I ONCE PREACHED ON THE “Do not provoke your children to wrath” passage from Ephesians 6:4. I approached it from the perspective of a thirty-two-year-old dad of three preschoolers—that’s what I was—struggling to find the line between discipline and punishment. I was convinced I had thoroughly exegeted the text before I began preparing my sermon.
I recently revisited the same text while preaching a series from the book of Ephesians. I pulled my study notes from my files and was startled to see how much of my life experiences as a thirty-two-year-old not only influenced my sermon content and illustrations but my exegetical research as well. I found I could not dip into my old notes and simply review discoveries I had made in a previous exploration. I was now fifty, the father of three adult daughters. I found one commentary particularly helpful this time as I studied the passage, the same commentary I looked at all those years ago but from which I chose to use almost no material. Not only was I bringing my immediate experiences to bear on the text but the passage raised different questions for me, issues I never would have considered twenty years ago.
For example, what does this text say to a sixty-year-old gentleman who is dealing with guilt now because he was so afraid of “provoking his children to wrath” when they were young that he never confronted them appropriately? This gentleman so much wanted to be kind that he allowed his children to make wrong choices, and now he lives with the consequences. He has also resorted to correcting his adult children in such a way that they are angry with him.
In short, if I had not dug new footings for my sermons on Ephesians—and instead built my sermons on what notes I had created many years ago—I would never have dealt with the key issues facing my congregation.
I want to continue in this chapter the theme of staying fresh in our preaching, but here I want to focus on the sermon-preparation process. Mid-life can bring sweetness to the task of preparing for Sunday mornings. We have worked through much of the Bible by now, and our life-experience aids us in the task of applying God’s Word in a way that rings true with real life. While a phalanx of temptations confronts the sermon-preparation process, new disciplines have helped me take new ground as I try to raise the level of my preaching in the second half of life.
Airbrush enemy
A minister who in some ways has been my mentor taught me about the continuing task of study. In his early sixties, he is a gifted communicator. I like to hear him preach because he not only has outstanding content, he speaks with power and passion. It is evident that he prepares well. His illustrations are current, and he avoids clichés.
Curious about what goes on behind the scenes, I spent a day with him to see how he worked. The biggest takeaway from my time with him was his simple declaration that he had made a conscious decision not to rely on his past material.
He said there are at least two enemies to sermon preparation for the experienced minister. The first is not the exclusive foe of mature preachers, but is a common opponent for all generations of preachers: fighting the battle for adequate preparation time, regardless of age. The second enemy, though, rarely attacks the preaching novice. An experienced preacher has so much material accumulated in his mind and in his files, he knows he can create a sermon without opening a book and doing fresh research. By pulling out old files and skimming previous research, the minister can quickly prepare a twenty-minute sermon. It is even easier if the preacher has kept manuscripts; with a few minor tweaks and verbal airbrush strokes, voilà!
The familiarity of the Bible can also tempt us to neglect new exegesis. When I was young, I felt pressure to perform on Sunday mornings, because preaching is considered one of the primary tasks of the minister. I made sure I carved out the time for preparation. Now at mid-life, after nearly thirty years of studying God’s Word, I can accomplish even new exegesis more quickly than I could at age twenty-three. But I often wonder, Am I taking less time because I am more efficient at preparation? Or am I just more involved with other things?
After talking with numerous pastors, I have concluded that pastors who did not keep their preaching fresh knew deep down they were cheating and that seemed to affect their attitude. They were more cynical, which affected their entire view of ministry. Conversely, pastors who stayed fresh in their preaching felt good about the rest of pastoral work. Every time I hang around with the sixty-two-year-old pastor I mentioned at the beginning of this section, I get jazzed about preaching. I love hearing the excitement in his voice as he speaks about his study. Every time I am around him I find I want to do better preaching and be a better minister.
In addition to familiarity with the Word, another enemy of preparation in mid-life can be our current interests or life theme. Some pastors, rather than becoming complacent in their study, tend to focus too exclusively on one area of interest as they get older. It shows up in their preaching, and congregations may become bored hearing the same issue over and over. One church recently terminated its pastor for several reasons, but at least one of them was his Johnny-one-note preaching. He was a good person and a decent-enough preacher, but his interest in eschatology led him to become an expert on the subject. He preached on it repeatedly and found ways to work it into almost every sermon. His people agreed with his conclusions for the most part but they wearied of the topic. He left feeling the church did not see the need for eschatology; the church is determined to avoid any preacher who broaches the subject. If a candidate for their pulpit makes the mistake of preaching from the book of Daniel, he will not likely survive the lions’ den.
While the above illustration may be glaring, it is natural for us to focus on what we know well or what God has brought to our attention through the years—our life theme. One way I am trying to guard against hammering away at only one theme is by starting my sermon evaluation process after I have prepared my sermon and before I have delivered it. Too often Monday has been my primary day of reflection. But now I try to discipline myself to ask, “Am I addressing this issue every week in one form or another?” or “Is there too much of me in the message?”
One Saturday night I eliminated an entire section of a sermon because I realized I had addressed the issue of money—in different ways—on each of the previous five Sundays. After some reflection, I concluded money was the issue I was personally facing at the time. I had been preaching to a felt need all right—my own. Although we must be sensitive to the leadership of the Holy Spirit, we must also be aware that often the voice of the Holy Spirit can sound a lot like our own voice. To preach only from our interests or hurts is to abuse the place God has given us and to take advantage of the pulpit the church has allowed us to fill.
A friend recently realized that for much of his ministry, he had ignored the Old Testament prophets. He began a thorough study and now preaches from them quite often. He says this has helped his preaching in other areas but that he must work to guard against using his sermons as a place to display his new appreciation of the prophets. Soon after I turned forty-five, I realized I rarely preached from the Psalms except at funerals and other sad occasions. I had used the Psalms as words to comfort the bereaved but never as words for celebration.
A final remark about the enemies of effective preaching at mid-life: by this point we know what we can get away with. We know how to fill a twenty-two-minute time slot with twelve minutes of material (preaching expands to fill the time allotted for it). The temptation is to do that every week. Some time ago we had a guest preacher for a special event at our church, and he obviously had not done his preparation. He had one story, which he told extremely well, but he preached for twenty-five minutes, and the entire sermon revolved around that one story. While the congregation was attentive, several people later said to me, “He didn’t have much substance. He had only one story.” Yet from my perspective, most of the congregation were complimentary to him. I am sure he left our church feeling he had preached well.
And perhaps that is the most scary aspect of preaching at any age: few people will tell us the truth, and when some do, we may dismiss them as cranks. For our preaching to be better in the second half of life than it was in the first demands new disciplines; it demands that we tighten down the preparation process.
Beginning with the new
For my current Sunday morning preparation, I have come up with some new techniques, changes in the way I approach the study of God’s Word. First I make a conscious decision to read new sources. When preaching a series on 1 Corinthians, for example, I read the epistle in a different Bible translation—one I had never studied before. The unfamiliar translation gave me a different slant on the text. I also consulted new commentaries, and only after the new research did I refer to my old reliable books and old material.
This may sound like a time-consuming process, but one of the advantages of experience in study is that I can skim an author’s work quickly and catch the drift as well as his biases. I am also more aware of my blind spots, things I missed in a text when I was younger.
I have also begun dating my files. I have three files on prayer now instead of one. The last is labeled “Prayer 1995.” I know everything in that folder will have been placed there after January 1, 1995. This small change in my filing system prevents my using outdated illustrations. Recently while preaching a series on prayer, I used notes from three different periods of research. In going through my old files, I found more of the material was illustration-oriented, while much of the recent material was more application-directed. Once again I was reminded of the importance of creating fresh material and not relying solely on previous study.
Today I often wait to write my sermon until Thursday and Friday. When I was younger, I began the research and writing on Monday and Tuesday because I was afraid I would not have enough material to develop a twenty-five-minute sermon. While I still research the text on Monday and Tuesday, I may not write the actual sermon until later in the week. Now I have so many more sources that I have more of a sense of what I need to pull in; I am confident I will have enough to say, but I want to make sure I have the right thing to say.
I probably devote more time to oral preparation than I used to. It has always been true to a degree that what communicates in writing does not necessarily come across as well when it is spoken, but we live in an increasingly oral, emotive, nonlinear culture. It is even more critical to prepare orally before giving the sermon. Sermons that sound like research papers will not be listened to, much less understood. Many college students are now required to prepare some research papers using PowerPoint software, which is designed for the visual-oriented reader.
Not long ago, after I preached in our early Sunday service, I realized the first two sentences of my sermon sounded like the opening lines of a bad novel. So between services I went into my study and reworked the opening—not rewriting it, but speaking it aloud. I was saying essentially the same thing, but I conveyed it in a much fresher way. Usually I don’t wait until after I have preached to polish the oral presentation. Rather, I have learned to integrate my oral and written preparation: I write a passage, then speak it out loud; rewrite a paragraph, and speak it again. I recently preached on the Psalms in our Wednesday night service, and I came across a wonderful line about Psalm 12 in Eugene Peterson’s Leap Over a Wall. It described the heart of that passage as well as anything I have ever read. Then I read it aloud and realized it did not communicate orally. Even as I was speaking the sentence, it felt awkward. As recently as ten years ago I would not have caught that and would have quoted it verbatim and added the appropriate footnote. But this time I put the phrase in my own words, while giving credit to Peterson.
On the fly
One skill that gets better with age is the ability to read your congregation while preaching. I can sense when I am connecting with people and when I am not, and I adjust accordingly. When I was younger, I often had no clue as to whether or not my preaching was connecting with the congregation. Only if people went to sleep or walked out did I catch on that I had missed the target. Later, I could pick up on body language to determine when I was not connecting—no direct eye contact, restlessness, shuffling of bulletins—but all I knew to do was raise my voice or increase the intensity, thinking that would drive home my point.
I now look at four or five people in the congregation and take direction from them. One woman sits in the fourth row, and I have learned that when she is not quite getting it, she gets a different look on her face. One fellow sits in the center section and avoids eye contact with me when I have either missed his head or his heart. I also listen for the general rustling and shuffling of feet that signals the congregation is bored or confused.
Clyde Fant, who was probably one of the most effective teachers of preachers of the last forty years in Southern Baptist circles, once told me, “If you preach a sermon word for word the way you wrote it, you probably haven’t brought out your best.” He said we need to learn to trust those ideas or phrases that occur to us during our preaching.
Once I was speaking on futility from a Christian perspective and how we don’t often see immediate results. I came up with a line during the message: “It doesn’t do any good to do any good.” It was an ordinary sermon, but I decided to use that line as a refrain throughout, and it drove home one of the key ideas of the sermon in a powerful, memorable way.
Preaching is a God-called and congregation-allowed privilege. We must resist the pride that can creep into how we view our own preaching and that can cripple our effectiveness. Until we receive our first retirement check, we can never give in to the entropy inherent in the task of preaching God’s Word. We must always think of ourselves as novices. And as a novice, my best preaching may be yet to come.
Copyright © 1998 Gary Fenton
