4. The Content of His Preaching
Rev Neil M Ross
One may well ask, What exactly was the content of the preaching that had such wonderful effects? We have before us the volume of Dr Kennedy’s published sermons, 58 in number, with such titles as, “God Calling the Wicked to Repentance”, “The Smitten Shepherd and His Flock”, “Redemption and Eternal Inheritance” and “The Humble and Hopeful Worshipper”. Those who were familiar with his preaching acknowledged that, while those sermons are excellent, they fail to convey an adequate idea of what his preaching was really like. “Of course,” wrote John Macleod, “when they were preached, there was to be taken into account the impact upon his hearers of the preacher’s striking personality and style and the reflex impact of his audience upon the preacher. But the written discourses, set down with the deliberate judgement of his fine mind, give us the doctrine, practice and experience that the preacher meant to lay stress upon. The English style has a decided distinction of its own. The inversion of sentences and the epigrams that often occur are marked features of it. The preacher was a special master in the realm of delicate spiritual analysis.”2
“They were written,” says Auld, “in the cool retirement of his study when he was in delicate health, and were often penned on a sick-bed. They
2This leads on to the following chapter, on the temptation of Christ.
1This is the final part of the Introduction to the recently-published Dr John Kennedy of Dingwall – Sermon Notes 1859-1856, and is used by kind permission of the publishers, the James Begg Society. The purpose of this introduction is to examine Kennedy as a preacher; Part 3, last month, gave examples of those who benefited from his preaching.
2Scottish Theology, p 327.
therefore, although exhibiting in the main his way of treating his subject, fall behind what was his wont in the pulpit, especially when fronting a large congregation, and all the powers of his mind raised to fullest activity. His conceptions of truth were on such occasions clear and comprehensive, his grasp of mind sustained and mighty, and his powerful affections, all aglow, poured themselves forth in strains of unstudied eloquence, impossible to be attained in quieter hours”.3
It is interesting to compare his written sermon on Psalm 106:4,5, entitled “A Large Prayer”, as published in that volume, with a hearer’s full “Notes of a Sermon” on the same text, which was published in The Free Presbyterian Magazine.4 The notes of the preached sermon, although substantially the same as the written sermon, do indeed have, as one would expect, more spontaneity and warmth. Of course, as Auld has said (and others have concurred with him), “There likewise often accompanied his preaching that without which all words of merely man’s wisdom are ineffectual, the unction from on high, the baptism of the Spirit of God, so that many have had to say, ‘The Lord was in this place; this is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven’”.5
John Kennedy deplored a presentation of the gospel which ignored or belittled “the sovereignty and power of God in the dispensation of His grace”, and for this reason, among others, he wrote his 31-page pamphlet, Hyper-Evangelism, “Another Gospel”, Though a Mighty Power, in which he criticised the type of doctrine preached by D L Moody and the enquiry-room methods of dealing with anxious enquirers during the revival movement of the day. As a result, some charged him with hyper-Calvinism. “This charge was without a foundation,” wrote John Macleod in his Scottish Theology, “for no man in his generation made conscience more than he did of proclaiming as the gospel a message that was as full as it was free and as free as it was full.”6 A P F Sell, in writing about Dr Kennedy in his work, Defending and Declaring the Faith – Some Scottish Examples, puts it this way: “Kennedy offered Christ to all comers. He did not encourage undue introspection; he did not suggest that the gospel was only for sensible sinners [that is, only for those conscious of their sins]; and he was no Antinomian. A High Calvinist he was; a Hyper-Calvinist he was not.”7
It was his heralding of this full and free message, and his warm and solemn
3Life of John Kennedy, DD, fifth edition, p 95.
4Vol 5, p 203.
5Life, pp 95,96.
6P 328.
7Pp 33,34.
pleading with sinners to come to Christ, which endeared him to the hearts of the people, as an eminently-distinguished ambassador of the cross. Take, for example, the conclusion of his above-mentioned sermon on Psalm 106:4,5, especially the prayer, “O visit me with Thy salvation”. Here is Dr Kennedy’s closing appeal as recorded by a hearer:
“I am to ask you three questions. Have you ever asked Christ to visit you? Not with your tongue merely, but has your soul really ever felt like that of the Psalmist, that you must remain for ever an outcast unless the Lord visit you? If you have, I am sure there was no failing on His part, for He says, ‘Ask and it shall be given you’. The Lord is faithful and cannot lie. On the other hand, if you have not asked, you have none to blame but yourself for being an outcast today and through eternity. I think though Christ should only have this to say to you at the last day, ‘Never through all the years I was with you in the gospel did you invite Me to come to you with My salvation’, you will be left without excuse, not only as regards your inability, but also as regards your choice. Is it not time to cry out, ‘Remember me, O Lord, and visit me with Thy salvation?’
“I am willing to come to a point with you tonight. Will you then come to the point now and ask the Lord now to visit you? There is a present opportunity of sending up the cry to God. If you let it pass, there is not one word in all God’s Book to warrant the hope of your getting another opportunity. Will you then come to the point now? You never gave one hour to your soul in dealing with God. Won’t you give it tonight? Say, ‘Remember me, and visit me with Thy salvation’. What hope, friends, can you have if the Lord does not visit you with His salvation? You must be cut off for ever. Dead in the destroyer’s grasp and near the gate of hell, if God remembers you not, it is death eternal for you. Will you not call upon Him while He is near and seek Him while He may be found? ‘Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation.’ ‘Turn you at My reproof: behold, I will pour out My Spirit unto you.’ ‘Him that cometh to Me, I will in no wise cast out.’”8
John Kennedy also excelled in encouraging the weak of the flock when they were faced with the solemn duty of remembering the death of their Saviour. When inviting communicants to the Lord’s table, he could and did descend to the case of the feeblest believer “and led him out of the prison-house by showing that a sincere desire after God was as sure a mark of grace as the strong assurance of the man who could say, ‘I know in whom I have believed’.”9 In his Gleanings of Highland Harvest, Murdoch Campbell tells how Kennedy, one communion Sabbath, used the following illustration for
8The Free Presbyterian Magazine, vol 5, pp 210-1.
9“Memoir” of Kennedy prefixed to The Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire, fifth ed, p cxxxii.
the encouragement of believers who had a wholesome fear of partaking unworthily: “I seem to see an abundant feast spread before the Lord’s poor ones. They fear, however, that the good things are not for them. They look longingly at the table, but who is worthy to sit down thereat? But I seem to see a young man in the company who ventures nearer to the table than the rest. He would know what are those letters of gold inscribed on a covering which hides the contents of a dish on the table. And this is what he reads: ‘A gift of choice honey from the Elder Brother to the children to be divided among themselves’. With that they all come and receive that which by His death He provides.”10
When Dr Kennedy died, a close friend and brother minister, Dr Aird of Creich, had this to say to those who gathered to mourn his passing: “Viewed as a minister of the gospel, he ever shone with peculiar lustre. He was called by the Master to the work, and as a proof of this was fitted for it by natural, acquired and gracious gifts. In opening up the treasures of the gospel, it was not his wont to skim over its surface. He searched the Bible for himself, his powerful intellect anointed with the unction from on high; deep and prayerful were his meditations, ever keeping in the foreground the essential doctrines of God’s Word. His unusual facility for analysing the thoughts and experience of God’s people, and distinguishing the true from the false, secured for him an extraordinary place in their affections, for he spoke to their hearts and feelings. . . . His delight was to proclaim an unfettered gospel to his fellow-men, and the Lord was pleased to acknowledge the labours of His faithful servant in giving him many seals of an accepted ministry.”11
Some may feel that this sketch is too adulatory in its attempt to present Dr Kennedy’s eminence as a preacher of the gospel. Some, for example, regard his type of preaching as tending to inhibit church growth. Dr Ian R MacDonald, in his book Aberdeen and the Highland Church (1785-1900), writes of Kennedy that “the stress which he laid on self-examination, in both his preaching and his writing, conveyed to the Church at large the impression that if many were called, few were chosen. Where this critical attitude on the part of ministers and kirk sessions prevailed, it had the effect of diminishing additions to the communion roll.”12 It was rather the reverse. The teaching and preaching of Dr Kennedy and his like-minded brethren were the cause, under God, not of diminishing but of increasing the number of those who professed faith in Christ, and also resulted in strengthening the Church north of the Grampians in those days.
10P 81.
11In Memoriam: Rev Dr Kennedy, pp 27-8.
12p 269.
We cannot but pray that such days would come again, and that ministers of the spiritual calibre of Dr Kennedy would occupy our pulpits today. To say so will no doubt be regarded by some as a “tendency to magnify the past and denigrate the present” as Principal Donald Macleod put it in the Free Church Monthly Record when he wrote about Dr Kennedy on the centenary of his death. Commenting on the wistful rhetorical question, “The fathers, where are they?” posed by Dr Kennedy and echoed by others, he states, “This praising of times past is essentially a ministry of discouragement. Its real interest is not so much to praise God for former days as to denigrate the present. In the last analysis that is the devil’s work and its only effect is to discourage those struggling in the service of the kingdom.”13
On the contrary, it is an undeniable fact that innumerable servants of Christ, by considering the records of more prosperous days in the Church of Christ in the past, have not only blessed God for His mighty works, but also have been motivated to seek, and strive for, heaven-sent betterment both for themselves and the Church in their own day. While we must guard against an unwise preoccupation with the past, we ought to imitate the resolve of the psalmist: “I will remember the works of the Lord: surely I will remember Thy wonders of old” (Ps 77:11).
In remembering them we are bound to pray that God would so work again. When Dr Kennedy had cause to mourn over spiritual decline in his own day, much more have we. But like him, we must pray. “O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy” (Hab 3:2). The bare fact that the God of all grace calls us to ask for such a blessing is a tremendous encouragement to us to keep asking. “Thus saith the Lord God; I will yet for this be enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will increase them with men like a flock” (Ezek 36:37).
It is clear that with regard to the truths which have been faithfully passed down to us by John Kennedy and other long-gone ambassadors of Christ, it is our duty to transmit them to future generations. “This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: that ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour” (2 Pet 3:1,2). We heartily concur with Rev H M Cartwright, who, when he wrote about Dr Kennedy in another issue of The Monthly Record, concluded, “It might be a hopeful sign if the hundredth year since his death were marked by a revived interest in the whole message which he proclaimed in pulpit, on platform, and in the press”.14
13May 1984, p 98.
14October 1983, p 212.