Like many young pastors, I spent my early years of ministry torturing audiences through endless experiments with my preaching. I had been to seminary, listened to hundreds of sermons, read plenty of books, and learned about expository, topical, Christ-centered, and Spirit-empowered preaching. I knew about the need for both study and unction. When I entered the academy, I reiterated these same lessons in my preaching courses. And yet, inwardly, I knew there remained a wide chasm for me between mastering the mechanics of crafting sermons and truly serving as a translator between God and his church. As John Koessler writes in Folly, Grace, and Power, “Those who preach break God’s silence.” Most weeks, I was just trying to make it until next Monday.
The first sermon I preached was at the fledgling church plant I helped launch in a bar. In this context, my preaching moved from the theoretical banter of a classroom to the anxiety-inducing reality of standing before people who are dying to hear from God. In these initial years of ministry, my preaching preparation began—and often ended—with my eyes and ears directed toward the culture around me. Significant time spent in prayer and study seemed a luxury reserved for large churches with large staffs. Instead, my sermon series were often formed around summer blockbusters, bestseller lists, and TV ratings. In an attempt to create messages that kept people entertained, I picked from the low-hanging fruit and ended up using pulpit time each week to merely baptize cultural consumption rather than to illuminate the Word of God.
Deeper Communion
With these familiar siren songs exposed and found wanting, I began to increasingly realize the weight of Heinrich Bullinger’s contention that “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” This belief began to undergird my conviction that my preaching must begin not with my audience, tradition, or cultural setting but with a deeper communion with the very source of all of my sermons: a Trinitarian God whose multifaceted personhood gives clarity and balance to the sermons I preach. A God who has enlisted preachers to engage weekly in the daunting task of mediating his words to the bride.
Having spent significant time in churches around the country and the world, I began to wonder if I fully understood the weight of this assertion. Across boundaries of culture and tradition, I started to recognize that preaching preparation, like traditions and denominations, can often sideline members of the Trinity and hinder our ability to preach the whole counsel of God in ways consistent with the very character of God. Far from isolating individual members of the Trinity, my desire was to preach faithfully through a lens of orthodox Trinitarianism that was “neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence,” as the Athanasian Creed emphasizes.
This point was clarified for me several years ago while attending a conference where a prominent theologian described various Christian denominations through stereotypical frames. He asserted that Pentecostals are the “heart” of the church, Baptists are the “hands,” and the Reformed tradition is the “mind.” His statements were meant not to disparage but to clarify the uniqueness of various parts of the body of Christ and to emphasize the need for collaboration. But his remarks also sparked my observation that much of our preaching preparation in these broad traditions often follows these same fault lines and divisions. In my own ministry, preaching had become a largely cerebral performance, and what I began to sense God calling me toward was a more holistic preaching that mirrored the multifaceted nature of the God I was speaking for.
In his book Preaching: The Art of Narrative Exposition, Calvin Miller gives us a vision of the preacher as the one eavesdropping on the eternal Trinitarian conversation between the Father, Son, and Spirit. In this way, preaching becomes the moment when “the good dreams that God has for the congregation get pulpit time.”
In contrast, the majority of my sermons were being crafted in haste, centering on my own vision and the desire to create memorable principles rather than a reflective dialogue with God. My excuse was always a lack of time. But the conviction continued to grow that my emaciated parishioners were becoming exhausted by the burden of surviving off crumbs when the Bread of Life could be theirs instead.
If my preaching was to change, I needed to learn how to lean into the total personhood of God. I couldn’t speak for him if I didn’t know him more intimately. For our relationship to grow, it would mean changing the way I approached his Word each week. It would require the humility to let him speak and the patience for me to hear. It would demand greater space in my sermon preparation for reflection, prayer, and a more attuned ear toward the words on the page, the Word it revealed, and the words he wanted to speak into my own heart and in our congregation.
The Initiating Father
Throughout the pages of Scripture, one of the defining attributes of the Father is that he is a creator. As he is the initiator of both the physical world and redemptive history, our best attempts at exegeting remain stinted if they are disconnected from this truth while ignoring his ultimate plan of revealing himself. God’s revelation is relational, not merely propositional, and he gives us both the written Word and the Word made flesh so that he might be known. Our time in sermon preparation is not merely a search for a homiletic idea but an invitation to a deeper intimacy with the author and initiator of those words. In the same way that the Son directs us to make our petitions to the Father in prayer, so too can our initial times of sermon preparation begin by listening in on the divine conversation among the members of the Trinity. We do this to learn more about the heart of the Father for his children and the words he longs to speak to them.
The Illuminated Son
In the famous scene on the road to Emmaus recorded in Luke’s gospel (24:13–32), the resurrected Jesus converses with heavy-hearted disciples who have heard of Christ’s crucifixion. When they fail to recognize Jesus as the risen Messiah, Jesus opens the Scriptures to them to demonstrate his presence on every page (v. 27). This is a vitally important window into our sermon preparation as we join these Emmaus sojourners in their discovery of Jesus in every passage we preach.
And it is the heart of Paul’s exhortation when he declared that, regardless of what others may be teaching, “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). If the Father has sent the Son as the consummation of redemptive history, it is the role of every preacher to make that story known. While Jesus is often preached today as a mere model or a source of self-actualization, the Father desires that the Son himself be lifted up, not just his benefits. We preach Jesus so that he may receive his full glory. When we engage with Jesus in our preparation, we are walking with him along the Emmaus road again and are invited to see him more clearly in the pages of every Scripture so that we, and our people, might conform increasingly to what we see.
The Indwelling Spirit
For some preachers, following the Spirit in our sermon preparation is intimidating because it seems uncontrollable. Due to a plethora of false teachers claiming direct revelation of heretical theology, many preachers today prefer the objectivity of the text alone. My concern here is not so much with an abundance of study but with a neglecting of the Spirit. As the member of the Trinity who tabernacles within us, the Spirit acts as the mediator who unites us to the divine life of the Trinity. To neglect the Spirit’s guidance and leading in our sermon preparation is to effectively cut ourselves off from access to the plans and purposes the Father and the Son have in store for the church—plans that they have been discussing before the foundation of Earth and that are embedded in Scripture.
In his first letter to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul describes the Spirit as the conduit for God’s revelation, reminding us that the Spirit alone is the one who can comprehend the thoughts of God (2:10–12). Paul’s emphatic declaration is a crucial corrective for me that, regardless of how much scholarly study I undertake, my efforts are in vain if they are divorced from the illumination of the Spirit. If my sincere hope is to impart the sort of life-giving words that are not “taught us by human wisdom but . . . taught by the Spirit” (v. 13), then prayerfully receiving the Spirit’s wisdom, however intimidating, becomes essential.
The Gift of the Trinity
Dialoguing with the whole Trinity in my sermon preparation has not negated my need for study, but it has certainly made my preaching more faithful, more powerful, and less dependent on my own ability to overcome my shortcomings. Michael Reeves reminds us that, as worshipers of the triune God, “we join in with the fellowship [of God] as the Father, Son and Spirit are already enjoying it.” This gift to all believers has now become the cornerstone of my preaching preparation as well, reminding me on a weekly basis to continue preaching with the Trinity instead of merely about it.
While there are still weeks in which I am tempted to fall back on my familiar utilitarian methods, I am reminded that the cost of expediency is simply too high and that there are truly infinite resources eager to help. For years I felt as if I had been fighting my way through a difficult exam, only to turn it in and discover that it was an open-book test. In this way, my sermon preparation moved from simply being another item on my task list to comprising a significant part of my own spiritual formation as I leaned into a weekly opportunity to draw closer to God and prepared sermons that would invite my people to do the same.
The God I preach, the God you preach, is not a silent God. He is a God of revelation who longs to be known by people on both sides of the pulpit. He desires to be not only the content of our message but also the source. Reeves again writes, “Indeed, in the triune God is the love behind all love, the life behind all life, the music behind all music, the beauty behind all beauty and the joy behind all joy.” And, I would add—in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit—the sermon behind all our sermons.
Stephen L. Woodworth is a teaching elder in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a contributing editor for CT Pastors, and the associate coordinator for the International Theological Education Network.
