A note from our Managing Editor: This article is the first in a series on the role the elements of the Sunday worship service play in everyday discipleship. While our individual churches may not formally include each of these liturgical pieces, we hope you will be blessed to understand the heart of Jesus behind these historic practices and allow them to shape your daily life as disciples.

As I had on so many Sunday mornings, I gathered my Bible and sermon manuscript to make my way to the pulpit. My legs felt heavy, like the day after leg day in the gym, as I took the 4-5 steps up the platform. Heavier still was my heart. Dawning on me that morning was the realization that I did not have faith in preaching.

I made my way through the sermon. I managed at points to even feel what I was saying. Then God surprised me. I felt the Spirit prompt me to confess my struggle with unbelief in preaching. I was outside myself, watching myself, confessing that as a preacher I believed the truth I was preaching but I was not actively believing God would use my preaching to do anything.

Then I saw Mrs. Heather’s face. Mrs. Heather was a silver-haired member of the church. Originally from Prince Edward Island, she’d moved to Jamaica as a young woman to teach. After a couple of years, she met a Caymanian man recently widowed with two young children. They married and later made their way back to Grand Cayman. For many years, Mrs. Heather was a stalwart prayer warrior, a lover of God’s people, and a devout student of God’s Word. As an older woman who’d lived through a lot and who’d raised rock-throwing boys, Mrs. Heather was warm-hearted but did not suffer foolishness. When she heard me confess my struggle, her face changed. I can’t say with any certainty what the change was. Perhaps it was merely surprise or piqued interest. Perhaps disappointment. But in the moment, it seemed to me that my lack of faith siphoned a little faith from her. It seemed my unbelief in the preaching moment was contagious, like a sneezy cough spreading measles. And if Mrs. Heather was affected, it dawned on me that something vital in the connection of pastor and people had been disturbed.

Finding Faith in Preaching Again

When the Lord saved me, he used an exposition of Exodus 32 to do so. When the Lord began to grow me as a young Christian, he used the expositional ministry of my first pastor and mentor, Pastor Peter Rochelle, to do so. And when the Lord decided to further equip me for the preaching ministry, he used the expositional labors of Pastor Mark Dever to convince me that the main diet of the church ought to be to sequential exposition of books of the Bible. For nearly thirty years, the Lord made expositional preaching central to my life and ministry philosophy.

But four or five years into my first pastorate, the Lord showed me that I needed to be more than an expositor. I needed to be a believer. I needed to preach as an act of faith. And looking at Mrs. Heather’s face, I realized I needed to preach as an act of love. I had been mastering the preparation of sermons, but in my preaching, I had not been mastering the essential virtues of Christian living—faith, hope, and love.

Around the time I made that confession of unbelief, I pulled John Stott’s Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today off the shelf. I’d owned the book for years but had never made my way through its pages. A kind of desperation drove me to the book, a quiet and faint hope that maybe something in it would help me. On a lazy Caribbean Saturday morning, when all lay still except a couple of wild chickens traipsing through the Cayman sand, I began the introduction: “Preaching is indispensable to Christianity” (15). With those opening words, Stott confronted me with the absolute necessity of proclamation. Then he unfolded the history of preaching from Jesus and the apostles to the friars and Reformers to the Puritans and evangelicals to the twentieth century. As I traveled that sacred history, the Lord began to revive my belief in preaching as the means by which God not only works but does his best work in the world.

Stott called Spurgeon to witness to me about my unbelief:

So pray and so preach that, if there are no conversions, you will be astonished, amazed, and broken-hearted. Look for the salvation of your hearers as much as the angel who will sound the last trump will look for the waking of the dead! Believe your own doctrine! Believe your own Savior! Believe in the Holy Ghost who dwells in you! For thus shall you see your heart’s desire, and God shall be glorified (108).

Stott’s Between Two Worlds was first published in the UK under the title: I Believe in Preaching. The original title better captures the burden of the book. It also better describes the medicine my weary heart needed. By the time I finished the opening chapter, I felt like a new man. I felt my calling revived. And most importantly, I felt belief in the Lord to use his word to bless his people—including me.

Re-Thinking Preaching

But something else happened. A new awareness. I came to understand that my preaching needed to change.

First, I needed to stop writing sermons for the eye—as if they would be published or as if they needed to contain the kind of complexity you find in commentaries—and start writing sermons for the ear. For faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Writing for the ear required shorter, simpler sentences. It meant writing with rhythm and cadence natural to conversation and showing with illustrations and word pictures rather than telling with prose. I needed to be less academic and more pastoral. Not less theological but less stodgy and more concerned with how the theology matters in life. I needed to preach to my people and not just for my people and certainly not at my people. As I did so, the members of the church found more comfort in the Scripture and more encouragement to fuel their daily lives with Christ. Hammers were wrapped in pillow, and the light of hope broke through the gray, listless days of discipleship. We became sojourners walking together instead of my being a guru dispensing abstract, often arid, truth to parched souls.

This led me, secondly, to re-think applications in my sermons. When I prayed through our membership directory, I saw the faces and names of people whose lives were lived within a regular cycle of waking early, shuttling children to school, driving to offices and workplaces, picking children up from school, making dinner for the family, snatching a few escapist moments to watch TV or take a walk, and lying down too late at night to begin it again tomorrow. I could judge their lives as too small, too earth bound, lacking zeal, or even worldly. Or I could recognize that God was present with them in all the tedium and ordinariness of life, and they needed ways of knowing God right where they were. Mostly they needed encouragement, having swum through the Slough of Despond or having fought through Vanity Fair all week to finally arrive at New Jerusalem’s outpost. Preaching was meant to steady the weary traveler and encourage them to continue another Lord’s Day along the way to glory. When I began to focus my applications on encouragements in Christ rather than tasks to complete, the people felt lighter and more deeply helped. People did more to serve Christ, but they did not find Christ or their pastor to be a hard taskmaster. Duty became delight, and habits became more filled with hope. People began to walk out the faith with more confidence because the completed work of Christ gave them reason to strive.

Finally, I had to rethink my motivation in preaching. Why was I doing it? Was it for my own ego, to be known as a “great preacher”? Were there outcomes and changes, certain “fruit,” that I thought necessary to indicate evidence of God’s blessing on my preaching? Was I preaching out of a tribal and competitive spirit, to prove our tribe was right and other preachers and churches inferior? The Lord made me aware that if I preached the most eloquent and powerful sermons, separated myself and our church from all the others in theological precision and faithfulness, and saw more fruit than could be harvested by a ministry but had not love, then I was nothing. A clanging gong. Ear-puncturing noise. The Lord made me see that preaching must be an act of love—for God, for the Word, and for people. Not surprisingly, loved people began to love people. Not that the church was not loving to begin with—they were. But a richness developed. We began to see our discipleship not solely as a matter of individual commitment but also a public and corporate commitment. Cliché language about being “family” was made meaningful by familial acts. The entire church stood to give a bride away to her groom when her biological parents could not be present. One or two members quietly gave away cars to other members struggling to make ends meet. It seemed a million meals were being cooked, delivered, and shared. I’d preached what seemed like dozens of applications on being the church, but nothing sizable happened until I preached with love, and members seized the opportunity to then walk in love.

Conclusion

Love will change not only the sermon but the preacher and the listener. I’m still learning to preach and to love. But I am no longer that heavy-legged, heavy-hearted preacher who failed to believe his sermons would have any effect. By God’s grace, I am a soon-to-be forgotten servant who hopes the Word I love will help the people I love to adore the God we love and who loves us. I am now more convinced that if a single sermon has that effect, it is worth it to preach. I believe in preaching!