“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.
Thomas Chalmers belonged to this tradition. But in Scotland, at least, the lectio continua mode of exposition to the congregation was still practiced in Bible-centered ministries in what was known as “the lecture” (often the second service of the day, or in certain circumstances an earlier one) or at a midweek gathering. An example of this in Chalmers’s own ministry is found in his one hundred “lectures” on Romans. (A digital version of the copy that belonged to B.B. Warfield can be read online.) This reference to Chalmers’s approach to preaching may seem no more than an interesting historical footnote, but there is considerable significance in it.
First, it reminds us that the Reformed tradition has never held that the only way to engage in expository preaching is by the continuous exposition of a book. Not only so, but the greatest proponents of lectio continua, whose ministries have made profound impressions on their congregations, have tended to be those who have in fact preached through the Scriptures textually — that is, verse by verse and not simply extended section by extended section.
In addition, Chalmers’s approach draws attention to the difference between preaching that explains a passage, with perhaps a few brief applications, and preaching that penetrates through the text into the presence of God and the hearts of the hearers. The Westminster Divines produced what amounts to a four- or five-page description of this kind of preaching (which they had found to be most profitable for the congregation). It was preaching of
such a manner, that his [the preacher’s] auditors may feel the word of God to be quick and powerful, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart; and that, if any unbeliever or ignorant person be present, he may have the secrets of his heart made manifest, and give glory to God.
The implication here is that 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).
Chalmers clearly believed that real exposition is not limited to faithful explanation. Paul spoke about his preaching not merely as a verbal description of the truth but as a phanerosis of it (2 Corinthians 4:2). The translation “open statement” (ESV) perhaps does not communicate to the modern ear the full force of preaching, for Paul thinks of it as an “unveiling,” a shining of light in our hearts (see 2 Corinthians 4:3, 6). In his view, Christ manifests himself in preaching. Indeed, through the ministry of the Spirit, Christ himself does the preaching. (The ESV footnote translation of Romans 10:14 gives the generally agreed better sense of Paul’s words, and it aligns with the fact that Christ came to Ephesus and preached peace when Paul himself preached there, as Paul writes in Ephesians 2:17.) As Calvin again notes (on Hebrews 2:11), “We ought not so much to consider men as speaking to us, as Christ by his own mouth.”
In Chalmers’s sermon on 1 John 2:15, then, little is said about the self-evident meaning of the words of the text. Did he perhaps feel that if someone understands English, he can readily understand what the words mean? (He certainly did not think that edification is limited to the intellect! Rather, it is the nourishing, nurturing, transforming of the saints and their character into ever greater Christlikeness.) So, his concern is to point us through the words to the reality to which the words point. The words themselves are not the reality to which they point. Scripture is God’s word, and (as Calvin noted in commenting on 2 Timothy 3:16) it is therefore to be given the kind of reverence we give to God because its words are his words. But Scripture is not itself God. Rather, it discloses, manifests, illumines, and brings us to God.
Chalmers, therefore, does not belabor the explanation of the words of the text but focuses attention on the reality they disclose. He seeks to penetrate to the deep logic of the text to uncover for us the what and the why and the how and the how-to of the apostle John’s words.
The result was that while Chalmers’s preaching involved the indicative exposition of what God has done for us in Christ, leading to the imperative address to respond in obedience, it also included the sometimes (often?) missing link: the transitive effect in which the preaching of the word “is at work” (1 Thessalonians 2:13). His preaching on “the expulsive power of a new affection” itself effected that new affection because it took fire and caused hearts to “burn” — and it still does.
It would surely not be too much to say that Chalmers clearly grasped the litmus test of preaching in which Christ himself preaches his own word into our hearts: not only that he interprets the Scriptures for us but that our hearts “burn within us” (Luke 24:27, 32). And that is the kind of heartburn, the warming of the affections, that is exactly the burden of “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.”
There is an added bonus here for preachers — not least those who know they have but a fraction of Chalmers’s ability and lack his eloquence (i.e., most of us!). In a sweetly unselfconscious way, he makes it clear that a preacher does not need to have brilliant analytical or rhetorical powers to expose the evanescent character of the charms of this world in order to be an instrument of deliverance and transformation. For, as he says,
With the tidings of the gospel in commission, he may wield the only engine that can extirpate them. He cannot do what some have done . . . when, as if by the hand of a magician [it was said that Chalmers’s own preaching had a kind of “magical” quality about it!], they have brought out to view, from the hidden recesses of our nature, the foibles and lurking appetites which belong to it. — But he has a truth in his possession, which into whatever heart it enters, will, like the rod of Aaron, swallow up them all — and unqualified as he may be, to describe the old man in all the nicer [i.e., subtle] shading of his natural and constitutional varieties, with him is deposited that ascendant influence under which the leading tastes and tendencies of the old man are destroyed, and he becomes a new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord. (Emphasis added)
That is surely good news for all of us who are what is (mistakenly!) called “ordinary ministers”!
So much, then, for Chalmers’s preaching. But what about the sermon?
The Message
The burden of “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” can be expressed very simply — and hopefully in a way that makes reading it desirable rather than redundant!
Imperatives on their own can never rid us of affections dominated by the offerings of this world. Conversion, living the Christian life, growing as a Christian, sanctification are all in large measure dependent on the experience of a new affection. Overcoming sin is not effected by exhortations to mortification alone. And the reason? Chalmers argues that, as human beings made in the image of God, we are not designed this way. And since the gospel has in view the restoration of our lives into a true humanity, God’s saving work in us, while supernatural, nevertheless works in and through our nature, not above or outside of it. Grace works in a way that is contrary not to human nature but to sinful human nature. Herman Bavinck is in harmony with Chalmers’s view here:
As the Redeemer or Recreator, God follows the line that he drew as Creator, Sustainer, and Ruler of all things. Grace is something other and higher than nature, but it nevertheless joins up with nature, does not destroy it but restores it rather. (Our Reasonable Faith, 277)
The Christian, then, is restored to a true and genuine humanity because the love of God is in him. And for this to take place, it is not sufficient to try to drive out sin (remember Jesus’s parable in Luke 11:24–26). There can be no breaking of our affections for the old life unless there is an inrush of a new affection that helps break up, drive out, and drown the old. In terms of 1 John 2:15, only when “the love of the Father is . . . in him” is it possible to “not love the world or the things in the world.” In this sense too, law (“Deal with your sin”) never works grace; only by grace transforming our affections will we love, desire, and do the will of God freely and joyfully.
Chalmers has, of course, much more to say. But one can’t help thinking that if more of us heard, understood, believed, and embraced the message of “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” more of us would grow in grace and taste the delights of grace. So, in words that helped transform Augustine’s life: Tolle lege — get hold of the sermon and read it. And then read it again!
Desiring God