A Reason to Quit

I have heard of a few preachers who show up on Sunday morning at their pulpit, open the Bible,  the Spirit shows them a passage of Scripture, and gives them their sermon on the spot.  I would never say such is not possible since there have been a few times when I have gone to the pulpit with a sermon I knew I could not preach because the Spirit was at the moment of preaching leading me to a different message.  To be honest, it is frightening to lay aside what seems to be a perfectly good sermon that has been worked on all week for whatever it is the Lord wants to do with the sermon.     

It was always a hard thing for me to lay aside my preparation for a "wait and see" moment in the pulpit.  What if I laid it aside and nothing else came?  What if I had a sermon I knew I should not preach, but was not given another one?  What if I got up and had to say, "I got nothing," and announced the closing hymn?  What if it was a moment when the Lord planned for me to fail instead of succeed?  It was a terrifying moment to be so exposed before a congregation, but there were a few times when obedience to what I knew to be the voice of the Spirit made it necessary to take such a risk.  

The one thing every preacher has to learn at some point is that preaching is not just about "me."  It is, instead, about what God wants to say through me, my mind and heart, my experiences, the Scripture, and my relationship with Him.  In other words to preach is to be the person God has created me to be and called me to be while He is at work through the totality of all that I am.  No matter how comfortable a preacher may become in a pulpit given to Him over the span of the years,  to stand as one who seeks to speak the Word of the Lord for the people of God is a frightening thing.  Any preacher who gets so comfortable preaching that there is no sense of being nervous probably should quit preaching.