The Preaching Life

The truth about preaching and preachers

The truth about preaching is that it isn’t a job, activity, career, gig, hobby, job, livelihood, occupation or vocation. It’s a calling. But the truth doesn’t stop there because preaching doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes place in the middle of a preacher’s congregation. And what happens between a preacher and his congregation on any given Sunday is a dynamic unlike what you find in any other profession.

That was the case last Sunday at my church. To start with, in the middle of my sermon a baby cranked up toward the back of the crowd. I normally don’t worry too much about babies making noise while I preach because through the years I’ve learned to tune them out as the price a church pays if it wants to reach young families. This baby, though, chose to scream loudest just as I paused at an important part of my message. The sound ricocheted across the room like a rifle shot. In the awkward silence that followed I said, “Amen,” a response that Baptist preachers are prone to make at such moments to break the tension. The congregation chuckled and the child apparently was satisfied as I didn’t hear from him again.

Preaching is like that. Some Sundays are perfect and the Holy Spirit carries you along as though you’re floating down a river in a canoe and you go home feeling like you accomplished something for the Kingdom. Other Sundays are the opposite, and everything that could go wrong does go wrong and you go home after church thinking that God must have made a mistake in calling you into this life.

It turned out Sunday that screaming babies were the least of my concerns. A few minutes later—while I was still preaching—one of our security people walked into the Worship Center and made his way to a seat near the back. Stooping over, he picked up an unattended backpack and took it out of the room. While words continued spilling out of my mouth, my thoughts went into overdrive as I remembered those recorded messages in airport lounges telling passengers to report suspicious bags to officials. I was sure that people sitting near the pew with the bag were thinking the same thing. Thankfully, the episode turned out to be innocent. A young homeless man had come to church and left his backpack in his seat while going to the restroom. After the service, several people in our congregation went out of their way to make him feel welcome. Two of them later took him to lunch.

While the situation was developing, though, my mind was racing through the inner dialogue so well known to all preachers. On one level, I continued preaching the sermon I had prepared. On another level, I was thinking through options for getting the congregation out of the room if the police officer gave me the signal from the back of the room. Sometimes preaching splits in different directions. There’s the voice coming out of your mouth to the people who need to hear the Word but there are also the voices in your head processing all the other things going on around you, like crying babies, homeless people, families in need, marriages in trouble, lost people who need Jesus. Maybe pharmaceutical companies could develop a special drug for us, something to keep us focused and scattered at the same time. They could call it “Preachmax,” a familiar name to, especially, older pastors.

But there was still more to Sunday’s service. At the conclusion of the service another man walked into the Worship Center, an older man plainly in distress. Making his way to the front pew, he plopped down and, holding his head in his hands, began weeping. As I walked up to him I could hear him saying over and over, “No one will help me.” It didn’t take long for me to realize that he needed professional help. Thanks to one of our staff members as well as our security people, we were able to get him to a nearby Emergency Room that referred him on to a Mental Health facility. A few minutes later, in our Connection Center where my wife and I meet guests following the service, a large family who had come to church that morning for the first time approached me. I had noticed them earlier during the sermon and could tell that they were burdened. It didn’t come as a complete surprise that they wanted to talk with me afterwards. After four decades of preaching, you get a feel for this kind of thing. We were able to find a time to get together later this week.

As I talked with the family, I noticed a young man waiting patiently nearby. When I finally had time to walk over to him, he spoke of a deep spiritual need he was struggling to understand. The sermon that morning had focused on the Second Coming of Jesus and centered on a simple question: Are you ready for the Lord’s return? It’s a biblical question and one that Jesus himself had directed his disciples to carefully consider. It’s still a pressing question today. Preaching, I’ve learned through the years, is most effective when it simply follows the biblical text. Anything a preacher adds or subtracts from the Bible has the net effect of lessening its impact. That a young man would feel in his soul a need to prepare himself for Jesus’ return didn’t catch me unaware; it was, though, another reminder of the priority of biblical preaching.

The amazing thing about preaching is that, somehow, by God’s grace and the work of the Holy Spirit, it so often finds a way to connect with crying babies, homeless people, broken old men, families, young adults and, for that matter, preachers themselves. More times than not, there’s that mystical moment when standing before your people with nothing but an open Bible and the Holy Spirit, you connect earth and heaven and shape a holy space where God can work in human lives. Preachers live for those moments.

Like many preachers, I tend to preach sermons in series so that there’s continuity from one Sunday to the next. Some series are topical and deal with issues of common interest and need. For example, almost all preachers preach regular series on marriage and family issues because so many people struggle in those areas. Other series are doctrinal and explain the beliefs and convictions necessary for people to be spiritually healthy. Other series are devoted to outreach and evangelism—although almost all sermons of any kind include a gospel invitation. There are strictly expository sermon series that take a single book of the Bible and lead the people through it; if not verse by verse, chapter by chapter. And then there are series—I confess to a particular aaffection for this method—that combine the best of topical and expositional. An example I did a few months back was an expositional series from the book of James that dealt with spiritual growth. I called it, “Roadblocks: Overcoming the Obstacles to Spiritual Maturity.”

The sermon I preached Sunday originated four months earlier. While on sabbatical leave, I had a sense that my congregation could benefit from a season in a single Bible book. So I went to Isaiah, an Old Testament book not often preached from for an extended time because of the complexity of its historical setting and the confusing way it’s structured. As I thought and prayed through my approach, I felt led toward a nine-week series that would hit the highpoints of the book and lead my people into a deeper experience of the reality of God’s judgment and the promise of hope in his forgiveness, a promise that finds its fulfillment in Jesus. Nine weeks is a long time to spend in that kind of series, but I didn’t feel too badly about asking my people to do it. They had it much better than the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia. A while back, their pastor—the wonderful preacher and writer Ray Ortlund—took two full years to preach through the book. Then again, Presbyterians tend to sit still for longer periods of time than Baptists.

With the series laid out, I began the weekly discipline of diving into the sermon’s text for each week. It’s a familiar pattern known to preachers everywhere—except those who sidestep the hard work of sermon preparation by buying their sermons online or letting ChatGPT—yes, that’s a growing trend—do the work for them. The truth is that, if a pastor is going to be faithful to his calling and to his people, he must put in the hard work of studying God’s Word in order to receive whatever message the Holy Spirit wants him to deliver on Sunday. There’s nothing particularly exalting or romantic to it—Eugene Peterson calls it “blue-collar work”—but the hours a pastor devotes to sermon preparation are his most important duties. Neglecting this part of his calling leads to shallow pastors and shallow churches.

Monday, I write out the Scripture passage in longhand and begin identifying its basic arguments or truths. Tuesday, I consult commentaries. Wednesday, I combine both my initial impressions with what Bible scholars say. Thursday, I begin to develop an outline. Friday, I consolidate everything and begin writing out the narrative flow of the sermon. Saturday morning I write the final draft, including the slides that will be used during the sermon. Saturday night I go over the final product. Early Sunday morning I make last minute adjustments. While every preacher has his own style of writing sermons—I have a friend who writes his final draft while sitting in his car in his driveway; WA Criswell, the famous preacher at First Baptist Church Dallas, Texas, was known to write his sermons while sitting in a bathtub eating oranges—all of us have one thing in common. The rhythm of writing the weekly sermon is the main factor that sets our weekly schedule. Not always, of course. Other things at church and at home are always going on and many times disrupt our preferred routine of sermon preparation. Still, our time and attention is almost always centered on the weekly sermon. That’s why preaching isn’t a job or a hobby or a casual pursuit. It’s a life.

Preaching isn’t the only thing that preachers do. Our other duties include teaching, discipling, outreach, personal counseling, leadership development, organizational development, working with staff, ministering to families, speaking to different age groups within the church, conducting weddings, funerals and baptisms, writing letters, building budgets, helping commitees, raising money and casting vision. It’s a pretty long list and one that includes such a diversity of activites and situations that preachers like me with short attention spans find church leadership a constant source of interest and joy. But preaching is the foundation of everything else. When people use that old line with me that they think they came up with themselves about how nice it must be to have a job that only requires one work day a week, I have a stock reply. “Let me tell you one thing,” I say to them, “Nobody pays me to preach. It’s my calling and I do that for free.” Then I usually take on the same snarky tone they use. “What you pay me for is all the other stuff I have to do every week.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was arguably the greatest preacher of the twentieth century, and his book on preaching, “Preaching and Preachers,” is the best book on preaching that I’ve ever read. Many teachers of preaching say it’s the best book on preaching, period, a judgment I agree with. But Lloyd-Jones’ most important observation of preaching and preachers is that you can’t distinguish between the two. In other words, the preacher and his preaching are so intertwined that the one leads naturally into the other. This is how Lloyd-Jones describes the relationship in his book:

What is preaching? Logic on fire! Eloquent reason! Are these contradictions? Of course they are not. Reason concerning this Truth ought to be mightily eloquent, as you see it in the case of the Apostle Paul and others. It is theology on fire. And a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology; or at least the man’s understanding of it is defective. Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the Truth must lead to this. I say again that a man who can speak about these things dispassionately has no right whatsoever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one."

The Apostle Paul tells the truth about the preaching life even better in words that have long formed my own heart for preaching and love for my congregation:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, alwasy be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. (2 Timothy 4:1-5)