The article warns that a “sluggard” — someone who avoids completing an errand fully or delivers a message carelessly — is as aggravating as “vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes” to those who send him. It argues that such laziness undermines trust, damages the sender, and shows why it is wise to know whom you delegate important tasks.

Proverbs 5:18–19 presents a bold tribute to the pleasure of physical love within a monogamous marriage, urging the husband to rejoice in the wife of his youth, delight in her, and be intoxicated always in her love as a joyful, God-given imperative rather than an optional extra. The article emphasizes that this marital enjoyment serves as a safeguard against sexual immorality, reflects the positive side of the seventh commandment, and expresses the husband’s responsibility to nurture a warm-blooded, lively, and faithful marital bond that honours God’s design for marriage.

True preaching, for Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrugge, must come from the heart — not simply as doctrine spelled out, but as the living Word of God addressing conscience and life. He believed the Word’s power is “unto salvation,” so sermons should comfort mourners, revive faith, and bring sinners into deeper communion with Christ. Preaching should not be a cold intellectual exercise, but a heart-directed proclamation that brings the burdened soul to rest in God’s promises and grace.

Experiential preaching within the context of the Dutch Second Reformation (or “Further Reformation”) seeks to bring the truths of the Word into the believer’s heart and life, stressing not just doctrine but how the triune God works savingly in sinners — especially regarding guilt, grace, sanctification, and gratitude. It urges that faith and sanctification be lived out in everyday life, so that genuine holiness and personal transformation follow doctrinal truth.

Experiential preaching shows how the Triune God works savingly in sinners, especially bringing together a poor sinner and a rich Christ so that the truths of sin and grace become a felt reality in the heart and life. It draws believers (and sinners) into heartfelt communion with God in Christ by moving from the objective truths of Scripture to the subjective life of faith through the work of the Holy Spirit.

For John Calvin, preaching is always “scriptural”: the Word of God itself is alive and powerful, so true preaching never needs an added “experiential supplement.” What later preachers term “experiential preaching” — stressing inner feelings, personal spiritual experience, the believer’s guilt, grace, assurance or comfort — is for Calvin not a separate kind of sermon but implicitly contained in faithful exposition of Scripture and God’s promises.

The article argues that Martin Luther’s preaching was not “experiential” in the sense later associated with Pietism — his index of sermons lacks terms like “experientiality,” “experience of faith,” or “experiential preaching.” Rather, when “experience” appears at all in his preaching it always refers to fides — faith — so that the “experientiality” in his sermons is really just the believer’s experienced faith, not a broader mystical or introspective experience.

Experiential knowledge in the Bible raises a controversial theme, since some groups claim that preaching is poor and does not build up the congregation if it is not experiential, while others object that experiential insight supplements the Word of God and places human experience in the centre. The article seeks clarity by exploring spiritual experience as inward, in-the-soul awareness of communion with God, showing that spiritual experience is the experiential side of faith and that there is no true faith without this experience.