Preaching should always move from understanding the meaning of the words of the text to seeing through the text to the reality to which it points so that its implications can be absorbed into our mind, will, and also affections, by which our understanding is existentially connected to the text and we appropriate the reality it reveals and illumines, so that in his light we see light (Psalm 36:9).

“The expulsive power of a new affection.” These words are the title of a sermon. It might seem to have several strikes against it.

The first strike is the title itself—not one that would pass muster in many congregations today. The second is that it was preached two hundred years ago (toward the close of 1819, to be more precise). Third, it was preached by a man with a pronounced Fife accent (Scottish accents are very varied and sometimes “thick,” as this one was). Fourth, the preacher read the sermon. And fifth, when it was preached, the sermon probably began with some such words as, “My text today is 1 John 2:15: ‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.’” But thereafter, the verse is referred to sparingly, and it is the only verse referred to in the whole sermon.

How, then, is this the most famous sermon preached in Scotland in the past two hundred years—indeed, perhaps ever?

The Preacher

One answer is found in the preacher, Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847). A Scotsman, born in Anstruther in Fife, he was fast becoming one of the most formidable figures in Scotland, if not in the entire United Kingdom. Reading between the lines of history suggests that when Lord Melbourne, the prime minister of Great Britain, found himself in the same room as Chalmers, his “blood earnestness” made Melbourne do everything he could to avoid talking to him! And it is clear from all the reports of his preaching, both in Scotland and England (where his accent must have required concentrated listening), that the impact of hearing him could be overwhelming.

The nineteenth century was a high point in evangelical eloquence in both Great Britain and the United States, and Chalmers belonged to the Mount Rushmore of eloquent preachers. No doubt, he possessed great natural gifts. A university student at eleven, he was licensed to preach at the age of eighteen, and thereafter he was successively (and at times contemporaneously) rural minister in Kilmany and lecturer in the University of St Andrews; city parish minister and social visionary in Glasgow; professor of moral philosophy and political economy, Sunday school organizer and teacher, and inspirer of young Christian men in St. Andrews; and, finally, professor of theology in Edinburgh, ongoing counselor to students for the ministry (including Robert Murray M‘Cheyne, Andrew and Horatius Bonar, George Smeaton, and others) and Scotland’s major ecclesiastical statesman.

In addition, Chalmers pioneered a church-planting movement (“church extension,” as it was then called) whose effect was so remarkable that between 1834 and 1841 no less than 220 new churches were built. In his spare time, he contributed financially to his friend William Collins and helped him establish a publishing company that once had worldwide fame (the “Collins” in what is now HarperCollins). And in the years leading up to 1843, he was the mastermind of the Disruption in the Church of Scotland that led to the formation of The Free Church of Scotland (or The Church of Scotland Free). Every overseas missionary in the old denomination joined forces with him.

His works stretch to more than thirty volumes. It is said that one hundred thousand people lined the streets of Edinburgh in respect as his coffin was carried to its burial place. A statue erected in his memory stands on George Street (parallel to the more famous Princes Street) in central Edinburgh. And this is but the outline of the man.

There is much more to say about Chalmers. It will impress some (but not all!) that for relaxation he managed to play two rounds of golf on the same day on the Old Course at St. Andrews. (It was played in a clockwise direction in those days—in distinction from the present counterclockwise direction—let the golfing reader understand!)

What lies behind all this, however, is the cold fact that when Chalmers was a young minister in the village of Kilmany, he was a stranger to God. To his later shame, he publicly stated that two days in the week were quite sufficient for any man to fulfill the calling of a minister. But in God’s grace, through a severe illness, reading works by William Wilberforce and Thomas Scott (himself no evangelical until John Newton patiently helped him to Christ), and doubtless the prayers of his family and parishioners, he was brought to a profound sense of his sin and need and a profound sense of the greatness and willingness of a gracious God to save him. At the end of the day, whatever his native temperament and gifts, it was his gratitude for the way Jesus Christ had shed his precious blood for his sins that made Thomas Chalmers “blood earnest.”

This, then, was the man who, in his late thirties, mounted the steps of his pulpit in the newly opened St. John’s Church in Glasgow (to which he had recently been translated from the nearby Tron Church) and announced as his text 1 John 2:15: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (KJV).

The Preaching

But what explains the fact that such a sermon continues to resonate with Christians two hundred years later? The question can be answered in a variety of ways. Here we must limit ourselves to two. We might call the first homiletical and the second theological.

These deserve equal weight. But to give due weight to the second would mean summarizing Chalmers’s sermon when the goal of this article is to encourage you to read it for yourself! Here—instead of a précis of the sermon—we will (1) try to shed some light on Chalmers’s approach in preaching the sermon, which will in turn (2) help to explain why it does not read like a typical twenty-first-century exposition (whether in a Reformed church or otherwise). Hopefully, this will also—and most importantly—(3) whet the appetite to read it.

In the subcultures of evangelicalism, a dramatic transformation has taken place in approaches to preaching. Go back seventy years, and most ministers had never heard the word hermeneutics. (Famously, at an evangelical Anglican congress half a century ago and more, the conference joke was that “hermeneutic”—an unfamiliar word to many delegates—was a revered German professor: Herr Meneutic!) Today, by contrast, there is a widespread insistence on the careful, contextual exegesis of Scripture, coupled with what is technically known as the lectio continua approach to preaching (i.e., preaching consecutively through whole books of the Bible). We little realize that this latter practice was—apart from a few notable exceptions—quite unusual during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. C.H. Spurgeon, for example, did not think he had the gifts to preach in this way. Textual preaching—with texts variously chosen—was the norm.

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