Preaching Thoughts

I suppose I preached a sermon or two before the one I often think of as my first, but if so, they have mostly disappeared somewhere in a section of my brain known as lost memories.  This first memorable sermon  was entitled "An Expectant Faith" with the text being James 1:6-8.  I was working as a summer youth worker in the Blakely Methodist Church in Blakely, Georgia.  The pastor was Clark Pafford who hired me to do youth ministry knowing I wanted to be a preacher.  So, he gave me opportunities to preach, but before I stood in the pulpit on Sunday morning, he insisted that I preach to empty pews on Saturday night.  Of course, they were not really empty as he was sitting in one of them.     

I have never forgotten the encouragement this man gave to me and have sought to repay him as only I could which was by trying to be an encouragement to the young preachers I would meet.  I also continued to preach to empty pews for the whole of my ministry.  Very few sermons were ever preached for the first time on Sunday morning because Sunday morning's sermon had been preached to the congregation of empty pews.  

It came to be a natural and necessary part of my sermon preparation over the span of my years of preaching.   It is one of the strange things about preaching that the oral part, the spoken part, the delivery part of the sermon is not the object of intentional preparation.  Preaching is not a written exercise even though it may be written before it is preached.  Instead, it is at its core a verbal means of communicating the gospel, or as some would dare to say, the Word of God.  From my old preaching mentor I learned that sermon preparation is not done until preparation for the spoken part is done as well as the exegetical work.