At just 14 years old, I stood before Hardin Baptist Church in my hometown in Kentucky on a Sunday night and preached my first sermon. This year marks twenty-five years since that event—twenty-five years of a life of preaching.
To say the least, I hope I’m a better preacher today than I was twenty-five years ago. Here are five lessons I’ve learned along the way.
1. Preach from the text.
I am unashamedly an expository preacher. My first sermon, however, was not. As a 14-year-old, I put together a textually-meandering, topical mess about prayer, inspired mainly from my reading of Andrew Murray books. But as I observed great preachers and studied the art of preaching, I realized that simply expositing the text was the practice that best fit with my understanding of who God is and what he is doing in the world.
This past Easter, our staff at Overland Church evaluated sermons from several regional churches. As we suspected, some prominent evangelical churches neglected even to offer a clear presentation of the gospel, much less an exposition of Scripture for the people of God. The practice confirmed something I had started to realize over the last several years: You don’t have to be a great preacher. Just preach the text. Wherever you go in the country or around the world, churches face a devastating drought of biblical preaching. If you will simply offer God’s sheep the water of the word, you will be a successful preacher of God’s word.
2. Preach early and preach often.
As soon as you begin to discern God’s gifting in your life, and as soon as you begin receiving the confirmation of your local church’s pastors, start preaching and preach at every opportunity you get.
It is increasingly rare for young men to be able to say they preached their first sermon at 14 years old. One reason for this is because many churches no longer have low risk opportunities for young men to test their gifts like Sunday or Wednesday evening services. Perhaps another reason is the availability of great preaching online has made us preaching perfectionists (more on that below). For whatever reason, pastors increasingly aren’t ready to take a risk on the mediocre preaching of a young man. But those of us in leadership need to change these expectations and create new venues and opportunities for young men to learn to preach by preaching.
If you are a young man who is discerning the calling and gifting of the Spirit on your life, then get started (under the supervision of your pastors). The best way to learn to ride a bike is to ride a bike. As a high schooler, I took every opportunity that came my way: teaching youth Sunday school, story time at Vacation Bible School, and pulpit supply for off-the-beaten-path tiny churches without pastors, to name a few. If there was an opportunity to preach, I preached, and I grew as a preacher through experience.
3. Read and memorize Scripture.
When I felt God’s call on my life at 14, my youth pastor took me to meet with a well-known preacher who at the time lived not far away. As I sat in trepidation and awe before this man who had delivered some of the most powerful sermons I had heard in my short life, he said to me, “Son, do you want to know how to be a better preacher than 99% of the pastors around?”
I nodded and sat on the edge of my seat, expecting some profound secret to be delivered to me. Then the great preacher said, “Go home. Read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Then when you’re finished, read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Then read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.”
While I haven’t followed the advice exactly (I’ve used a lot of different reading plans through the years), his point was well made: preachers need to know their Bible. That means reading and memorizing the Bible. While I certainly love biblical backgrounds, all the various branches of theology, and the biblical languages, none of it is a substitute for the slow and plodding work of knowing your English Bible well.
4. Preach from an outline — Kill the manuscript.
Dare I tread on one of the land mine issues among preachers? I can’t avoid it. Kill the manuscript. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve seen a rise in manuscript preaching, but I believe preaching from an outline allows for greater connection with the congregation.
Preaching from an outline allows for greater connection with the congregation.
Listening to someone speak the way they write is exhausting, and it can make a 45-minute sermon feel like 3 hours. Even if you can achieve the art of writing like you speak and can deliver it in a way that seems free flowing, the reality is that it isn’t free flowing. You are handcuffed to the manuscript.
No matter how well you know your congregation, you can’t really preach to the people in the room until you have them in the room. When I’m preaching, I don’t want people simply listening, I want them feasting. And the only way I can really do that well is by having my head up and my heart out, connecting in real time with the congregation on that particular day.
I don’t mean to say that I preach extemporaneously. I rarely stray from the direction I’ve marked out for myself on my outline, but as I sense certain points resonating with people or missing the target, I change the rhythms and the emphases to fit how God is using the text in those people in that room in that moment.
I often tell young preachers: If you have all the time in the world and you want to “write yourself clear” by writing a manuscript, do it. But then turn it back into an outline and preach freely to the people before you in that moment.
5. Don’t be a preaching perfectionist.
As mentioned above, a temptation I’ve seen grow over the past twenty-five years is to become a preaching perfectionist. Maybe we’ve listened to too many sermons by John Piper and Alistair Begg. Our standards have become unreasonably high, and for some people the expectations have become debilitating.
This is one of the reasons that we don’t give young men opportunities to test their gifts: they might not be good enough. But it is also one of the reasons why there has been a general neglect of pastoral ministry in many evangelical churches. Some preachers boast of spending 20, 30, or even 40 hours on a sermon, but this often comes at the expense of pastoring.
You can’t read every good commentary. Know your Bible, read the text repeatedly, use commentaries for difficult spots, and then preach, giving yourself grace even when you don’t execute your sermon to the level you thought you should. Remember, it’s not your words that change people, it is God’s word. And if you explained, illustrated, and applied God’s word, then he will work. Preaching is that simple.
John Webster and the Holiness of Preaching
For Webster, preaching and pastoral work is one of a profound vocation; a calling to emulate the God who preaches.
Masterful
Dr. Iorg thanks his pastor, Dr. Brian Kennedy, for his life-giving, spiritually sustaining sermons, and reminds us that preaching, done well, still invigorates people.
Illustrating Well – An Excerpt
Dr. Jim Wilson’s new book, Illustrating Well, provides preachers with a resource to learn what makes an effective sermon illustration. You can find an excerpt of his new publication here.
