Monday was a great day to leave Chicago. The wind-chill was thirty degrees below zero and the Bears had just lost the Super Bowl. This week I'm in sunny San Diego for the National Pastors Convention. Although the main sessions don't start until later today, on Tuesday I attended a five hour "Critical Concerns" course on preaching.

John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, CA, and the author of numerous books with really long titles, presented about preparing the soul to preach. His focus was not simply getting spiritually juiced for Sunday morning, but rather becoming the kind of person that preaching flows out of that pleases God. It was really about character formation.

Part of Ortberg's discussion included a list of the ten deadly sins of preaching. (John said he originally intended to create a list of seven deadly sins, but preaching offered so many temptations that he had to expand the list.)

1. The temptation to be inauthentic

We want to present an image ...