How (Not) To Prepare A Sermon
It was 1964. I had just arrived in Chicago for my first year of college at Moody Bible Institute. Early that September morning I left Kentucky. As the cab pulled away from my house to take me to the Greyhound Bus station, I looked back. I could see my widowed, fifty-eight year old mother leaning over and craning her neck out the second floor window. The only son she ever had left to never return home again. Her job was over.
I had a red, black, and yellow plaid suitcase made out of cloth and plastic that zipped up, folded over, and buckled on the sides. They called it a suiter. It bulged. In there was everything I took to college for my first year. A few clothes and shoes. A skinny belt or two. A sport coat. Bedspread. Dress pants. A couple of narrow ties. A dictionary, a thesaurus, and a Bible. That was it.
When my daughter went to college at Michigan State, I drove her there in a truck. A loaded truck. A million clothes, stuffed animals, tables, lights, jewelry, mementos, and all kinds of crap. Plus a jammed Steelcase file cabinet with extension drawers that weighed about 300 pounds. The day I heaved that thing into the truck was the first of eight days in four years of college when I cursed that thing every time I moved it to and from Michigan State. I hated that thing and rued the day I even suggested buying it. I kept telling my daughter with the same look on my face that I always wore when filling out my income taxes that all of this junk was absolutely unnecessary to haul off to college. Nobody in his right mind was going to cart all this down there and try to fit it into a diminutive dorm room with another girl in it too. Then I would plunge into the story in second paragraph above.
When I got to Michigan State with my pickup, it was like a Casita trailer had just driven up and parked between a canyon of two-story 45 foot RV's at a Good Sam Rally. My pickup filled to the top was the modern day equivalent of carrying onto campus one suitcase for college. Most of the girls not only had pickups carrying their crap, but they were also pulling a double axle U-Haul plus the family car jam packed with even more junk. Many of them had even rented small moving vans to bring it all. As I sat there in front of her dorm looking around, I felt like I had just brought my poor daughter to college from a housing project. She had almost nothing by comparison. Not only that, it reminded me more of a a new housing development than it did a college. Everywhere I looked there was lumber. Lumber, mind you. Dads and brothers were streaming into the dorms with tool belts, 2x4‘s, plywood, tool boxes, drills, screws and bolts. I walked into the dorm with a suitcase amidst the din of sawing and hammering as if carpenters were framing out the interior. Expecting to find in her room two beds sitting on the floor next to desks like I had seen in the pictures they sent us, no bed or desk was in sight. Instead, her roommate's family was sweating like horses constructing a matrix of girders and beams that came up off the floor about 7 feet high towards the ceiling. Up there they were hoisting the new beds and mattresses that were now reached by ladders. Below were the sofas, bean bags, love seats, coffee makers, pole lamps, stereos, rock concert speakers, bongs, books, pictures, teddy bears, wine bottles, refrigerators, beer cans, and all the other furniture that they had just dragged in from the moving van and carried up to the fourth floor. I stepped into the hall. Power saws and cursing could be heard in every room. Apparently some dads had measured once and cut twice. The fuzz of sawdust floated in beams of light. Things had certainly changed since I was in college. In nine months I was back with the pickup. So were all the other dads with their Penske trucks and deconstruction crews.
Anyway, on MY first day of college, I got off the bus in Chicago and took a cab up to Chicago and LaSalle and climbed the stairs to my fourth floor dorm room in what was called the 835 Building, a very old and dilapidated structure. I always had the impression that I was walking uphill when I crossed the room. Other missionaries and preachers-to-be soon carried in their one suitcase too. Within hours, I met two fellows who became life-long friends, Hawthorne and Ewing. Hawthorne had just come in from Ridgewood, New Jersey. He was born in Bolivia as the son of missionary parents. You will often see a lot of Hispanics in the amateur and professional boxing business. I guess there is something about living down there that makes people want to knock other people to the ground. As Hawthorne was growing up in Bolivia, he began to run into these morons in school. As they got into the halls of education, they loaded up their fisticuffs and started cold-cocking each other. Thus Hawthorne started taking Spanish bone hammers to the head after school and not faring so well. Now it just so happened that his Dad had been a bone-crusher himself and had laid out a few ruffians in his day before he took up the Bible full-time. So one day he took Hawthorne aside and began to teach him how to handle these amateur Roberto Durans. Soon Hawthorne developed a right and left hook and an upper cut that came out of nowhere like a cobra out of a box and enabled the Hispanics in Bolivia to visit a playground planetarium and see brilliant stars and galaxies without the aid of a telescope. So as the days passed in Bolivia, Hawthorne was fastening on the gloves almost everyday, going a few rounds with the bullies at grade school, and sending a few of them into early retirement through the severely injured list. It felt to them as if Hawthorne had sewed an anvil in his right glove.
The day came when Hawthorne moved back to the United States for high school, as missionary students often do. Just like down in Bolivia, the first school he attended was where the Joe Louis wanna-bees happened to be going to school too. Walking into that place was the same thing as going down to Mohammed Ali's gym everyday and stepping into the ring with Joe Frazier and the school's heavy-weight contenders. The school was as black as midnight with a few Jews sprinkled in with one little white guy - Hawthorne - who, they decided, would be used as a warm-up bag for title fights after school. On Hawthorne's first day at the Thrilla in Manilla, he was confronted by a team of five black boys who understood a title fight to mean ten swinging black fists against two white fists in a sort of tag team competition. Hence, they beat the crap out of Hawthorne and took turns practicing the art of kicking and stomping on his head. But little did they know that Hawthorne had been stepping into the ring every day down in Bolivia with the Golden Glove aspirants of South America and had developed a keen ear and love for the pleasurable sound of South American skulls bouncing off of concrete walls and sidewalks. So Hawthorne decided he was going to open a case of whoop-ass and schedule private, one-on-one bouts with each of the tag team members without them having their fans watching the fight and also jumping into the ring to lend assistance. Before long, each contender for the title had the joy and privilege of facing Hawthorne for the second bout. This time, though, Hawthorne's short arms stiffened out like the hind legs of a horse that was annoyed by people standing behind him and staring up his back end. A deftly placed round-house left hook, a right that came in like a horse shoe from a Clydesdale, and a teeth-clacking upper cut that turned day into night helped each partner of the tag team to decide from that day on that the route to the New Jersey High School Boxing Championship would not go through Hawthorne any more. The contenders kept coming, of course, but Hawthorne was more than a sparring partner for the champ. He was sending them to the floor on a routine basis and dancing around the school lot like George Foreman at Madison Square Gardens doing the Ali shuffle in a satin robe, pulling on the ropes, and shadow boxing with a wide belt and buckle around his waist the size of a saddle. Before long, he was walking around the school like it was Walden Pond.
Ewing, on the other hand, was from Topeka, Kansas. While Hawthorne was a sawed off, muscular dude who wore pointed-toe shoes and skinny silver belts like the West Side Storygreasers on the East coast, had yellow, straight-as-a-stick hair that flopped on his head until he was able to get a long swirl of Brylcreem grease into it, and had a laugh like Mortimer Snerd, Ewing was a 5'11", barrel-chested, clothes horse. Having worked in a men's store, he always wore classic clothing like the upper middle class, country-club types and looked like the Campus Crusade, Joe-College stereotype. A closet of classic plaid sport coats, rep ties, dress slacks, Weejuns, split toes, cap toes, etc., filled his closet. John Molloy wrote a book years ago called Dress For Success. Ewing emulated every word on every page of that book. His bureau featured all the classic colognes, spices, and bay rums found in barber shops. As a result, he waltzed around Moody as if he were Don Juan and the Stallion of the Plains who serviced his harem of mustangs like basketball's Wilt Chamberlain attending to his groupies.
Since his family had driven him to Moody, Ewing was able to get more useless crap there than Hawthorne or me. One of the things he brought was a valet. Hawthorne and I had never seen a valet and would not have known what it was for if we had. Ewing had somehow stolen a complete traffic light, made a valet out of it, draped his clothes and pocket valuables off and on it, and sat perched upon it to tie his shoes while the rest of us had to use the inclined floors of 835 to do so. For some odd reason, he always bought or tailored his pants with a long crotch. Hence, the waist and belt hiked up past his navel and sat just below his nipples. Or is seemed that way to Hawthorne and me who always wore our pants low in the saddle. When Ewing laughed, he bellowed like a heifer who had just gotten her bag caught in the suction cups of a barn milker.
One Saturday night Hawthorne and I sat in his spartan, one suitcase room, talking around the midnight hour. Because Hawthorne had been down in the jungles of Bolivia, he had come to Moody to become a preacher, as had I. So we were discussing on this very night the high art of pulpit-pounding that made people listen to every word that dropped from our golden tongues. Since the morrow was a Sunday, most of the Moody students had what were calledPractical Christian Work (PCW) assignments. That is, on Sunday mornings, many would pour out of the doors of the Institute into the highways and byways to preach in all kinds of joints all over Chicago. We would venture out and employ our newly learned theology in a practical way by pushing it into our right arm. Upon quoting the Bible, we would hammer empty air, point with our index finger into guilty, ash-white faces, slap the Bible with authority, and throw it down on the pulpit with emphasis as if we had had enough of the sin business and weren't taking any more crap. We had honed these techniques by sealing shut the doors to our rooms and practicing them in front of a full-length mirror. Well, it just so happened that on this coming Sunday, Hawthorne had to preach in some joint someplace in Chicago to a band of unsuspecting and unfortunate souls who had no choice but to listen to him. So I said to him, "Hawthorne, I presume you have prepared your sermon."
As he lay back on his bed, relaxing calmly with his feet stretched out, his hands folded behind his head on his pillow, his answer took me by surprise, "No, I have not."
There was a delay before I spoke. His words gave me pause. As I attempted to ingest his response, I intoned, "Then, Hawthorne, how are you going to go down there tomorrow and preach a full-fledged gospel sermon for half an hour?"
"Do you remember how the Lord delivered the Philistines into Joshua's hands?"
"Yes."
"I never prepare a sermon ahead of time."
I tried to interpret this incredible statement. "In other words, you..."
"That's right. I no longer read and depend on man's words for what I should say. I go right to the source and get my messages directly from the Lord."
I paused again. Longer this time. I was trying to make the connection. This was new. This was the first time I had come across such great faith. "Then what do you do?" said I, as I leaned in for greater insight into the deeper canyons of spiritual power.
"Well, I just go to bed, and before I shut my eyes and go to sleep, I ask the Lord to give me the message...deliver the Philistines into my hands, so to speak. When I wake up in the morning, there it is. A fully inscripturated, outlined, and illustrated sermon in my mind. It never fails. Red-hot and ready to go."
"Oh........okay." I had to admit I had never had the faith to try this before. But here it was. Right here in front of me. A living testimony to the kind of divine inspiration we had all dreamed of. Hawthorne was not a mere student. He was kith and kin to an Old Testament prophet. At this point, I was trying to figure out why he had even come to Moody Bible Institute. But right then something happened. I could feel it working in me. I realized immediately that I was not the giant tower of power that Hawthorne was. Not only had he just come off of the mission field, but he had beaten the crap out of his fellow high school students like Samson wielding the jawbone of an ass against the Philistines. Here was a man who actually believed in and took to heart all of God's promises to Israel about full victory over the enemy. Here was a man of faith filled with so much of God's Almighty power and wisdom that he didn't preach sermons. He prophesied. It was an enlightening moment as that concept right then and there rooted itself in my mind. From that day forward, I decided, I too would begin to practice this faith-resting method of prophetic revelation that came on those who rested and waited and held spellbound those who were blessed to hear a descendent from the short line of apostles and prophets. On the next occasion when I was notified that I would be sent out into some pulpit to hammer it into toothpicks, I laid aside all the man-centered preparation methods I had been learning at Moody and simply climbed into bed without the usual Saturday night trips to the bathroom that accompanied the worry, torment, and nervousness that preceded a Sunday morning sermon that I hoped was correctly exegeted, prepared and researched. No. I would let the Holy Spirit do all that work for me as I drifted into dreamland and confidently floated through the hallowed halls of sermon preparation via the tunnel of prophetic revelation. All night I would imbibe divine truth by the process of osmosis and arise Sunday morning with enough raw sermonic power to roll away the stone of unbelief from the tomb of the church, so to speak. When I awoke the next morning, an absolutely amazing thing happened. I had never experienced anything like this before. Like Hawthorne, I did not have any worries. I did not have any torment. I did not have nervous wrenching. In fact, I had nothing. That included the so-called sermon that Hawthorne had said was always waiting for him. What I DID have was TERROR. My mind was a total blank. No matter how many times I ventured out in faith and tested Hawthorne's sermon preparation technique, it never worked. After I became a pastor, I tested it out a few times there too. And the congregation also agreed that it didn't work then either.
The funny thing is I think Hawthorne got to thinking that he might extend his sermon preparation process to other areas. For example, he imagined that it might also work for him as he studied Greek, Hebrew, and all the other rigorous Bible classes he was taking at Moody. That is probably why when I asked somebody one day if they had seen Hawthorne around Moody anywhere lately, they said, "Hawthorne? No. He was here last semester, but I don't know where he is now. Somebody said he flunked out, which doesn't make sense. He always looked like he knew what he was doing. Seemed well rested. Came to class with complete confidence. Don't know what happened to him. He was always the first one to hand in his tests. I once asked him if he was ready for the final exam. All he said was, ‘The Lord will deliver the Philistines into my hands.' What is really strange is that some blonde said she saw nearly every test he turned in...and nothing was ever written on it."
As I walked away, I said, "Yeah, I know."
I had a red, black, and yellow plaid suitcase made out of cloth and plastic that zipped up, folded over, and buckled on the sides. They called it a suiter. It bulged. In there was everything I took to college for my first year. A few clothes and shoes. A skinny belt or two. A sport coat. Bedspread. Dress pants. A couple of narrow ties. A dictionary, a thesaurus, and a Bible. That was it.
When my daughter went to college at Michigan State, I drove her there in a truck. A loaded truck. A million clothes, stuffed animals, tables, lights, jewelry, mementos, and all kinds of crap. Plus a jammed Steelcase file cabinet with extension drawers that weighed about 300 pounds. The day I heaved that thing into the truck was the first of eight days in four years of college when I cursed that thing every time I moved it to and from Michigan State. I hated that thing and rued the day I even suggested buying it. I kept telling my daughter with the same look on my face that I always wore when filling out my income taxes that all of this junk was absolutely unnecessary to haul off to college. Nobody in his right mind was going to cart all this down there and try to fit it into a diminutive dorm room with another girl in it too. Then I would plunge into the story in second paragraph above.
When I got to Michigan State with my pickup, it was like a Casita trailer had just driven up and parked between a canyon of two-story 45 foot RV's at a Good Sam Rally. My pickup filled to the top was the modern day equivalent of carrying onto campus one suitcase for college. Most of the girls not only had pickups carrying their crap, but they were also pulling a double axle U-Haul plus the family car jam packed with even more junk. Many of them had even rented small moving vans to bring it all. As I sat there in front of her dorm looking around, I felt like I had just brought my poor daughter to college from a housing project. She had almost nothing by comparison. Not only that, it reminded me more of a a new housing development than it did a college. Everywhere I looked there was lumber. Lumber, mind you. Dads and brothers were streaming into the dorms with tool belts, 2x4‘s, plywood, tool boxes, drills, screws and bolts. I walked into the dorm with a suitcase amidst the din of sawing and hammering as if carpenters were framing out the interior. Expecting to find in her room two beds sitting on the floor next to desks like I had seen in the pictures they sent us, no bed or desk was in sight. Instead, her roommate's family was sweating like horses constructing a matrix of girders and beams that came up off the floor about 7 feet high towards the ceiling. Up there they were hoisting the new beds and mattresses that were now reached by ladders. Below were the sofas, bean bags, love seats, coffee makers, pole lamps, stereos, rock concert speakers, bongs, books, pictures, teddy bears, wine bottles, refrigerators, beer cans, and all the other furniture that they had just dragged in from the moving van and carried up to the fourth floor. I stepped into the hall. Power saws and cursing could be heard in every room. Apparently some dads had measured once and cut twice. The fuzz of sawdust floated in beams of light. Things had certainly changed since I was in college. In nine months I was back with the pickup. So were all the other dads with their Penske trucks and deconstruction crews.
Anyway, on MY first day of college, I got off the bus in Chicago and took a cab up to Chicago and LaSalle and climbed the stairs to my fourth floor dorm room in what was called the 835 Building, a very old and dilapidated structure. I always had the impression that I was walking uphill when I crossed the room. Other missionaries and preachers-to-be soon carried in their one suitcase too. Within hours, I met two fellows who became life-long friends, Hawthorne and Ewing. Hawthorne had just come in from Ridgewood, New Jersey. He was born in Bolivia as the son of missionary parents. You will often see a lot of Hispanics in the amateur and professional boxing business. I guess there is something about living down there that makes people want to knock other people to the ground. As Hawthorne was growing up in Bolivia, he began to run into these morons in school. As they got into the halls of education, they loaded up their fisticuffs and started cold-cocking each other. Thus Hawthorne started taking Spanish bone hammers to the head after school and not faring so well. Now it just so happened that his Dad had been a bone-crusher himself and had laid out a few ruffians in his day before he took up the Bible full-time. So one day he took Hawthorne aside and began to teach him how to handle these amateur Roberto Durans. Soon Hawthorne developed a right and left hook and an upper cut that came out of nowhere like a cobra out of a box and enabled the Hispanics in Bolivia to visit a playground planetarium and see brilliant stars and galaxies without the aid of a telescope. So as the days passed in Bolivia, Hawthorne was fastening on the gloves almost everyday, going a few rounds with the bullies at grade school, and sending a few of them into early retirement through the severely injured list. It felt to them as if Hawthorne had sewed an anvil in his right glove.
The day came when Hawthorne moved back to the United States for high school, as missionary students often do. Just like down in Bolivia, the first school he attended was where the Joe Louis wanna-bees happened to be going to school too. Walking into that place was the same thing as going down to Mohammed Ali's gym everyday and stepping into the ring with Joe Frazier and the school's heavy-weight contenders. The school was as black as midnight with a few Jews sprinkled in with one little white guy - Hawthorne - who, they decided, would be used as a warm-up bag for title fights after school. On Hawthorne's first day at the Thrilla in Manilla, he was confronted by a team of five black boys who understood a title fight to mean ten swinging black fists against two white fists in a sort of tag team competition. Hence, they beat the crap out of Hawthorne and took turns practicing the art of kicking and stomping on his head. But little did they know that Hawthorne had been stepping into the ring every day down in Bolivia with the Golden Glove aspirants of South America and had developed a keen ear and love for the pleasurable sound of South American skulls bouncing off of concrete walls and sidewalks. So Hawthorne decided he was going to open a case of whoop-ass and schedule private, one-on-one bouts with each of the tag team members without them having their fans watching the fight and also jumping into the ring to lend assistance. Before long, each contender for the title had the joy and privilege of facing Hawthorne for the second bout. This time, though, Hawthorne's short arms stiffened out like the hind legs of a horse that was annoyed by people standing behind him and staring up his back end. A deftly placed round-house left hook, a right that came in like a horse shoe from a Clydesdale, and a teeth-clacking upper cut that turned day into night helped each partner of the tag team to decide from that day on that the route to the New Jersey High School Boxing Championship would not go through Hawthorne any more. The contenders kept coming, of course, but Hawthorne was more than a sparring partner for the champ. He was sending them to the floor on a routine basis and dancing around the school lot like George Foreman at Madison Square Gardens doing the Ali shuffle in a satin robe, pulling on the ropes, and shadow boxing with a wide belt and buckle around his waist the size of a saddle. Before long, he was walking around the school like it was Walden Pond.
Ewing, on the other hand, was from Topeka, Kansas. While Hawthorne was a sawed off, muscular dude who wore pointed-toe shoes and skinny silver belts like the West Side Storygreasers on the East coast, had yellow, straight-as-a-stick hair that flopped on his head until he was able to get a long swirl of Brylcreem grease into it, and had a laugh like Mortimer Snerd, Ewing was a 5'11", barrel-chested, clothes horse. Having worked in a men's store, he always wore classic clothing like the upper middle class, country-club types and looked like the Campus Crusade, Joe-College stereotype. A closet of classic plaid sport coats, rep ties, dress slacks, Weejuns, split toes, cap toes, etc., filled his closet. John Molloy wrote a book years ago called Dress For Success. Ewing emulated every word on every page of that book. His bureau featured all the classic colognes, spices, and bay rums found in barber shops. As a result, he waltzed around Moody as if he were Don Juan and the Stallion of the Plains who serviced his harem of mustangs like basketball's Wilt Chamberlain attending to his groupies.
Since his family had driven him to Moody, Ewing was able to get more useless crap there than Hawthorne or me. One of the things he brought was a valet. Hawthorne and I had never seen a valet and would not have known what it was for if we had. Ewing had somehow stolen a complete traffic light, made a valet out of it, draped his clothes and pocket valuables off and on it, and sat perched upon it to tie his shoes while the rest of us had to use the inclined floors of 835 to do so. For some odd reason, he always bought or tailored his pants with a long crotch. Hence, the waist and belt hiked up past his navel and sat just below his nipples. Or is seemed that way to Hawthorne and me who always wore our pants low in the saddle. When Ewing laughed, he bellowed like a heifer who had just gotten her bag caught in the suction cups of a barn milker.
One Saturday night Hawthorne and I sat in his spartan, one suitcase room, talking around the midnight hour. Because Hawthorne had been down in the jungles of Bolivia, he had come to Moody to become a preacher, as had I. So we were discussing on this very night the high art of pulpit-pounding that made people listen to every word that dropped from our golden tongues. Since the morrow was a Sunday, most of the Moody students had what were calledPractical Christian Work (PCW) assignments. That is, on Sunday mornings, many would pour out of the doors of the Institute into the highways and byways to preach in all kinds of joints all over Chicago. We would venture out and employ our newly learned theology in a practical way by pushing it into our right arm. Upon quoting the Bible, we would hammer empty air, point with our index finger into guilty, ash-white faces, slap the Bible with authority, and throw it down on the pulpit with emphasis as if we had had enough of the sin business and weren't taking any more crap. We had honed these techniques by sealing shut the doors to our rooms and practicing them in front of a full-length mirror. Well, it just so happened that on this coming Sunday, Hawthorne had to preach in some joint someplace in Chicago to a band of unsuspecting and unfortunate souls who had no choice but to listen to him. So I said to him, "Hawthorne, I presume you have prepared your sermon."
As he lay back on his bed, relaxing calmly with his feet stretched out, his hands folded behind his head on his pillow, his answer took me by surprise, "No, I have not."
There was a delay before I spoke. His words gave me pause. As I attempted to ingest his response, I intoned, "Then, Hawthorne, how are you going to go down there tomorrow and preach a full-fledged gospel sermon for half an hour?"
"Do you remember how the Lord delivered the Philistines into Joshua's hands?"
"Yes."
"I never prepare a sermon ahead of time."
I tried to interpret this incredible statement. "In other words, you..."
"That's right. I no longer read and depend on man's words for what I should say. I go right to the source and get my messages directly from the Lord."
I paused again. Longer this time. I was trying to make the connection. This was new. This was the first time I had come across such great faith. "Then what do you do?" said I, as I leaned in for greater insight into the deeper canyons of spiritual power.
"Well, I just go to bed, and before I shut my eyes and go to sleep, I ask the Lord to give me the message...deliver the Philistines into my hands, so to speak. When I wake up in the morning, there it is. A fully inscripturated, outlined, and illustrated sermon in my mind. It never fails. Red-hot and ready to go."
"Oh........okay." I had to admit I had never had the faith to try this before. But here it was. Right here in front of me. A living testimony to the kind of divine inspiration we had all dreamed of. Hawthorne was not a mere student. He was kith and kin to an Old Testament prophet. At this point, I was trying to figure out why he had even come to Moody Bible Institute. But right then something happened. I could feel it working in me. I realized immediately that I was not the giant tower of power that Hawthorne was. Not only had he just come off of the mission field, but he had beaten the crap out of his fellow high school students like Samson wielding the jawbone of an ass against the Philistines. Here was a man who actually believed in and took to heart all of God's promises to Israel about full victory over the enemy. Here was a man of faith filled with so much of God's Almighty power and wisdom that he didn't preach sermons. He prophesied. It was an enlightening moment as that concept right then and there rooted itself in my mind. From that day forward, I decided, I too would begin to practice this faith-resting method of prophetic revelation that came on those who rested and waited and held spellbound those who were blessed to hear a descendent from the short line of apostles and prophets. On the next occasion when I was notified that I would be sent out into some pulpit to hammer it into toothpicks, I laid aside all the man-centered preparation methods I had been learning at Moody and simply climbed into bed without the usual Saturday night trips to the bathroom that accompanied the worry, torment, and nervousness that preceded a Sunday morning sermon that I hoped was correctly exegeted, prepared and researched. No. I would let the Holy Spirit do all that work for me as I drifted into dreamland and confidently floated through the hallowed halls of sermon preparation via the tunnel of prophetic revelation. All night I would imbibe divine truth by the process of osmosis and arise Sunday morning with enough raw sermonic power to roll away the stone of unbelief from the tomb of the church, so to speak. When I awoke the next morning, an absolutely amazing thing happened. I had never experienced anything like this before. Like Hawthorne, I did not have any worries. I did not have any torment. I did not have nervous wrenching. In fact, I had nothing. That included the so-called sermon that Hawthorne had said was always waiting for him. What I DID have was TERROR. My mind was a total blank. No matter how many times I ventured out in faith and tested Hawthorne's sermon preparation technique, it never worked. After I became a pastor, I tested it out a few times there too. And the congregation also agreed that it didn't work then either.
The funny thing is I think Hawthorne got to thinking that he might extend his sermon preparation process to other areas. For example, he imagined that it might also work for him as he studied Greek, Hebrew, and all the other rigorous Bible classes he was taking at Moody. That is probably why when I asked somebody one day if they had seen Hawthorne around Moody anywhere lately, they said, "Hawthorne? No. He was here last semester, but I don't know where he is now. Somebody said he flunked out, which doesn't make sense. He always looked like he knew what he was doing. Seemed well rested. Came to class with complete confidence. Don't know what happened to him. He was always the first one to hand in his tests. I once asked him if he was ready for the final exam. All he said was, ‘The Lord will deliver the Philistines into my hands.' What is really strange is that some blonde said she saw nearly every test he turned in...and nothing was ever written on it."
As I walked away, I said, "Yeah, I know."