Page:Heralds of God.djvu/177

THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE coming out of the blue, with no eyes on you, that's the acid test. Who among us knows how he'll come through it?" What wealth of material lies to your hand in the pages of the Bible, to show how different men react to the sudden personal emergency, leaping on them out of the blue, in the unguarded hour! "Souls at the Crossroads," you might call your sermon sequence: and you speak in turn of Esau, of Balaam, of Samson, of David, of Gehazi, of Daniel—of each man in that crucial hour when, as Browning puts it,

It will be strange indeed if, through such a course, many in your congregation do not become aware of God dealing with their own souls in judgment and mercy. Or at another time you may plan a series with the title "Encountering Jesus." From the crowded record of the Gospels you choose out six or seven men and women in the moving and dramatic moment when their several paths crossed the path of Jesus—Nicodemus, the woman of Samaria, Zacchaeus, the centurion of Capernaum, the man born blind, the Syrophoenician mother, the dying thief—and it may be that as you endeavour with the aid of imagination (which is just another name for the insight of faith) to reconstruct these scenes, the Gospel story will begin to repeat itself in your congregation; and one here and another there, forgetting all about the preacher and "seeing no man save Jesus only," will register secret 171