"Our greatest qualification for the ministry is the mercy of God." Ajith Fernando

Christian, contextualization means identifying with unbelievers, not accommodating to nominal Christians.

Christians enjoy feeling convicted

“I see a trend in many churches where people are beginning to enjoy convicting sermons. They walk out feeling broken over their sin. The distorted part is that they can begin to feel victorious in their sadness. They boast, ‘I just heard the most convicting message, and it ruined me!’ The focus is on the conviction itself and not the change it is meant to produce—change that doesn’t necessarily follow when we stay focused on conviction. Guilt is not always a good thing. It is only good if it leads us past sorrow to the joy of repentance.” Francis Chan

"Technique is a terrible substitute for the presense of God." Darren Patrick

an honest preacher's prayer

"Lord, by your Spirit, may your people hear a better sermon than the one I am about to preach." (@RevKevDeYoung)

When Preachers Suffer From Pulpit Anxiety

Unbelievable how accurate this is lol: http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/164797-jeremy-linneman-preachers-suffer-pulpit-anxiety.html

takes work to be concise

“If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation. If you want me to speak for thirty minutes, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.” 

Winston Churchill

Your inadequacy is one of God's favorite tools in accomplishing His purposes (Exodus 3; Jeremiah 1; 2 Cor. 12).

humility and pride in preaching

I read a little parable about a young Scottish minister who walked proudly into the pulpit to preach his first sermon. Not sure where the story comes from but it's such a great reminder!

This young Scottish minister had a brilliant mind and a good education and was confident of himself as he faced his first congregation. But the longer he preached, the more conscious everyone was that “the Lord was not in the wind.” He finished his message quickly and came down from the pulpit with his head bowed, his pride now gone. Afterward, one of the members said to him, 

“If you had gone into the pulpit the way you came down, you might have come down from the pulpit the way you went up.”

when you don't know what to preach

Occasionally I get invited to preach at other churches. That's always a tough thing for me because I typically have a hard time discerning what to preach. Along those lines, I found this helpful advice from Pastor Ray Pritchard:

There are two ways to go here, and only one of them really works. You can start with the church and think, “What do they need to hear?” Good question if you are their pastor. Bad question when you don’t know the congregation.

What do you do then?

Preach a message that is simple and clear and stirs your own heart. It’s not easy, in fact it can be very difficult, to come in cold and preach to people you don’t know. You can’t and shouldn’t depend on much help from the audience because they don’t know you very well. Think about what can you say in 30 minutes that is simple, clear, and stirs your own heart. This probably isn’t a good time to review the “meal offering” of Leviticus 2. Hard to get their attention on that one. Stick with a message that is close to your own heart. 

In most cases a visiting preacher doesn’t need to ask, “What do the people need?” because he won’t know the answer. Stick close to the central truths of the Bible. Pick something that feels comfortable to you, that you care about and believe in. That way you can preach with confidence knowing that you have a message from God’s Word you are excited about.

preaching that addresses non-Christians

One way to respect non-Christians in your audience is to talk directly to them not just about them. Rather than saying "they" as if everyone in the room is a Christian, say "you." Talking about about "them" indirectly makes non-Christians feel like you see them as some kind of specimen or abstract people group to be analyzed and described rather than actual people to be addressed.

Preacher, it is one thing to say that a truth is astounding; it is another for people to see that you are astounded.

preaching is worship - Ed Clowney

"Since [preaching] is the declaration of God's name it is addressed not only to men, but also to God. It is an act of worship. Our preaching often lacks the punctuation of the exclamation point of praise. Unlike the Scriptures, our sermons are so centered on men that they neglect to bless God. The doxologies that burst from Paul in the midst of his expositions never trouble our placid pools of prose" (Ed Clowney in Preaching and Biblical Theology, p.73).

what sermon prep really looks like

This post by Kevin DeYoung about sermon preparation is almost unbearably real lol. Glad I'm not the only one.

"somewhere along the way we have succumbed to the temptation to displace the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of strategic planning"

A friend of mine sent me this quote today. Such a good reminder, based on 1 Corinthians 1:18, to trust God's power and wisdom over our own:


"At the moment, books are pouring off the presses telling us how to plan for success, how 'vision' consists in clearly articulated 'ministry goals,' how the knowledge of detailed profiles of our communities constitutes the key to successful outreach. I am not for a moment suggesting that there is nothing to be learned from such studies. But after a while one may perhaps be excused for marveling how many churches were planted by Paul and Whitefield and Wesley and Stanway and Judson without enjoying these advantages. Of course all of us need to understand the people to whom we minister, and all of us can benefit from small doses of such literature. But massive doses sooner or later dilute the gospel. Ever so subtly, we start to think that success more critically depends on thoughtful sociological analysis than on the gospel; Barna becomes more important than the Bible. We depend on plans, programs, vision statements—but somewhere along the way we have succumbed to the temptation to displace the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of strategic planning. Again, I insist, my position is not a thinly veiled plea for obscurantism, for seat-of-the-pants ministry that plans nothing. Rather, I fear that the cross, without ever being disowned, is constantly in danger of being dismissed from the central place it must enjoy, by relatively peripheral insights that take on far too much weight. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry." (D.A. Carson in The Cross and Christian Ministry, p.26)


This may seem to be lifting up a false dichotomy between gospel ministry and strategic planning. I don't think that's what D.A. Carson is doing. This is obviously a quote out of a book, from a publisher, and marketed to consumers. There was certainly some strategy in there. But I think the operative words are trust and depend. We should use the wisdom God has given us in strategic planning and demographic research, but at the end of the day we have to trust that the gospel is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16). Strategic planning done well will get us to the people who need the gospel but then we must rely on the gospel itself to do its work.

"A lot of times in our preaching what is missing is the call to faith in Christ, a call to reorient our stories to His." Dr. David Prince

"If you teach people that the Bible is all about them, don’t be surprised when they think that the church is all about them." Dr. David Prince

"You can preach texts about Jesus without preaching Christ." Dr. David Prince

"Preaching is warfare." Dr. David Prince

praying for preaching

"It is of no use for me to preach to the people, my dear Christian brothers and sisters, unless you pray for them. It is of no use holding special services for the quickening of the spiritually dead unless the Holy Spirit is brought to them by our prayers. It may be that you who pray have more to do with the blessed results than we who preach." (Charles Spurgeon from a sermon in 1868 called Prayer-Meetings)