The preacher got it

Yesterday, perchance, I heard a preacher preaching whom I did not expect to hear preach and who did not expect me to turn up to hear him preaching. The self-confession of the preacher during the sermon is that he did not preach often (and it was a bit scary having a person listening, me, who made a full-time living out of preaching).

In a way it put a bit of acid on me: what would I say at the end of the sermon? With a set up like that, even saying nothing would be, so to speak, saying something. To have said nothing would be, I sensed, to have implied I did not think much of the sermon.

So I listened more intently than usual.

Fortunately for me, to say nothing of the preacher, the sermon was very good.

Why was it a good sermon? I thought it would give more substance to me saying 'That was a good sermon' if I could tell the preacher why I thought it was good. This is what I said:

1. There was a message and he stuck to it, kept coming back to it, and didn't lose track of it.

2. The opening of the sermon was touched on in the closing of the sermon.

3. The sermon connected with the passage of Scripture read before the sermon.

I have no reason to think the preacher ever reads this particular blog, but he could well have done, because the sermon, effectively, followed frequently repeated advice here.