Lessons Learned by Experience

The following text was transcribed from the introductory message to the Pastors College preaching conference on February 12, 2008.

What I’ve Learned About Preaching After Teaching it for 15 Years.

In this chapter I want us to think on a higher level. We’ll delve into the specifics later but now we want to talk at a level where we can orient ourselves to the larger task and familiarize ourselves with the relationship of preaching to pastoral ministry.

I am a little concerned about what the title communicates. It’s not designed to call attention to expertise. I hope the intention of the title will become clear in just a moment. And the second adjustment that I would make has to do with the word “learned,” because it actually should say, “Things I am learning.” Or maybe even, “Things I think I am beginning to get a grasp on.” Please notice the stress on the word “after” which is designed to make a point. Even though I had the privilege of teaching this, there is still so much to learn. Many things are learned by experience.

While taking nothing away from the elements of preaching that can be more or less learned in the classroom, I believe the heart and the soul of preaching are learned in, and grow out of, the crucible of the actual work of weekly preparation and delivery (and that develops over a period of time). “Good preaching” is one thing. But effective pastoral care and leadership through preaching are the result of awareness and intentionality at a higher level.

Things mechanical and things spiritual

In this chapter I am going to share with you seven things that touch on both the mechanics of preaching and the more spiritual dimensions of preaching. You will see more of a lean to the mechanical in the first three. But numbers four through seven lean towards the spiritual side. Preaching is endlessly interesting. It is not quite so simple as to separate out mechanics from the spiritual. Both are inextricably bound together. But there needs to be an awareness and intentionality on both of these directions because both are part of your calling in preaching.

1. The Crucial Connection Between Preaching an Pastoral Leadership

I’ll begin with the biggest difference I’ve seen between teaching preaching in a seminary and actually preaching in the context of a local church to a body of believers. I am regularly amazed at the leverage given to pastors when we preach on Sunday morning. And it is not just because you have the pulpit. Yes, you have the floor. But preaching is also a powerful tool for the exercise of pastoral leadership. So let’s talk about using your preaching to lead.

Using your preaching to lead

You are not a guest speaker who happens who show up every week. You are the pastor, a pastor who is commanded to pay careful attention to the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you an overseer to care for the church of God (Acts 20:28). So you need to see every opportunity to preach—in addition to the opportunity it affords to communicate truth—as an opportunity to exercise pastoral leadership and care.

In the midst of sermon preparation (usually the temptation comes Friday or Saturday) I find myself thinking, “Oh, I just need to get through this one. I will position myself better next week, but for now I just need to get through this message.” Right there is when I need to say one word to myself, “No!” This opportunity cannot be missed! So, Lord, help me not to slip into this mentality of just getting through another sermon.

Listen to Lloyd-Jones.

The greatest danger for me, the greatest temptation to me, is that I should walk into the pulpit next Sunday because it was announced last Sunday that I would be doing so. Of course it is right that a man should not break his contract, but that I am simply doing it because, well, another Sunday has come.

So what does this mean, using your preaching to lead? Certainly it means your faithful leading in terms of doctrinal definition. That’s inherent in the preaching task, and part of your pastoral leadership certainly includes that. But it also means thinking carefully about the spiritual needs of your congregation and determining the priorities for the church. I try to do this each year. I use my retreats to think specifically about where the church needs to be led. And then, having determined those priorities, fuel those priorities with exposition- driven, Spirit-empowered preaching. Don’t put a disjunctive between your goals for the year and your preaching.

One of the things I love about expository preaching is that God can be trusted to set the agenda for your church. You will not fail to get what God wants to get done because you are limited by preaching through the Gospel of Matthew. There will be, even in the Gospel of Matthew, plenty of content to accomplish the goals that you set forth for your church.

One of the things that I have tried to do over the past several years is to write an anniversary letter to the church. Our anniversary is conveniently located on the second Sunday of the year, so right at the beginning of the year the pastors share with the congregation what we are trying to do for the year. And then we attempt to help them see how the preaching relates to these particular goals.

Using your preaching to lead means boldly addressing real issues. Are there things that need to be defined? Do we, as a church, need to talk about the issue of baptism? Then preach on it! Address key issues from the pulpit.

My wife has a little something called the “cringe factor.” After my sermons she will sometimes say, “Oh, the cringe factor was up today.” She is sitting down there as I am addressing some issue and she is thinking, “What are people thinking right now?” And I have to help her with that. She helps me to speak with grace. But there are times that the church needs to be addressed on something. And so what better place than in your preaching?

You need to be bold in addressing points of contact with real life experience. Often topics addressed by the world should be talked about, too. So, for example, a couple of years ago we decided to dedicate three Sundays to “end of life” issues in an “ending well” series. What better way to address these topics than through your preaching?

I don’t think a Sunday passes when I am not conscious of some opportunity to exert leadership. So let me give you the most recent example.

This last Sunday we sent off a church plant to Milwaukee. But I don’t want people to be thinking, “This is just one plant, and then we’re done.” No, I want to build this moment into an opportunity to envision them for the next church plant. And so right in the middle of that sermon from Philippians about the wonderful privilege of gospel partnership, I just said, “How do you feel about this? And how are you going to feel about doing this again in 2010? And then doing another one after that and another one after that, and another one after that, and another one after that?”

Nobody except the guys on the team would have known why I listed five church plants (I am praying for five church plants during my tenure as a pastor). No one would have known that except the guys, but I used the opportunity to begin sowing a seed through pastoral leadership.

It might be something tiny, but I don’t think you should let any Sunday pass without seizing an opportunity to lead through your preaching.

The benefit of corporately-shared experiences

Part of what makes this pulpit leadership so important is the corporately shared experience. I think you can heighten this by announcing ahead of time where you are going in the

pulpit. This builds an anticipation. And you can do that either orally or in print. But take advantage of the corporate experience to announce these kinds of things to help people anticipate the messages as a body.

Also, connect the preaching with other parts of your corporate life. If you have Scripture memory programs, make sure they correlate to the sermon. If you are preaching through Matthew, have Scripture memory verses that correlate to Matthew. Or give your care groups a schedule of your preaching so they can maximize the momentum of your preaching.

You see the point. Anything connected with your corporate life—if you can pull it out and tie your preaching to it—is a way to leverage your preaching for pastoral leadership.

2. Difference Between a Sermon and a Sustained, Unified Teaching Ministry

While I was at Trinity I had the opportunity to frequently fill pulpits on a weekend and that mentality can surprisingly invade your preaching in your home church. We begin thinking of this coming week’s sermon as kind of “one-off.” And then I’ve got another one after that. But this independent sermon mentality, even if you’re in a series, affects your preaching. And it can create an appetite that will never be satisfied because you’ll be looking for responses to independent sermons.

You need to see your preaching as cumulative. Not only will you need to go over topics again and again, but you also need to see that whatever you are preaching is part of something much bigger. So you cannot think in terms of independent sermons.

I would argue that even if you have an independent sermon (separated from any series) you can’t think of it as an independent sermon. And while an extended series helps you to avoid this kind of atomistic approach, even a series needs to be seen as part of something bigger.

Building a house

I have adopted the helpful metaphor of building a house, a great big house for your people to live in. And it’s a life-long project. It has specific parts. It is not vague. And you’ve got to get it built. And this house will need regular upkeep.

I remember being disabused of this naïve notion early in church planting that you can lay the foundation and then move on. Well, two years later there are new people. They weren’t there when you laid the foundation. And by the way, the people that were there need a refresher anyway. So somehow your preaching must be a happy mix of going over again and then building, going over again and then building.

Importance of long-range planning

Every year I take a fall retreat (usually late October or early November). The primary objective is to set priorities for the coming year and to plan the preaching calendar. In that retreat I’m unable to get down into specific texts and weeks. But I don’t need to at that point. I just need to plan out the year.

When I look back at the preaching ministry at CrossWay over the last nine years, this purposeful planning has been one of the most fruitful parts of our attention to preaching. It has paid huge dividends. I shudder to think about the opportunities that could have been missed if this mindset of planning and building a house was not in place. Added to this, the lessens the stress level each week.

Unified theological center

I remember hearing a seminary graduate come to the end of education at Trinity saying, “One thing was missing—a class on how the whole Bible fits together.” Although I loved my education at Trinity, I could have said that when I graduated, too. Building from a unified theological center is something that Sovereign Grace pastors do remarkably well. I just want to add my voice to encourage you to operationalize that in your preaching, making sure you are preaching from this unified theological center. I think your preaching is one of the major places where that needs to be leveraged.

3. Clarity Matters More Than I Thought it Did

When teaching at Trinity I held four hallmarks as absolutely essential to preaching: integrity, engagement, clarity, and spiritual empowerment.

Clarity—both on the small scale and on the large scale—is very important.

I don’t know if you realize this, but you forfeit a lot of momentum if all of a sudden in the course of your preaching someone thinks, “I’m not quite sure I followed that.” Even if it is a small moment in your preaching, you forfeit momentum.

I think it is fair to say that there is, for all of us, a tendency toward unnecessary organizational complexity. I’m not talking about conceptual complexity. Sometimes this is unavoidable. For example, it’s conceptually complex that we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection. Here I’m talking about organizational clarity. And I don’t think you should ever be satisfied with anything less than clarity in the development of your ideas.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Simplicity on this side of complexity is a failure to do your work. You must go through the jungle. There is a time in your sermon preparation where you are going to be in the thick of it. But you must come out. You can’t stay there. You can’t preach from inside the jungle. Come out on the other side of complexity with simplicity.

Large-scale clarity

One of the things that I do fairly early in my sermon preparation process—in fact, as early as possible—is to write down what I call the basic flow of the sermon. In other words, I want to simplify the movement of the sermon. I don’t want to get bogged down in the details at this point. I want to make sure I have clarity on the primary movement of the argument. At this point it’s like stretching out a clothesline. You want to make sure that you are connected all the way down and everything that you are going to add hangs on that clothesline.

Everything in your sermon needs to be clearly contributing to the forward motion of the argument.

Don’t let your sermons become holding tanks for displaced ideas. Your sermon should not be bowl of pearls, but a string of pearls. I have had many sermons that were a holding tank for displaced ideas. Just get that point in somehow. It is so good they will need it and let them figure it out while I am preaching.

Remember, you are preaching to persuade. Persuasion depends on clarity and clarity depends upon unity. You will not persuade if you are unclear. And you will not be clear if your sermon is not unified. So that’s why you need the clothesline all the way through. You must be certain there is a clear, large-scale argument.

And working hard to get clarity on the basic flow of the argument will serve you in discerning if the nugget of information stays or goes. Does the nugget contribute to the forward motion of my argument or not?

You will find if you wrongly place a nugget, you have just robbed yourself of using it at the right place. Within a few weeks you’ll be kicking yourself. “Oh, I wish I hadn’t forced that illustration in there because here is where it belonged.” Be willing to say, “Not yet.” Besides, you are the only person who knows what you didn’t use. This truth is liberating. You are the only person who is aware of what’s left out. So it is not like your people are saying, “Well, why didn’t you use that other illustration?” Because they don’t know about it. They know what you’ve given them. And what you have given them must hang together.

Small-scale clarity

This is just an appeal regarding the use of quotes, illustrations, and all other supportive material. Make certain its contribution to your point is very clear. We can be sloppy here, of inserting an illustration but not connecting it. Make the illustration and quote work for the sermon.

Ask yourself three questions:

• Is it succinct? Don’t include anything more than you need for your point. Only in a very rare occasion should you include a very long quote.

• Is it emphasized rightly? C.J. has served me so well by teaching through his example how to read a quote well. Are you emphasizing the quote according to what you are trying to illustrate or to prove? Highlight the particular things that are going to contribute to the point that you are illustrating.

• Is it operational? When you come out of the quote, make sure to operationalize the quote with reference to your point.

So all three of those things are very important to determine if a quote or illustration advances your idea.

Watch the first five minutes of your preaching. Don’t waste time. Get right to it. I see too many guys laboring over the first five minutes. Time is precious. And it can be confusing if you are trying to get too many other things done in that first five minutes.

4. The Weight of Your Preaching Comes from the Weight of the Truth Meditated Through Your Own Conviction, Not From a Manufactured Passion or Some Confidence in Your Crafting.

Now we begin leaning towards the spiritual side. Let me tell you what is behind this. There were many times in my early enthusiasm when I would be reviewing my sermon and find myself saying something like, “That is the point where I need to be passionate.” I was introducing artificiality. And do you know what happened almost invariably? It would be awkward for me, and awkward for the people. To put it bluntly, my point of passion would flop.

So what should it be like?

Your job is to spend time with your Bible until you feel the burden of the text. You have accurately identified the burden of the text when you have begun to feel the weight of the text on your own soul. You care about it and it matters to you—and not just as a preacher, but as a creature who desperately needs truth. And when this happens, there will be a gravity and a joy about your preaching.

Let me try to capture this in a few notes from history for you. This is from an account by Lloyd-Jones.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne walked into his pulpit at Dundee, and before he had opened his mouth, people would begin to weep and were broken down. Why? Well, there was a solemnity about the man. He had come from the presence of God. He did not trip into his pulpit lightly and crack a joke or two to put everyone at ease and to prepare the atmosphere. No, there was a radiance of God about him. There was a terrible seriousness

Here is another account. Sereno E. Dwight, who assembled The Memoirs of Jonathan Edwards, asked a man who had heard Edwards preach whether he was an eloquent preacher. The man said,

He had no studied varieties of the voice and no strong emphasis. He scarcely gestured or even moved. He made no attempt by the elegance of his style or the beauty of his pictures to gratify the taste and fascinate the imagination. But, if you mean by eloquence the power of presenting an important truth before an audience with overwhelming weight of argument and with such intenseness of feeling that the whole soul of the speaker is thrown into every part of the conception and delivery so that the solemn attention of the whole audience is riveted from the beginning to the close and impressions are left that cannot be effaced, then, sir, Mr. Edwards was the most eloquent man I ever heard speak.

I’m not suggesting we don’t attend to other things. Remember the Chrysostom quote? There are dynamics of public speaking that matter. You should illustrate well. You should gesture now and then. This is not an argument to avoid all of the other tools at your disposal. Nor am I suggesting that any of us are ever going to be a M’Cheyne or Edwards. I am learning that the weight of our preaching comes from the weight of truth mediated through personal conviction.

Identify the burden of your text

I have already mentioned the importance of identifying the burden of your text (also know as “the claim of your passage”). Let me unpack that just a little bit.

Preaching is less a treatise on the material of your text, and more a communication of the burden of the text. Preaching is not coverage of biblical material but the accomplishment of a biblical intention.

A good definition of expository preaching is this: A good expository sermon is one whose content and intent is controlled by the content and the intent of the passage. You can’t be satisfied with the sermon’s content. You must accomplish what God was trying to accomplish in the preaching.

Now, I don’t want to drive a wedge between content and intent. Obviously, the intention of a passage is communicated by the content of a passage. And the preacher uses that material to communicate the burden and intention. But I’m trying to clarify your purpose. The end of preaching is not information, it’s persuasion. Your sermon’s purpose needs to find itself completely in line with the purpose and the burden of the passage. From this burden everything else in you sermon will highlight, emphasize, argue towards, connect, and apply. Success here gives your sermon unity, focus, and effectiveness.

Illustrating the burden

Sometimes one illustration carrying the burden of the message is more effective than multiple small or medium-sized illustrations. There is no formula. Preaching requires wisdom in the moment, so let’s not try to do a paint-by-number thing. Illustrate in a very focused and specific way and you will advance the purpose of your preaching.

5. The Craving for Recognition is Strong and Needs to Die

The craving for recognition is strong and it needs to die.

6. Effectiveness in Your Preaching is Utterly and Completely Dependent on God … And God is Faithful!

Effectiveness in your preaching really is utterly and completely dependent on God. All of the hope of your ministry lies in the Spirit of God operating on the spirits of men. All of it! So you are utterly and completely dependent on God. Notice I did not read the rest of the sentence—“and God is faithful”—which I am going to get to in a moment.

Let me read a wonderful excerpt from a sermon of Edwards that I read recently. The sermon, “Ministers Need the Power of God,” was published in The Salvation of Souls: Nine Previously Unpublished Sermons on the Call of Ministry and the Gospel by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards writes,

The inability of the instruments that God makes use of to do his work appears from their imperfections. First, in that they are creatures and finite beings. If ministers were angels incarnate and had the wisdom and strength of angels and could speak with the tongues of angels, it would be all one [it would make no difference]. If God hid himself and withheld his influence they would be creatures still and their power and knowledge would be limited. The highest angel in heaven cannot convert one soul if God does not set in. Conversion is the peculiar work of God. There are some works that none can do but God, not men nor angels, such as creation and such as raising from the dead and such as the conversion of the soul which is both a creation and a resurrection. The grace of God is a gift that never any can bestow but God. It is a jewel that God has in his own keeping and never commits to any but his own Son to bestow. If ministers knew perfectly the circumstances of every soul, knew all his thoughts and the workings of his heart and so knew how to suit the word exactly to his taste, if he could set forth the gospel in the most powerful, moving and convincing manner that the nature of words will allow of. Yet if the matter be left there and God does nothing, nothing will be done.

And let me read one other section from this same sermon.

And ministers should beg of God that his Spirit may accompany their administration. If their own abilities and performances are but mean, lowly, yet if they have a true love to souls and desire of advancing the kingdom of Christ, God is able to make the weapons of their warfare mighty to the pulling down of strongholds as he made David that appeared so weak and insufficient a warrior to prevail over Goliath without sword or shield or spear only with the instruments of a shepherd. And if they have ever so great strength of natural power and ever so great gifts, yet if they depend upon their own abilities and look that everyone should be persuaded and converted by their gifts and eloquence, there is danger that God will withhold his Spirit. And then it will all be in vain.

Is there anything that sends a chill down your spine more than the thought of coming to the end and discovering all was in vain? Effectiveness in your preaching really is utterly and completely dependent upon God.

... and God is faithful!

God is faithful. I don’t want to separate those two parts of number six. Originally, those were going to be two different points, but I thought that if I said the first part without quickly saying the second part we would all faint, overcome by anxiousness rooted in an insufficient trust in God.

Listen to the words of our friend John Piper in The Supremacy of God and Preaching:

How utterly dependent we are on the Holy Spirit in the work of preaching. All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You go to your study and you look down at your pitiful manuscript and you kneel down and cry, ‘God, this is so weak. Who do you think I am?’ What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odor of death to death and the fragrance of life to life. My God, who is sufficient for these things?

I think it was Lloyd-Jones who said, “To me there is nothing more terrible for a preacher than to be in the pulpit alone without the conscious smile of God.”

We are utterly and completely dependent on God, but God is faithful! Yes, we are utterly and completely dependent on him for strength, illumination, and insight—during the study, the writing, and the preaching. God must perform a miracle every Sunday.

And you know what? Every Sunday he does perform miracles. And he delights to do it! He really uses our preaching for real transformation. God gives gifts and he intends to use them to accomplish something. You can trust God for that. Spiritual gifting both requires faith and encourages faith. So thinking about the reality of spiritual gifting will shift your focus from self-confidence to trust in God.

Role of the Holy Spirit

God works through the active ministry of the Holy Spirit during your preparation. I am so encouraged by this growing awareness of the Spirit’s activity during sermon preparation. For me, the Spirit’s activity shows up primarily in the writing stage, even to the giving of words and phrases.

I began a faith-building process of having a notepad to my side where I put a little checkmark every time I felt like God had just given a word or a phrase. And it was wonderfully encouraging to see the number of checkmarks after a period of three hours of writing. There was a giving of words and phrases repeatedly. I felt like I was being borne along by the Spirit.

You still need careful, diligent study. And during the preaching event it is not always something you will be directly conscious of, though sometimes you might be aware of, God’s presence in a unique way. I don’t know how to say it—something bigger than yourself is in the pulpit.

So I am learning to cultivate a greater awareness of God’s presence given through his Spirit. And I have a greater desire for God’s presence by his Spirit. All the hope of our ministry lies in the Spirit of God operating on the spirits of men. Any genuine change is a distinct work of God. We are completely and utterly dependent on God and God is faithful.

The prayers of the people

Implore the prayers of your people on your behalf. Yes, you might do this in a self- promoting or self-absorbed way. That is a possibility. But it doesn’t have to be. Ask them to pray regularly for you. Ask them to pray for spiritual empowerment. Ask them to pray for humility. Ask them to pray for boldness. Ask them to pray for words.

I believe there is a particular eagerness on God’s part to bless his people as they gather on Sunday mornings and to bless them particularly with his word. So ask your people to pray. And, if possible, have a group of them praying with you on Sunday morning.

Early on in our life as a church, we started a prayer gathering at nine o’clock on Sunday morning—not just for the pastoral team, but for the people of the church as well. I had no idea how much strength I would derive from that. It is a sweet time. We end, typically, by gathering around whoever is going to preach that day. It can be a little awkward sometimes, but I tell you I cannot wait to one day see what God did through those prayer meetings every Sunday morning. Even as an old man sitting on a rocking chair some day, I’ll remember those moments with great fondness.

The prayers of a close ally

I believe preaching prospers under the prophetic voice of a close ally. A godly wife is a gift, and she has a role to play. You need to implore her to fulfill this role, to carry this burden with you, to pray for you, to speak to you specific words of encouragement (not just nice things, but biblical encouragement)—putting courage, faith, and hope in your heart.

Remember that wonderful little moment when Jonathan goes out and finds David in the wilderness. Scripture says, “And Jonathan, Saul’s son, rose and went to David at Horesh, and strengthened his hand in God” (1 Samuel 23:16). That’s a role your wife should be playing and one she is positioned to play like no one else.

7. Preaching is a Costly Act of Love

I believe preaching is ultimately an act of love, but it’s a costly act of love.
E.M. Bounds writes, “Life-giving preaching costs the preacher much—death to self,

crucifixion to the world, the travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from one who has been crucified.”

Given what Bounds says, how should you pray? I think you should pray, “God give me love for these people that goes beyond my awareness of the cost. I know the cost. I feel it every week. Would you please give me a love for these people that goes beyond the cost? Give me a love for you and your word that on Sunday morning shines for people to see. Help me to lay down my life so that my preaching can give life.”

And it’s an act of love to spend yourself every Sunday. Guys, you can’t make this up. It flows out of care. It flows out of love. Do you care about what you are saying? Do you care about the people you are saying it to? Or do you primarily care about yourself in the preaching? Does the love of Christ control us (2 Corinthians 5:14)? Are the words of Paul—“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”— the standard set for the content and the character of your preaching (1 Corinthians 2:2)?

A Workman Approved by God: Transcripts from the 2008 Pastors College Preaching Conference Copyright © 2008 by Sovereign Grace Ministries