'Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your God.'--
Joel.
In our soft and self-indulgent day the very word 'to fast' has become an out-of-date and an obsolete word. We never have occasion to employ that word in the living language of the present day. The men of the next generation will need to have it explained to them what the Fast-days of their fathers were: when they were instituted, how they were observed, and why they were abrogated and given up. If your son should ever ask you just what the Fast-days of your youth were like, you will do him a great service, and he may live to recover them, if you will answer him in this way. Show him how to take his Cruden and how to make a picture to his opening mind of the Fast-days of Scripture. And tell him plainly for what things in fathers and in sons those fasts were ordained of God.
And then for the Fast-days of the Puritan period let him read aloud to you this powerful passage in the Holy War. Public preaching and public prayer entered largely into the fasting of the Prophetical and the Puritan periods; and John Bunyan, after Joel, has told us some things about the Fast-day preaching of his day that it will be well for us, both preachers and people, to begin with, and to lay well to heart.
1. In the first place, the preaching of that Fast-day was 'pertinent' and to the point. William Law, that divine writer for ministers, warns ministers against going off upon Euroclydon and the shipwrecks of Paul when Christ's sheep are looking up to them for their proper food. What, he asks, is the nature, the direction, and the strength of that Mediterranean wind to him who has come up to church under the plague of his own heart and under the heavy hand of God? You may be sure that Boanerges did not lecture that Fast-day forenoon in Mansoul on Acts xxvii. 14. We would know that, even if we were not told what his text that forenoon was. His text that never-to-be-forgotten Fast-day forenoon was in Luke xiii. 7--'Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?' And a very smart sermon he made upon the place. First, he showed what was the occasion of the words, namely, because the fig-tree was barren. Then he showed what was contained in the sentence, to wit, repentance or utter desolation. He then showed also by whose authority this sentence was pronounced. And, lastly, he showed the reasons of the point, and then concluded his sermon.
But he was very pertinent in the application, insomuch that he made all the elders and all their people in Mansoul to tremble. Sidney Smith says that whatever else a sermon may be or may not be, it must be interesting if it is to do any good. Now, pertinent preaching is always interesting preaching. Nothing interests men like themselves. And pertinent preaching is just preaching to men about themselves,--about their interests, their losses and their gains, their hopes and their fears, their trials and their tribulations. Boanerges took both his text and his treatment of his text from his Master, and we know how pertinently The Master preached. His preaching was with such pertinence that the one half of His hearers went home saying, Never man spake like this man, while the other half gnashed at Him with their teeth. Our Lord never lectured on Euroclydon. He knew what was in man and He lectured and preached accordingly. And if we wish to have praise of our best people, and of Him whose people they are, let us look into our own hearts and preach. That will be pertinent to our people which is first pertinent to ourselves. Weep yourself, said an old poet to a new beginner; weep yourself if you would make me weep. 'For my own part,' said Thomas Shepard to some ministers from his deathbed, 'I never preached a sermon which, in the composing, did not cost me prayers, with strong cries and tears. I
never preached a sermon from which I had not first got some good to my own soul.'
'His office and his name agree;
A shepherd that and Shepard he.'
And many such entries as these occur in Thomas Boston's golden journal: 'I preached in Ps. xlii. 5, and mostly on my own account.' Again: 'Meditating my sermon next day, I found advantage to my own soul, as also in delivering it on the Sabbath.'
And again: 'What good this preaching has done to others I know not, yet I think myself will not the worse of it.'
2. The preaching of that Fast-day was with great authority also.
'There was such power and authority in that sermon,' reports one who was present, 'that the like had seldom been seen or heard.'
Authority also was one of the well-remembered marks of our Lord's preaching. And no wonder, considering who He was. But His ministers, if they are indeed His ministers, will be clothed by Him with something even of His supreme authority. 'Conscience is an authority,' says one of the most authoritative preachers that ever lived. 'The Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories;
such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.' Now, the well-equipped preacher will from time to time plant his pulpit on all those kinds of authority, as this kind is now pertinent and then that, and will, with such a variety and accumulation of authority, preach to his people. Thomas Boston preached at a certain place with such pertinence and with such authority that it was complained of him by one of themselves that he 'terrified even the godly.' Let all our young preachers who would to old age continue to preach with interest, with pertinence, and with terrifying authority, among other things have by heart The Memoirs of Thomas Boston, 'that truly great divine.'
