Paul, the greatest philosopher of ancient times, came to Athens. You can well imagine how he had waited and longed for the opportunity to speak in this home of philosophy and intellectual life. Now he was to speak, not to uncultured barbarians, but to men who could understand and appreciate his best thoughts. He preached in Athens the grandest sermon, as far as argument is concerned, ever uttered. I doubt if ever a sermon of Paul's accomplished less. He could not even rouse a healthy opposition. The idea of a new god, Jesus, and a new goddess, the Resurrection, rather tickled the Athenian fancy. He left them, and, in deep dejection, went down to Corinth. There he determined to know only "Christ and him crucified," and thus preaching in material, vicious Corinth he founded a church.
Some of you will go through the same experience. You will preach to cultured and intelligent audiences, and they will listen courteously and eagerly as long as you tell them something new, and do not ask them to do anything. The only possible way of reaching Athenian intellect or Corinthian materialism and vice is by preaching Christ, "the power of God and the wisdom of God." And you will reach more Corinthians than Athenians.
You may preach sermons full of the grandest philosophy and theology, and of the highest, most exact, science; you may chain men by your logic, thrill them by your rhetoric, and move them to tears by your eloquence, and they will go home as dead and cold as they came. What they need is power, life. But preach "Christ and him crucified"--not merely dead two thousand years ago--but risen and alive for evermore, and with us to the end of the world, the grandest, most heroic, divinest helper who ever stood by a man, one all-powerful to help and who never forsakes, and every one of your hearers who is not dead to truth will catch the life, and go home alive and not alone.
So long as we preach a dead Christ we shall have a dead church, as hopeless as the apostles were before the resurrection. "But now is Christ risen from the dead," "alive for evermore." See how Paul and Peter and John, and doubtless all the others, talked with him and he with them, after he was taken from them, and you have found the secret of their power, and of that of all the great Christian heroes and martyrs who could truly say, Lord Jesus, we understand each other. Better yet, prove by experience that it is possible for every one of us.