In the upcoming book Meditations on Preaching, contains approximately 200 stray thoughts and meditations that Grimke wrote about the highest calling of the minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whether one reads it cover to cover in one sitting, or as a daily devotional exercise, the sentences and paragraphs of the former slave turned Princeton Seminary graduate will convict, instruct, encourage, challenge, and inspire.

The death of a wife of thirty-six years has a way of making a man reflective. The waning of a fifty-year pulpit ministry has a similar effect. Combine these two, and you get the rich fare found in Francis Grimke’s Stray Thoughts and Meditations, the third volume of his published works. In 1914, Grimke’s wife Charlotte passed away, and he began to set his pen in earnest to what Carter Woodson, his publisher, states “is more serious than a diary.” As he preached less and less to Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., the congregation he had pastored since 1878, he wrote even more in his notebooks. By 1934, three years before his death in 1937, this African-American father in the faith had filled over 600 pages with the wisdom of godliness and experience on all manner of topics pertaining to life and ministry.

In the upcoming book Meditations on Preaching (for purchase click here), contains approximately 200 stray thoughts and meditations that Grimke wrote about the highest calling of the minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whether one reads it cover to cover in one sitting, or as a daily devotional exercise, the sentences and paragraphs of the former slave turned Princeton Seminary graduate will convict, instruct, encourage, challenge, and inspire. In an article this size, it’s impossible to summarize all 200 meditations, for they cover many aspects of pulpit ministry. Yet the following is a taste of what Grimke had to say on the task of preaching, the message preached, the delivery of the sermon, and the messenger who delivers it.

Grimke had a sense for the gravity of the task of preaching. He wrote:

A minister should enter his pulpit, not in a thoughtless, frivolous mood, but with a deep sense of the seriousness of the work in which he is engaged – the work of calling dying, sinful men to repentance and faith before it is eternally too late. The thought of the tremendous issues that depend upon the faithfulness with which he addresses himself to the work should solemnize his heart and banish every frivolous thought from his mind every time he enters the pulpit. The business in which he is engaged is a serious one, and no one should be more deeply sensible of that fact than the minister himself.

It is a temptation to be careless in preparation or delivery, or even to follow the lead of our culture’s levity and turn the pulpit into a half-hour comedy show. Yet the message of God’s holy and gracious gospel, and the eternal destinies of our hearers, demand the seriousness to which Grimke points us. His exhortation should be kept in mind as we write our sermons and as we preach them.

What shall we preach? Grimke was unequivocal:

It is a great thing in preaching to expound the word of God, to draw out of it what is in it, and not attempt to expound our own views, to set forth our own ideas. What the people need is to hear the word of God, and not the wisdom of man, not what is passing current in the newspapers and magazines. The sooner we preachers learn this lesson and stick to it the more fruitful of good will be our ministry. It is a great privilege to be permitted, week after week, to appear before the people and to unfold to them the word of God. How careful ought we to be to see that what we do present to our hearers is the word of God, the plain, simple, unvarnished truth of God, and not the speculation of men, the vagaries of the human mind…

Grimke knew that at the heart of the word of God, and thus at the heart of our preaching, was the gospel of Jesus Christ. He saw clearly, “No man’s ministry is a failure, however meager the results, if he has been faithfully and earnestly preaching the gospel of the grace of God, holding up to dying, sinful men God’s message of redeeming love. Such a ministry is not, could not be, a failure.”

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