If Malcolm Gladwell is correct and it truly takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, I should have the art of preaching down. By this point in my life, I’ve preached several hundred sermons and put in thousands of hours in message prep.
Yet, not only do I not feel like I have it down, but I’m waking up to the reality that the “art” I’ve been doing for most of my sermonic life may have been closer to heresy than I would like to admit.
Let me explain.
The model of sermon preparation and delivery that I modeled during my early years as a pastor taught me a consistent rhythm for teaching the Bible. It went like this: Pick a behavior that you would like people to do or not do, find a verse in Scripture to support this behavioral change, tell a story that elicits emotions of guilt or regret, and invite the audience to respond by doing what you’ve told them to do.
So that’s what I did. Hundreds and thousands of times. I taught people how to obey a wide assortment of biblical commands: control their tongues, avoid temptation, maintain sexual purity, love others, serve the poor, give generously and so on.
And then I would wonder why those I spoke to were so prone to indulge in the very acts I had so eloquently taught them to avoid. The problem did not seem to be in my delivery, in my illustrations or in my clever use of stories. I could not put my finger on the problem.
My failure can be seen in two different ways to teach a familiar story about Jesus. Luke 5 and Matthew 4 both tell the story of Jesus’ call of his original disciples. Matthew 4:18–22 reads:
While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
