preach. He says that earnestness - above everything else - is what will arouse and hold people’s attention when we preach.

Because it is, as he says, “a quality of Christians who care.” This means caring about God and His glory and His Christ, but it also means caring about people. This brings us back to our need to know them and understand them. If we care, we will take the time to learn about them and know them.

Our knowledge of them will be both in our mind and our heart. And if it is, then we can preach to both their mind and heart. And this is important, because Stott says our sermons are to be both rational and emotional, that is, we will address both the minds and hearts of our hearers.

Addressing just the mind cannot persuade. Addressing just the heart does not persuade, but manipulates. We need both light and heat in our sermons.

Our preaching, Stott says, should be “theology on fire.”

And this light and heat come from the fire within the preacher, and this can only come from the Holy Spirit.

Stott then addresses using humor in the pulpit. He warns that the preacher should be very careful about the topics we choose for laughter. We do not mock the holy. But laughing at the human condition - and ourselves - helps keep things in proportion.

And laughter is good for breaking down both tension and the defenses of our hearers. It makes us relatable.

Stott ends this chapter talking about the length of a sermon. He offers some guidelines on time, which I think is painting with far too broad a brush.

But he does include this gem that is very practical for all of us. He says that “every sermon should seem like twenty minutes” no matter how long it is.

And if we preach with that fire from the Spirit, that is exactly what will happen.

The book closes talking more about the character of the preacher, this time the courage and humility required for preaching.

Stott begins with courage. He saw a need in 1982 for more courage in the pulpit. I don’t think we need that any less today.

Stott speaks of some courageous preachers of the past, and he defines courage as preaching what the Bible teaches. We are like the prophets of the Old Testament, in that we are bearers of God’s Word, and like them, we have no right to deviate the slightest bit from what God says.

And this requires courage, because, in Stott’s words:

“the authentic gospel of the New Testament remains extremely offensive to human pride, and nobody who preaches it faithfully can expect to escape at least some degree of opposition.”

This means we cannot but disturb people through our preaching. We will arouse the ire of both the proud and the complacent.

This is where Stott most strongly advocates for consecutive, systematic preaching through books of the Bible. Working through a book verse by verse means the preacher cannot escape the responsibility to handle tough issues.

At the same time, addressing these issues in this manner broadens the horizons of our hearers, opens to them the Bible’s major themes, and teaches them to interpret Scripture according to Scripture.

Stott calls for a return to consecutive exposition. He says it is urgent for the church.

And it will require courage by the preacher.

Finally, Stott speaks of humility. Being courageous can lead to arrogance. Stott rightly says that “pride is without a doubt the chief occupational hazard of the preacher.”

At the same time, humility is required for courage. Because we need that humility as preachers, to ourselves submit to the Word of God.

In order to be sincere and live out what we preach, humility of motive is required. “The main objective of preaching,” says Stott, “is to expound Scripture so faithfully and relevantly that Jesus Christ is perceived in all his adequacy to meet human need.”

We need humility to recognize our need.

Humility is also required by the preacher for full reliance on the Holy Spirit and His power. Only Christ by His Spirit can accomplish salvation through the preached Word. Only He can move the will. Only He can change hearts.

This is why we need humility - we need to recognize our great need for the power of God to work through us for us to be at all effective as preachers. This means we need to recognize and revel in our own weakness. Every preacher is fallen, fallible, and so weak in ourselves.

And the words we preach in our human weakness, the Holy Spirit uses to affect the minds, hearts, and lives of our hearers.

Indeed, as preachers, when we are weak, then we are strong.

In his epilogue, Stott reminds us that all we do, we do before God - in His very prsence. He says, “True, when we preach, we speak in the sight and the hearing of human beings, and they challenge us to be faithful. But how much more challenging is the awareness that we preach in the sight and the hearing of God.”

May that reality be ever in our minds.

In closing, I remind us of the major themes of the book:

Conviction

Boldness and courage against the spirit of the age and opposition to preaching

Faith in the power and relevance of the Word written and preached

Character and hard work

These define the Art of Preaching not just in the twentieth century, but in our time, every time before, and it will every day after today, until the Lord comes.

May we heed Stott’s warnings, find encouragement in his exhortations, and may we always remember that our calling is to preach plainly and honestly what God has said, that He may speak to the minds and hearts of our hearers.