Preacher’s Personal Life

Spiritual Warfare and Preaching – Part 3

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Since spiritual warfare is a reality we face as preachers, perhaps there is more we should be doing in order to stand firm against the wiles of the enemy? Again, I would love to hear your suggestions. I would like to focus my thoughts on one key area – prayer.

Preaching Prayer Partners – I am a firm believer in the importance of prayer partners. We are blessed with a network of prayer partners that stand with us in prayer as we minister. This is not just the privilege of missionaries, why not preachers too? Seek out a group of people who will pray for you as a preacher, your family and your ministry. Then remember to communicate regularly, appreciate appropriately and pray for them as well.

Preaching Prayer Teams – This is one of the most difficult things to organize, perhaps because it has so much potential. Find a small group who will pray during the service, interceding for those ministering (preacher, music team, etc.), and for those in attendance. The challenge is first of all finding people willing to miss the service, then finding people who understand what it means to intercede throughout the time rather than for just the first few minutes. Training, encouragement and appreciation are vital.

Personal Prayer Life – Arranging for others to pray for you and your ministry is no substitute for a dynamic personal prayer life. In this area I am more of a pragmatist than a spiritual disciplines fanatic. Do whatever it takes to stimulate and cultivate a healthy prayer life – journaling, prayer-walking, prayer while swimming, prayer while pacing, prayer-driving, etc. There really is no substitute for time with God.

Enjoying Exegesis

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At its core, a commitment to expository preaching is a commitment to biblical exegesis. If we are going to rest our eternity on the message of the Scriptures, and entrust the needs of our congregations to that message, then we must diligently pursue the meaning of the text. Our ministry demands a disciplined, responsible and wholehearted commitment to exegesis. While our exegesis should be rigorous, we should not allow it to become a chore for us. The journey of discovery as we wrestle with God’s Word can be a lifelong delight. As Richard Erickson puts it, “…always keep the ball rolling, however slowly. . . . Strive not for perfection, but for persistence.” His book on New Testament Exegesis is on its way to me, and I look forward to reading it. But more importantly, let us enjoy the privilege of studying God’s Word.

One of my professors at seminary, Dr Bruce Fong, now at Michigan, would always start class the same way, “Well, good morning class, always a pleasure to welcome you here. No place on earth I’d rather be, than studying God’s Word with you. Man, O man! What a privilege!” Let us never allow the pressures of ministry, the problems of people and the perpetually approaching deadlines to steal from us the joy of studying God’s Word.

The Problem of Performance

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The danger of performing is not only there when preaching a first-person sermon. It is a danger every time we preach. After all, as a preacher we study an ancient text, determine its main idea and its contemporary relevance, then design a message to communicate both the meaning and the relevance to the congregation who will sit before us on Sunday morning. Our goal is not to fill time, but to stir people and to see lives transformed. As has been said many times, we preach to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. And if we’re honest, there are ways to get that done. It is not out of our reach to spin a story a certain way in order to turn the emotions of our listeners, or ask a rhetorical question that we know will poke a nerve of guilt in them. So how are we to avoid stepping up to the pulpit and treating it like a stage?

1. Give preparation time to soak. Last minute preparation will lead to last minute desparation wherein “preaching tactics” will seem like our only hope. We must be diligent to begin the study and thinking process early enough for a message or a series to soak in before we must pour out. Even if all we can do is to start reading and making some notes ahead of time, it is worth it. Performance is lines through an actor, but preaching is truth through personality (Phillips Brooks succinct definition). Allow time for the preparation to become a part of who you are so that you preach something you truly believe and know deep down.

2. Prepare more, not less. In the quest for “natural” delivery, it may be tempting to prepare less. The hope is that what comes out will be less of a performance and more “from the heart.” The reality is that unprepared preaching will often lean heavily on our own abilities. It is better to craft, to sweat, to wrestle, to pray, to think and to think some more. As I have written before, in an ideal world it is best to write out a manuscript in full and edit it closely and prayerfully. All that extra work will result not in performance, but genuine preaching “from the heart” as well as “from the text” – choosing to do minimal work will compromise both the text and your heart, leaving only any performance skills you may have.

3. Pray. Not just a “bless this effort” prayer, but real prayer. Personal wrestling with the God who is at work in you first. Persistent wrestling for those who will receive the message. There is a great spiritual battle raging around you and around them. Let us not fight in the pulpit a battle we have not first heavily engaged in the closet.

Preacher’s Worst Nightmare

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There are all sorts of things that can go wrong for a preacher. What is your worst nightmare? Last week I was at an event at All Souls in London, where a preacher referred to arriving at a church and realizing the message he planned to preach there was one he had preached there before. Is that a nightmare? What about sitting in a service as the first part dragged longer and longer, leaving less and less time for the message? I haven’t enjoyed that experience when it has happened. Or the other extreme. A couple of years ago in the Caribbean I was asked to preach for twenty minutes, but when we arrived at the church I was told my message would be live on the radio and I had to finish on the dot at 10:05am . . . and I was introduced at 9:00am. A twenty minute message squeezed into sixty-five. I’m sure you could add to this list of preaching nightmares.

But the worst nightmare? That’s easy. Preaching a sermon that is all me and no God. That’s the worst nightmare.

Perpetual Preaching Student?

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To be the best stewards of the ministry the Lord has entrusted us with, we need to keep stretching ourselves. There are many ways to do this.

Preaching Passages – Choosing to preach difficult passages or subjects is often helpful. For those who speak in a variety of churches, it is helpful to have them select the passage rather than choosing your own every time.

Preaching Books – It is good to read books related to the field of preaching and related fields like communication and hermeneutics. If you click on “Review” in the right-hand bar, you’ll find reviews of several very helpful books.

Preaching Exposure – Look for opportunities to hear preachers from outside your own church or circle of influence. Perhaps a respected preacher online, or better yet, a conference or event. It may be hard for pastors to get to other churches on a Sunday (of course), but there may be the odd opportunity to do so, or midweek events. Take the opportunity to listen to good preachers and evaluate what they do well.

Preaching Training – Look for opportunities to take seminars or courses designed for preachers. Perhaps in a local Bible school, or in other venues. There is much to be gained from any course in preaching, just remember that you will get out as much as you put in to the experience.

Preacher Fellowship – It is easy to miss this one, but perhaps this is the best of all. Look for ways to get together with other preachers. Perhaps for an evening every couple of months, or perhaps for a few days less frequently. Opportunities to discuss, to learn, to study together, to pray together, to stimulate each other in your ministry. I am planning for such a get together and cannot wait. I will report on the experience so others can benefit too.

How do you stay fresh and stimulate your own growth as a preacher? It is easy to settle in to a pattern, but it is privilege to be a lifelong student of preaching.

Lack of Application? Not Just A Pulpit Problem.

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A follow-up thought to yesterday’s post. The difference between a true expository sermon and an interesting biblical lecture is often the speaker’s awareness of sermonic purpose. As Bryan Chappell wrote (Christ-Centered Preaching, p52) “Without the ‘so what?’ we preach to a ‘who cares?’” In his own way Haddon Robinson has put it like this, “Preaching can be like delivering a baby, or like delivering a missile – in one your goal is to just get it out, but in the other your goal is to hit the target!”

Perhaps the problem goes deeper though. While it is true that we must think through the purpose for a sermon before preaching it, there seems to be an issue at an earlier stage in the process. Are we saying that it is possible to study a passage, but not follow through and consider its application? Hermeneutical purists argue about whether application is a part of the hermeneutical process. Yet as preachers our concern is not academic wrangling, but bringing the Word of God into the lives of His people, by the power of His Spirit, to see His purposes worked out. May we never fall into the trap of studying a passage, determining the author’s intended meaning, but failing to consider the contemporary application of that passage in our own lives.

Perhaps a lack of application in the pulpit is the fruit of a lack of application in personal study. The implications are frightening.

Preachers and Their Books

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If you’re like me, you are more than happy to receive amazon.com gift vouchers for Christmas. While others may love their cars, guitars, guns or fishing rods, many preachers are in love with their libraries. If you, like me, are a closet bibliophile, this post will make you uncomfortable. Books are a real blessing and a visit to a country where pastors have access to nothing soon puts our personal libraries into perspective. Be sure to be thankful for what you have, but don’t be obsessive:

Don’t hold your books too tightly. If God has blessed you with more than a handful of books then you are very blessed. But don’t let them sit dormant on your shelves as a monument to your past spending. Let them do their work. Share books with people that are motivated to learn from them. Share your books, let them be an extension of your ministry, and if a good book is not returned or is damaged . . . just replace it. It’s not a big deal!

Become passionate about giving books away. Scan your shelves for books that you have outgrown and no longer refer to. I don’t mean trash or heresy that should be recycled like a free newspaper. But good books that are not pertinent for your study any more. Find someone who would benefit and give them the book. Take advantage of your book awareness and become a distributor of free books. You know quality books. You also have opportunities to promote and push books. Now with online sellers you can find a quantity of a good book for cheap and push them from the pulpit. Either give them away, or ask for donations to allow you to replace them with others to give away. Sometimes your free book fund will be up, sometimes down, but if books are changing lives, you are up!

Reading Matters

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One further suggestion from Fred Craddock’s list of suggestions for a life of study is to set up your own library to function efficiently. I’ll take his prompting and share my thoughts on the subject of reading:

Don’t shelve books until they have been read. Either a pile on your desk or a dedicated shelf for new books is the way to go. Once a book is shelved with the others of its kind, the chances of actually reading it are reduced drastically. Engage the content of a new book enough to know if you should keep it, where it should be shelved, why you would go back to it, etc.

Read wisely, books should not be making you feel guilty. Many people feel guilty if they have started a book and not finished it. I regularly interact with people unwilling to look at a new book because they have an old one they feel obliged to finish first. Read wise. You have paid an amount of money for the book. It may be that one chapter of that book is all you need to read for your purposes. If this is the case then you paid that much money for one chapter, the rest was a bonus from Amazon! Forcing yourself to move your eyes over pages of text that are not of interest right now may appease some guilt, but you’ll learn nothing, get tired eyes and procrastinate on reading what you actually need to read. For many of us, if we could be free of guilt from unfinished books, we would be free indeed . . . well, it’s not that good, but it certainly helps!

Shelve books for access. Some books should be consulted regularly, so shelve them within easy access. I have several reference works I consult regularly, and books on interpretation and literary structure which need to be close at hand. Everything else should be shelved in an orderly manner that allows you to find what you want when you want it.

A Life of Study – Part 2

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Three more suggestions from Fred Craddock on the life of study, with comments:

3. Develop the ability to use small units of time. When you only have a few minutes, redeem the time with brief journal articles, checking biblical references, assembling resources, sequencing material to be read, etc.

4. Regularly read novels, short stories and poetry. Craddock is right when he notes that as preachers we need the input of well-written and imaginative work. We tend to read heavy material written by experts in their field, but usually not experts in the use of language. Yet in order to communicate with compelling and gripping language, we need to be exposed to it. Avoid the cheap thrill stuff, but read well-written literature alongside everything else.

5. Resist the urge to cease studying once a sermon idea emerges. You may have an idea, but does further study strengthen it or disprove it? Allow an idea to stand the test of context and theological consistency. The goal of study is to get at the main idea, but don’t just accept the first attempt at an idea. Make sure it stands some further testing and refinement.

A Life of Study – Part 1

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Fred Craddock, in chapter 4 of Preaching makes a series of suggestions for cultivating and guarding a life of study. I’ll share five of his ten suggestions in these two posts, with comments added:

1. Inform your congregation of your study schedule, explaining that study time is time spent with the whole congregation. It is better to plan times of study than to try and fit them in around other things. If it is in the schedule, then try to treat those times as you would another appointment – keep it and don’t be interrupted whenever possible.

2. Be realistic in your expectations of your study life. You cannot read every book on every subject relevant to your role. However, hunt out the key landmark books in each field and know them well. Each key book will be followed by dozens of other books that interact with the key book. Try to get at the source of the discussion. This would apply to Biblical studies, counseling, homiletics, pastoral ministries, church growth, cultural analysis, systematic theology and so on. Find the key books and interact with them.

How do you find key books? Ask experts in the field, or well-trained peers. Be aware of helpful tools like John Glynn’s Commentary and Reference Survey (currently on 10th edition). Read introduction’s to journal articles, skim book reviews, etc. The lists of required texts in seminary book stores are also valuable. A little time well spent in hunting will save a lot of time reading secondary texts.