Whatever God wants to communicate to mankind must be communicated through our five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound.

In medieval Roman Catholicism, the focus was on the first of these five senses. Church buildings were constructed to teach the people of God what the Papacy wanted them to learn. The cross shape of the building reminded them of the means of Jesus’ substitutionary death. The statues, carvings, and stained glass represented the stories of the Bible or the persons of the Godhead. The fenced altars rebuked presumptions of familiarity with the transcendent divine Being; the soaring naves lifted the mind heavenward.

The worship services within these buildings involved a multitude of actions, such as the processions of the clergy, bowings and kneelings by the people, and symbolic movements by the priests, all of which drew the eye—and thus the mind—to them. The emotional climax of the mass became the elevation of the host, at which point the elements of the Lord’s supper were thought to be transformed into the physical body and blood of Jesus Christ.

The sense of smell was not ignored, with the burning of pungent incense, nor the sense of touch, with so many parts of the church building appealing to the worshiper to “Touch me!” The sense of taste was limited to the receiving of the sacramental wafer, as the cup was denied to the laity for fear that some dear soul would accidentally—and embarrassingly—drop the blood of the Savior on the floor.

The use of the sense of sound, once the preeminent means of communication, was gradually limited to short homilies, the unknown Latin language of the liturgy, and the performances of professional singers or even actors. The focus shifted from the Word of God to the routines of the clergy, from the dynamism of a group of worshipers coming together to adore their Creator and Redeemer to the deadness of a liturgy mindlessly performed—in an unknown tongue, no less.

John Calvin (1509-1564) describes these sermons as follows, in his typical, pungent style.

What sermons in Europe then exhibited that simplicity with which Paul wishes Christian people to be always occupied? Nay, what one sermon was there from which old wives might not carry off more whimsies than they could devise at their own fireside in a month? For, as sermons were then usually divided, the first half was devoted to those misty questions of the schools which might astonish the rude populace, while the second contained sweet stories, or not unamusing speculations, by which the hearers might be kept on the alert. Only a few expressions were thrown in from the Word of God, that by their majesty they might procure credit for these frivolities (Selected Works, ed. Henry Beveridge, Baker, 1:40).

Even before the Reformation, some in Romanism sensed the problem of this developing imbalance and tried to correct it. Hence arose the friars, orders of traveling preachers founded by both Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and Dominic de Guzman (1170-1221)—thus the Franciscans and the Dominicans. But even their efforts gradually came to little, compromised by the dead weight of a Roman Catholic system that knew no easy stopping point in its downward path before crowding out the preaching of the Word in favor of clerical performance.

Even a generation into the Reformation, the situation was far from satisfactory in the churches. Hugh Latimer (1485?-1555), the celebrated martyr, in a sermon in 1548, asked his congregation to identify the greatest preacher in England.

And will ye know who it is? I will tell you: it is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other; he is never out of his diocese.…ye shall never find him unoccupied; he is ever in his parish.…Where the devil is resident, and hath his plough going, there away with books and up with candles; away with Bibles and up with beads; away with the light of the gospel and up with the light of candles.…Where the devil is resident, that he may prevail, up with all superstition and idolatry; censing, painting of images, candles, palms, ashes, holy water, and new service of men’s inventing; as though man could invent a better way to honour God with than God himself hath appointed. Down with Christ’s cross, up with purgatory pickpurse.…Up with decking of images and gay garnishing of stocks and stones; up with man’s traditions and his laws, down with God’s traditions and his most holy Word. Down with the old honour due to God, and up with the new god’s honour.…Oh that our prelates would be as diligent to sow the corn of good doctrine, as Satan is to sow cockle and darnel! (“Sermon of the Plough,” in Sermons, Cambridge: University Press, 1844, pp. 70-71)

The Reformers, however, not only knew what they were against, they knew what they were for. John Calvin, while preaching on Ephesians 4:11-12, said:

Now the fact is that [the church] cannot be built up, that is to say, it cannot be brought to soundness, or continue in a good state, except by means of the preaching of the Word. So then, if we earnestly desire that God should be honoured and served, and that our Lord should have His royal seat among us peaceably, to reign in the midst of us, if we are His people and are under His protection, if we covet to be built up in Him and to be joined to Him, and to be steadfast in Him to the end; to be short, if we desire our salvation, we must learn to be humble learners in receiving the doctrine of the gospel and in hearkening to the pastors that are sent to us (Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians, Banner of Truth, 1973, p. 374).

Beginning with the pre-Reformers, like John Wycliffe (d. 1384), Jan Hus (1369?-1415), and Girolamo Savanarola (1452-1498), the emphasis was placed strongly on preaching, often outside the usual church confines. The early Reformers, such as Martin Luther (1483-1546), Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), and John Calvin, were known near and far as preachers. They sought through their preaching not only to change Wittenberg, Zurich, and Geneva, but the whole of Christendom.

The Reformers not only preached, but they returned preaching to the systematic exposition of the Word of God. Luther discovered the freeing doctrine of justification by faith alone while preaching through the Epistle to the Romans. What we call Calvin’s “commentaries” on most of the books of the Bible are, in fact, his sermons. And these men not only preached once each Sabbath morning, but at numerous times that day and other days in the week. We do not read of them complaining that the pace was too heavy for them; indeed, Calvin can be accurately said to have worked himself into an early grave by his diligent preaching. Calvin’s enthusiasm for preaching was matched by his congregation’s, as James Hastings Nichols makes clear:

The appetite for the Word preached was startling by modern standards, both in length and solidity of sermons and the number of them desired by the congregations. For the 12,000 people of Geneva there were 15 services with sermon every week, distributed through three parishes. And although many or most modern historians refer to the length of these sermons as wearisome, they rarely supply contemporary judgments to this effect. Such comments usually reveal more about the attention span of the modern historian than of that of the 16th- and 17th-Century congregations (Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, Westminster Press, 1968, pp. 29-30).

It was in the time of the Second Reformation in the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, particularly in the Low Countries and the British Isles, that preaching reached its zenith, in the pulpit ministrations of the Puritans, from whom the Covenanters and their Reformed Presbyterian descendants came. Not that there were not excesses: One English Puritan spent his entire ministry in one congregation preaching over 700 sermons on the Song of Solomon! But men and nations were transformed under the impact of the Word of God systematically, regularly, and trenchantly preached by men of God who were called by the church, trained in the seminaries, and sent out into the field. In more than a few cases, men gave their lives for the sake of the preaching of the truth that sets men free from bondage to sin and damnation.

Thus, at the time of the Reformation, a major shift occurred in the Church’s usual mode of communication. While none of man’s senses were ignored, appeals to the sense of sound came to predominate, as the preaching of men ordained to the ministry of the Word came to dominate the worship. As Nichols has written, “Whatever else it was, the Reformation was a great preaching revival, probably the greatest in the history of the Christian church” (Corporate Worship, p. 29).

And so it is to preaching that the Church must look for reformation in our own day. As the famous London preacher D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones has written: “It is preaching alone that can convey the Truth to people, and bring them to the realisation of their need, and to the only satisfaction for their need. Ceremonies and ritual, singing and entertainment, and all your interest in political and social affairs, and all else cannot do this” (Preaching and Preachers, Zondervan, 1972, p. 40).