“A sick-bed often teaches more than a sermon.” (Watson 27)
Yet again, Watson is on the money – and that is coming from one who has heard, written and preached a couple of decades worth of sermons. This is not to say that sermons don’t teach at all. In fact, they do even more than that. The purpose of a sermon is not only to teach the meaning and detail of Scripture but to facilitate live encounters with the living God. That’s the point of preaching, what’s supposed to happen. It’s the thing that makes it thrilling to hear and what sets it apart from any other type of speaking and hearing. The preacher, their life and their message are a conduit for the present speaking of God to his people. If that hasn’t been your experience, expectation or prayer when hearing a sermon, then let it be – there is a richer experience available! Sermons then, approached in faith by the hearers, communicate not just the scripture but the Person.
So, given that glowing endorsement, why on Earth recommend that a ‘sick-bed’ is probably, if not certainly, better than a sermon when it comes to teaching? Watson says “Affliction teaches what sin is.” And there it is; actual harm brings the reality of the failure and the tainted state of self and the world to bear not only upon our minds but on our very lives.
“In the word preached we hear what a dreadful thing sin is, that it is both defiling and damning, but we fear it no more than a painted lion; therefore God lets loose affliction, and then we feel sin bitter in the fruit of it.”
Thomas Watson
That we ‘feel sin’ this way through sickness is one of those peculiar blessings that we’re getting used to hearing about in this series. The sort of smack-in-the-mouth blessings which we might have thought we understood whilst it was all theoretical and we still had our teeth intact.