Grow in your realization that your sermon is entirely dependent upon God’s sovereign grace.
This is perhaps one of the top five lessons I’ve learned since assuming my role as preaching pastor of our church. Everything rides on God’s sovereign grace! I can put in 20 hours of exegesis, synthesis, and homiletics, but if I wake up Sunday morning with a pounding headache, it’ll be worthless. More importantly, if God doesn’t draw near to us by His Spirit through His Word to open hearts, to convict and give repentance, the best sermon will fall on dry bones. Sometimes the Lord gives His blessing on your sermons and sometimes He withholds it, and He has every right to do both. Therefore, be mindful that all our preaching, and indeed everything we do in pastoral ministry, is entirely contingent on a sovereign work of God’s Spirit. If I could suggest some resources here, two books that well understand this essential but neglected truth are Al Martin’s Preaching in the Holy Spirit and Martyn Lloyd Jones’ Preaching and Preachers. It’s appalling that most books on preaching say little to nothing about the work of the Spirit, but these two volumes hit the nail on the head.
Pray desperately for an outpouring of God’s Spirit.
This point is an obvious application of the previous truth. If our sermons are entirely dependent on God’s sovereign grace, it stands to reason that we preachers should be diligently pleading with God throughout the week that He’ll pour out His Spirit come Sunday. Dedicate part of your daily prayer time to specifically praying for your upcoming sermon. Enlist your family members, congregation, and pastor-friends to beg God’s blessing on your preaching. After the sermon is over, pray that God would cause the Word to continue to percolate in the minds of those who heard the message. Something John Bunyan once said may apply most directly to preaching: “You can do more than pray, after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.” For more thinking on this point, I recommend E.M. Bounds’ classic Power Through Prayer [originally entitled Preacher and Prayer]. But be forewarned; reading it may make you feel compelled to quit the ministry.
Exercise faith in the truth that God’s normal means of salvation and sanctification is the ordinary sermon.
Twenty-first century America is a culture of mindboggling technological feats, instant access internet, massive political rallies, and huge entertainment productions. Osama bin Laden can be eliminated halfway around the world and it’s on the news minutes later. One unfortunate side effect of this is that we begin to assume that it’s dramatic expressions and experiences that change the world. We have little place in our thinking for the slow, methodical, persevering mentality of the farmer. This kind of thinking can creep into the church with the result that we subtly begin to assume that it’s only the jaw-dropping, goose bump-producing, once-in-a-decade sermon that truly changes God’s people. This, in turn, leads us to think that if we don’t hit a homerun every time we preach, we’ve disappointed our people or failed as preachers. Realize, brother-pastors, in God’s mysterious providence, He more often than not uses the ordinary to do the extraordinary (1 Corinthians 1:26ff.). He more often uses base-hit sermons than homerun sermons to bring in the runs. Most of us will never preach a Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; most of us will never be a John Piper or a Martyn Lloyd-Jones; but that’s okay. That’s actually God’s plan. If you’re faithfully expositing the Word, week after week, year after year, even if you’re an ordinary preacher, God’s Spirit will do His work. Sinners will be saved and the saints will be built up. And the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church.
I trust these lessons are of some help to you, brother-pastors. Again, my hope is to spare you some of the humiliation the Lord has brought me through. As you preach the Word, in season and out, beware the perils of pride.
