David Pawson - A Preacher’s Legacy

Anchor Recordings

Copyright 2017 David Pawson

The right of David Pawson to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Anchor Recordings Ltd
DPTT, Synegis House, 21 Crockhamwell Road,
Woodley, Reading RG5 3LE

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CONTENTS

This book is based on a series of talks.Originating as it does from the spoken word, its style will be found by many readers to be somewhat different from my usual written style. It is hoped that this will not detract from the substance of the biblical teaching found here.

As always, I ask the reader to compare everything I say or write with what is written in the Bible and, if at any point a conflict is found, always to rely upon the clear teaching of scripture.

David Pawson

My first sermon was a failure. I was around nine years old and there was a congregation of three: my mother, my elder sister and younger sister. My father was away with the car one Sunday and we couldnt go to church so my mother said, Well have a service at home and you, David, will be the preacher. We turned an armchair backwards and I knelt in that and used it as a pulpit. I chose for my first sermon the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. I read the story first, then I told it again in my own words, then I went through it a third time drawing lessons from it, and finally my elder sister, in a tone of exasperation, said, Isnt that vineyard full yet? The whole thing collapsed into unseemly mirth and was a complete failure. I didnt try preaching again for another ten years.

When I was seventeen my parents faith became mine and I began to preach then. At first I didnt preach in churches, I preached in the open airin working mens clubs, down a coalmine, in pubs, anywhere there were people. I began preaching outside churches. My preaching at that stage is what I call testimony preaching, and that was my beginning. I was sharing experience and thats all. My first sermon in church came one Sunday when I went to have tea with a converted bookmaker in County Durham called Jack Harrison an amazing man. He gathered about 120 young people and he discipled them. I went to have tea with him and then we got on the bus to go to a place called Spennymoor in County Durham. On the way there I asked, What are you preaching on tonight, Jack? and he said, Im not preaching tonight, you are and he pushed me into the pulpit. I gave my testimony, I quoted every text I could remember, and I gave them all my theology in seven minutes flata feat which I have never been able to reproduce.

So that is how I began preaching in churches, which is far more frightening than preaching in pubs or working mens clubs. When you face a typical congregation, it is really weird.

I came from a line of preachers and three books remind me of this. One of them, The Letters of John Pawson, was written by one of John Wesleys first helpers, his very close colleague, and it contains his letters to Wesley written in 1794. The second book is Harvesting for God by my grandfather, David Ledger Pawson. He died when I was four, so I dont remember hearing him preach. In fact I can hardly remember him at all, but he was an evangelist to his fingertips and he worked mainly in the North and the Northeast.

The author of the third book, Hand to the Plough, was my father, who was a professor of agriculture in Newcastle University. He did his evangelism on the weekends. Every Saturday night he interviewed people and made himself available. His great gift was friendship. It was through friendship that he led people to the Lord, and he kept a book in which he wrote the name and address of everyone he had led to faith, and there are twelve thousand names in that book (which I still have). He did that in his spare time, and he was a lay-preacher with a Methodist Church. All this is telling you that my background is Methodistor it was. When I was called into the ministry, it was the only ministry that I knew, so I became a Methodist minister.

Then I began the second phase of my preaching, which was what I call text preaching: My text this morning is John 3:16... that is how most Methodist preachers preached and so I just adopted the same thing. It is a highly subjective approach to preaching because you are selecting the text, and you either select a text that appeals to you or a text on which you can hang your own thoughts. It is really not very good preaching but I adopted it, and I marvel that I wasnt stoned to death for some of the early sermons! I still have the notes.

One I preached from the Authorized Version, which I never use now, but I did in the beginning. I thought this a marvellous text from 2 Peter, speaking to the churches then. Peter said, You are a peculiar people.... I thought, What a marvellous text and what a wonderful truth in that text! When you look around the pews we are a very peculiar people. I didnt know then that that was an old Elizabethan English word for belonging exclusively to someone. So I launched into it; You are a peculiar people, just look at you... and I made a great deal of that word peculiar in quite the wrong sense. I am amazed at the patience of congregations!

So my first phase had been testimony preaching, sharing my experience, and my second had been text preaching, in which I took a verse. But since there are only 34,000 verses in the Bible I could only deal with one thirty-four thousandth of the Word of God in each sermon. The selection was entirely up to me. Nobody every taught me to preach. I have never really thought about that until recently when I was asked to speak about it. I learned intuitively to preach, and I learned most from the faces in congregations. I learned from the response of people to what I was saying. I learned to stop talking when they stopped listening.

Then phase three in my preaching was what I call topical preaching. Now I would use a lot of texts in one sermon, gathering them from all over the placeall out of context. I was then preaching concordance sermons. You choose a topic like humility, you look up every text on that, you throw them together, and then youve got a sermon with a lot of texts. I then bought a big book which I confess I have never used: Naves Topical Bible. In it, every verse in the Bible has been reproduced under topical headings. At first I thought, What a help this could be to my preaching, but then I thought, But why didnt God do this? Why did he give the Bible in the way he did? Couldnt he have given us books of the Bible on each subject? Wouldnt it have been wonderful if Genesis was all about heaven and Exodus was all about hell and Numbers was all about judgment, and something else? But God didnt do that. I began to ask, Why didnt God give us a topical Bible? It would have been so much easier to look things up and to preach if everything was in the same place. So Naves is a book that I dont recommend. That big, heavy book is a waste of money.

But I got into topical preaching and instead of choosing a text I began to choose a topic. Whatever the topic, look up all the texts, put them together and youve got a sermon! I am disturbed that most preaching that I hear today is topical preachingit sounds biblical because many texts are quoted, but when you look at it closely it is not very biblical. So I moved on.