At a number of conferences, I have had the privilege and joy of sitting in the front row to hear my friend John Piper speak. And a few times I have been assigned to speak after him. It’s never my preference to speak after John. Preaching after John is always a humbling experience.

As you know, I cannot preach like John Piper. But what I have discovered over time is that great preachers like John, Charles Spurgeon, and Jonathan Edwards do model practices all preachers can emulate and benefit from.

At the Together for the Gospel conference, I had the privilege to participate with Mark, Al, and Lig in interviewing John. During the panel discussion, John provided us with a glimpse into how he prepares his sermons, and how he prepares his heart as he prepares his sermons.

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C.J. Mahaney: Most of these guys are already in the process of preparing a sermon for this Sunday. If they were to meet with you for lunch, how would you counsel them about both the preparation process and the preaching event?

John Piper: The most important thing I want to say in answer to that question is this: There isn’t any technique to preaching. It is not a technique. It is not a profession that you go to a homiletics class to learn how to do.

God is doing sermon preparation when your throat is blazing with yellow pustules and you have a fever and you feel like quitting. He is doing sermon preparation there. Don’t begrudge the seminary of suffering. Don’t begrudge the marriage difficulties. Don’t begrudge the parental stuff that is so hard. He is making you a preacher. He is making you a pastor.

So the main preparation work is walking with him through it all, and going deep with him, and being there and not running away from it into endless food or television. That would be a—very practical thing to do would be to get rid of your television so that you have some time, family time and reading time and reflection time, and basically keep your mind free from pornography.

We were talking about this pornography thing over lunch the other day, and we who are 60 years old were reflecting on how difficult it was to get pornography when we were teenagers. The implication of that is that in my brain I have two pornographic images from my teen years. I found a Playboy in a Laundromat, and they were passing a really weird book around in the locker room one day. I remember both images like I saw them yesterday. Most of you have a thousand images in your brain. That really makes sermon preparation hard, but not impossible. He died to purify our conscience, although you make your job a lot harder if you keep going to that cesspool.

…Keep your minds from being contaminated, because the preparation moment is a heart/mind thing in which every three minutes you are crying out to the Lord as you are reading your text in Greek or Hebrew or English. You are reading it and you are saying, “God, please. I have got to have a word. I have got to have a word for my people. Let me see what is really here.” That is a prayer for the mind part. My points must be here in the text. I can’t make this up. My people have to see it. I have to see it. I don’t want to pull rank on these folks by quoting Greek—and they say, “I don’t see that,” and I say, “Well, believe me it is there.” I don’t want to do that. I want them to see what is really there, so I need to see what is really there. So I am pleading with the Lord, “Show me what is there.”

And then I am pleading just as strong, “Help me to feel what is there. If it is a horrible thing, help me to feel horrible. If it is a beautiful thing, help me to feel thrilled over its beauty. Bring this dead heart into some kind of conformity—moral, affectual conformity to what is really there.”

Those are my two kinds of prayers, light and heat. If you try to work it up without the Holy Spirit giving it, people will know. They will know. Your people will know sooner or later. “I don’t think that was a real affection. That was planned.”

So there are a thousand details I could say about the preparation moment as far as poking at the text, but the preaching moment is the same. You plead with the Lord.

I do APTAT, before I stand up.

A—I admit, O Lord, that I can do nothing of any lasting value.

P—I pray for self forgetfulness, for fullness of the Holy Spirit, for love, for humility, for passion, for zeal, for prophetic utterance that may come to my mind while I am preaching so that I can say things that I hadn’t prepared that might penetrate where nothing else would.

T—I trust a particular promise from the Lord that I have found in my devotions early in the morning. So today I read Deborah’s song in Judges 5 as well as Psalm 84 between 6:30 and 7:00 this morning, and pointed out a verse to Mark as we were sitting there. “Oh my soul, ride on in strength.” That was my word this morning.

The Lord gave a word from his Word this morning: “Ride on in strength.” So I take that. That’s my T: trust. So as I am walking up, I am saying, “This is your work. It has come. Don’t leave me here. You have got to do something here. I am counting on you.”

And he is saying, “I got this under control.” He is God.

A—Then you act. You have got to do it. It is your hands that are moving. It is your voice that is moving. You have got to do this. Walking by the Spirit, putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, bearing the fruits of the Spirit is a mystery. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10, ESV). That is the mystery. So sermon preparation is: You put out when you are preparing and when you are preaching. You put out, but if you have prayed and done APTAT and God is merciful, you won’t be putting out. He will be putting out.

T—Thank God. And when you have acted and you go sit down, you thank him. He is going to do, and is doing what he is going to do, and he regularly does more than you think he does.

I don’t think after 28 years of preaching that I can correlate with any degree of confidence my sense of effectiveness in the moment and the true effectiveness of the moment. I don’t know any keys to know how to correlate those two. This keeps me from being too excited or too depressed.

The Lord will be sure to put me in my place if I do the one and lift me up if I do the other, because he said, “I am working out there in ways you can’t make happen at all. You thought that was a good thing to say? That wasn’t it. You missed it. That wasn’t what did it. This thing over here that you didn’t even know I gave you did it, and you will find out in heaven that that happened.”

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Listen to the T4G panel discussion here.

 

 

Today we feature more wisdom from Mark Dever in my 2007 interview with him. This time Mark shares details about his personal preparation and delivery of sermons.

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C.J. Mahaney: Let’s move into the topic of preaching. The first of the “nine marks” is expositional preaching. Talk to us very specifically about your process of preparing a sermon.

Mark Dever: I assume that my mind is in too many ways a stagnant swamp that needs the fresh water of God’s Word constantly being poured in to understand him better, to understand myself better, to understand life better. So I want to give myself to preaching on a certain passage of Scripture. I usually don’t preach because I am looking to talk about a particular problem. This year we are going through Luke’s Gospel, and so I want to work specifically on the passage I am going to be preaching Sunday. I want to read it over and over and note things.

Gordon Fee taught me New Testament exegesis at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and—although I didn’t agree with his feminism or his kenotic Christology—I did love his story about the graduate student in ichthyology. There is a student studying fish at a doctoral level, and a world-class expert tells him to write down everything he sees about the fish and then he leaves. And the guy is kind of disappointed, because he was studying under this great expert. He thought, “Why am I doing this?”

He wrote down a few things. The expert returns about 30 minutes later and says, “This is all you’ve got?”

And the graduate student says, “Yes.” 

He says, “I want you to do this for the next hour.”

And the student says, “An hour? You’re kidding!”

So for an hour the student does it and he starts noting down more things, and seeing more things, and writing them down.

The expert returns an hour later and he says, “All right. This is a pretty good start. Why don’t you do this the rest of the afternoon?”

And the graduate student is thinking, What are you thinking? You are the great expert, I came to learn from you and this is just a fish floating here.

So the student spends the rest of the afternoon doing the same thing. But by the end of the afternoon he realizes he has learned more about fish just by sitting and staring at the fish.

All of that to say: Rather than reading all the commentaries, I spend my first day in sermon preparation just reading and rereading the text and praying about it and noting things I see (any structures or questions that are answered). I find this to be the most fruitful way for me to have my soul freshly engaged by God about his Word.

And I also think of it in the context of where I’ll be preaching it—to this congregation. So I assume my exegesis should be very similar to what other people have done, but I will be looking at it with certain questions in mind from my own life, from the lives of those people in the congregation, and from the congregation as a whole. 

So the most fundamental part of the sermon preparation for me is this reading and rereading of the text.

CJM: Do you do recommend pastors consult commentaries?

MD: Yes, particularly when there are things I’m not sure what to do with—but only after I have completed all this work on the text myself. Otherwise I will just become an echo chamber for somebody’s commentary rather than talking with the commentary, as it were. When I have a text, I will put a question mark by a certain thing that I have a question about in my Word doc. I will write out my question and then I make myself answer it. Then I will type in “Answer” and insert the best answer I could think of at the time (even if it is not a very good one).

Then once I have this in mind, I try to answer all the questions I have about the text. Only then do I feel it’s safe for me to look at a commentary. Hopefully a lot of the things commentators will have thought of are some of the questions I have considered as I have been reading and rereading the text and praying over it. So I am able to have a conversation with the people who have written the commentaries, rather than just let them sort of type on my brain.

CJM: All right. Average number of hours each week devoted to sermon prep?

MD: Thirty to 35.

CJM: How long do you speak on Sundays?

MD: One hour. 

CJM: You work from a manuscript? 

MD: I do, though I don’t generally recommend other people do that. 

CJM: Why?

MD: Manuscripts can just be deadly boring. I don’t want to say there are few people who can use a manuscript well, but it is definitely a minority.

CJM: And you don’t remain restricted by your manuscript, though. That would be the difference.

MD: For whatever reason, I can glance down and pick up several sentences and then talk. So I don’t think it appears that I am reading.

CJM: Not at all, no.

Matt Schmucker: And you often get accused of saying that your best stuff after a sermon is the stuff that wasn’t in the manuscript anyway. We call it off-roading. 

MD: What everybody thanks me for as they walk out at the door usually had nothing to do with my manuscript. 

CJM: You are unique in your preparation process in that you love to have people around you. True?

MD: Well, honestly, there are some parts of preparation when I do prefer to be alone, especially when I am trying to think things through. But I like having people around for me to be able to bounce things off of. Particularly when I go over my application grid and fill it out, I do that with another member of the church.

CJM: Describe that process. Because before you preach a sermon on Sunday, you meet with a member of the church on Saturday to do what? 

MD: They will have been reading over the text of Scripture. We will sit and talk about the Scripture. So they will ask me any questions they have. And that helps me sometimes, because they will have questions—as someone who hasn’t done all this study will have. Sometimes I’m thinking, “Well, you don’t need to explain about the Samaritans. Everybody knows.” They’ll say, “Well, no, actually I don’t know. Who are the Samaritans?”

These things are very helpful as a reality check for the preacher, I think. 

But then we labor in giving our time to application where I have various categories set up, which can change from series to series. But generally for each point of my sermon I try to ask,

• What is this saying to the individual Christian? This is the category I think most evangelical preachers preach from—and only this one. But there are others.
• How does this point to Christ?
• What is this saying that is unique in salvation history that I need to articulate?
• What is this saying to the non-Christian?
• Are there any public implications?
• What is it saying to Capitol Hill Baptist Church? How should we as a church, as a congregation, be challenged, encouraged, or shaped by what we are hearing? 
  

These categories provide me a structured meditation on the text. And it is really helpful for me to have someone else to talk through these categories with.

September 11, 2001 was, for me, memorable. It marked the first morning of a very special trip with my wife to the quaint town of Chatham on Cape Cod. Carolyn and I had just finished breakfast at the Wayside Inn and were eager to begin this relaxing and romantic day together. And the day could not have been more inviting.

But while preparing to pay for breakfast, I noticed a gathering of people in the adjoining bar area, studying a television screen. Curious, I took a place among them and learned what they already knew: Two jet airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers, both the apparent attacks of terrorists.

We made our way back to our hotel room stunned and perplexed by the images we had briefly viewed. Just yesterday we had flown into Logan International Airport in Boston, now the airport of origin for the two flights that slammed into the towers.

I had no category for what had taken place. Like the rest of the world, we stared in disbelief at the television, immediately aware that our trip would not end as planned. I called home to talk with the pastors to begin altering the message for the Sunday meeting and assembling the church that evening for the purpose of prayer. It was important to return home to serve the church with a message providing biblical perspective to the events. I was one of countless pastors whose plans were altered that week by the crisis.

Years ago I came across an article with the title “When the News Intrudes: What Do You Say from the Pulpit about National Crises and Tragedies?”. Though I would give the article a mixed review, I like the title and the idea behind it. Pastors have a unique responsibility and opportunity during a national or local crisis. How are pastors to effectively serve and lead those they care for “when the news intrudes”?

Hopefully nothing like 9/11 will ever happen again. But events that capture the attention of the world and broadly affect the world will happen again. So how should a pastor serve and lead the church during these times?

I’m no expert on this topic, but the following is what I learned in leading Covenant Life Church through experiences like 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Beltway sniper attacks....

[Download the full article, titled “9/11, Crisis, and the Pastor,” as a PDF document here.]
 

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The role of the church in influencing and shaping contemporary American culture is a topic generating much interest, discussion, and disagreement. Gauging from the many books on the subject, there is a lot that can be said, but I especially appreciate what my friend Mark Dever has said.  

Today I want to draw off another excerpt from my 2007 interview with Mark. Mark lives, works, and pastors a church four blocks from the U.S. Capitol and three blocks from the U.S. Supreme Court. Mark is geographically—and in his thinking—on one of the front lines where the church and contemporary culture meet.

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C.J. Mahaney: Elaborate more on the priorities of 9Marks.

Mark Dever: Well, what we want to see are communities of people that reflect the character of God, and by doing so are distinct from the world around them. As I travel around I see so many evangelical churches trying to “break the code” of how to look as much like the culture as possible and yet keep the gospel, assuming this will maximize the evangelistic impulse.

I’m not sure that’s true.

I think there is a lot of peril in this. And it seems to be that even from the very earliest chapters of Acts, what strikes people are not thoughts of, “Hey, they speak Hebrew too,” but rather, “Hey, look at how they love one another in a way that is different from the way we are loving or being loved.”

So I think that God’s character, as it is reproduced in a community of people, must be one of the most powerful witnesses to the truth of the gospel, both for evangelism and the edification of those already converted. So I would like to see evangelical churches— while not becoming unsophisticated in how they interact with culture—keep cultural interaction in perspective, and realize that the life-blood of your church continuing is not your contextualization (your similarity to the culture), but how you are blessedly distinct from the culture. The church is full of people who are born again.

So our distinctives are what we want to hold out, and trust that God will make them attractive and will commend the gospel to other people.

So sometimes I feel like I am being called to tar the ark before the flood. Our world is increasingly secular. And churches that are trying to be as much like the world as possible, I fear, are very leaky arks. And churches that are trying to be like the world are often unselfconsciously nothing more than part of their culture. I fear they are just going to sink and become spiritually worthless spiritual tombs.

So I think the rise of secularism will itself cut down on nominal Christianity. It will actually encourage the clarity of what truly is the gospel and the effects that it has, because the cache, the worth, the value of nominal Christianity will just continue to decline in the culture broadly, so that you won’t want to be known as an evangelical Christian because that means you hate various groups of people or you believe these weird things. (As opposed to in the 50s it meant you were a respectable, upstanding citizen.) So as the general cultural perception turns on evangelical Christianity, I think we are just seeing all the more clearly our need to have a positive vision for the church as distinct from the culture.

CJM: And so what would you say to a pastor who is attracted to models of the church that aren’t distinct from the culture and aren’t distinctly proclaiming the gospel?

MD: Well, when you are not distinctly proclaiming the gospel, then you are not talking about a healthy church in any way whatsoever.

I want to be careful here. Not every church is going to be exactly alike. For example, there are churches that deliberately dress differently, or have a different kind of music, or different order of their services. But as long as they are preaching the gospel, preaching the Word, the things they are saying are true, they are reading Scripture, they are praising—as long as they are doing the things we are commanded to in Scripture, I am prepared to believe there are a number of different ways, and that in different settings one can be better than another.

But I would be very careful if these things are what a church begins majoring on. If the adverbs overtake the verbs, the adjectives overtake the nouns, the how you do it becomes more important than what you are doing, well then I think you have surely lost your way.

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For more on this topic, consult Mark’s T4G’08 message (“Improving the Gospel: Exercises in Unbiblical Theology”), The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World by David Wells (Eerdmans, 2008) and Christ and Culture Revisited by D.A. Carson (Eerdmans, 2008).

 

Ministry expectations can spread a pastor's energy thin as his duties expand in all directions. So how does a pastor serving alone prioritize his life and ministry to ensure that he is faithful to what is most important? During a Pastors College Q&A meeting this winter, a visiting pastor asked C.J. the following question.

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Question: With 18 to 20 hours of study a week, small-group training and leadership, parent-teen leadership, generational leadership, etc., for a guy like myself who is pastoring by himself, what do we do? Obviously we should preach on Sundays at the gathering, but where do we back off? And how do we gauge our family hours?

C.J. Mahaney: Your challenge will be the consistent temptation to compare yourself unfavorably to other pastors and other contexts. You hear about other churches and what they are accomplishing, and you can be tempted to think this is immediately transferable. Always look behind the immediate illustration to the history behind that church. That is too often what we don’t do. So realize that behind that other individual is a body of experience and a number of years. That church didn’t begin the way you now see it. And that is no small challenge for someone who is serving by himself in pastoral ministry, but it is your challenge, and it is one that I think you can walk wisely through.

Your priorities at present sound like they are in place.

(1) First is the priority of caring for your own soul before God, cultivating affection for the Savior, and growing in your appreciation for his death on the cross for your sins.

(2) The second priority is caring for, serving, and leading your wife and children.

(3) Then we arrive at preparation for the Sunday meeting. If I were to open your planner and study your calendar, I would want to see reflected in your schedule a sufficient number of hours to prepare for the Sunday meeting. This meeting must be your priority because, until you have a team around you, this is the most effective way you can serve the entirety of the church as it exists now.

From my experience, the demands of counseling often most forcefully intrude upon your preparation for serving the church on Sunday. Identifying and training those capable of serving as small-group leaders would be, I think, your next priority. I would train them in biblical counseling so that they can help you with pastoral ministry and free you to devote more undistracted time to preaching and leading on Sunday. Given the strategic role they play, I wouldn’t be simply training these small-group leaders in generalities, but developing a specialized training program for those individuals so that they can assist you in detailed counseling situations. Although you may be required in the toughest cases, finding capable small-group leaders will relieve much of the counseling burden that single-staff pastors cannot carry themselves.

And at this point there are ways I think you can specialize, depending on the makeup of your church. But you don’t have to think in terms of official, formalized ministries. For example, you may consider developing a class based on a book like Age of Opportunity to train parents and teens for a period of time without the obligation of creating a formalized, ongoing parent-youth ministry.

That is what I would recommend for someone in your present situation. I want to address the immediate pressing needs of your church that aren’t being addressed through Sunday and that can’t be addressed adequately through small-group leadership. Then asking, “How can we create a way to effectively address those pressing needs temporarily, without obligating you to create an entire ministry?”

And then, primarily, you must be particularly aware—which I am sure you are—of this vulnerability to compare yourself to other churches. You must guard your heart carefully, because if you don’t pay careful attention to your heart, there will be a cumulative low-grade discouragement in your soul. I am jealous that you serve the Lord with gladness in this season of the life of your church, and not postpone this joy for some future time when you are surrounded by a pastoral team. Whatever season we find ourselves in—whether a staff of 20 or a staff of one—I am jealous for all of us that we “serve the Lord with gladness” (Psalm 100:2 ESV).

 

I was recently privileged to participate in the 2008 Resolved Conference in Palm Springs, California. (The conference is named after Jonathan Edwards’s famous resolutions.) Some 3,400 college students and single adults attended the conference, led by my friend Rick Holland.
 
Even the theme of the conference was very Edwards-like: Heaven and Hell.
 
Obviously, it’s easier to preach on the love of God than the justice of God, easier to preach on the glories of heaven than the horrors of hell. We must preach on both topics. But from my perspective pastors are often reluctant to preach on hell, and that leaves an absence of biblically accurate—and humbly presented—examples of current sermons on this hard topic.
 
At the Resolved conference, John Piper and John MacArthur each preached a very effective message on hell. One message is topical, the other more expositional. For preachers who have the responsibility and courage to humbly, compassionately preach on hell, Piper’s and MacArthur’s sermons model theological accuracy and a tone of compassion.

Both messages will serve your soul and leave you more amazed by grace.
 
Downloads here:
 
John Piper—“The Echo and the Insufficiency of Hell” (Resolved session 8). Download this message from the Desiring God website [here].
 
John MacArthur—On Luke 16:19–31 (Resolved session 10). To listen, download the MP3 from the Resolved website [here].

Pic by Lukas.

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III recently traveled to Sovereign Grace to teach on covenant theology at the Pastors College. Dr. Duncan currently serves as senior minister of First Presbyterian Church (Jackson, MS) and as an adjunct professor at Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS). In late March, Dr. Duncan generously opened his schedule for me to ask a handful of questions on the value of the early church fathers, especially for busy pastors. Patrology, or the study of the early church fathers, was the topic of Dr. Duncan’s PhD thesis from the University of Edinburgh.

The interview answers questions like Why should a busy pastor invest time in reading the patristic authors? How will a pastor benefit? Where should he start? What cautions should he be alerted to?

Download the full interview MP3 (14.4 MB).

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Outline of interview questions [with time markers]

[00:00] – Intro

[01:30] – Define for us patristics or patrology.

[04:28] – Why should busy pastors read patristic literature in the first place?

[09:29] – What hurdles do pastors face in reading and benefiting from patristic writings?

[14:13] – For the busy pastor, recommend a few specific patristic titles covering history, biography, and primary sources.

[26:52] – What contemporary debates reflect controversies addressed by the patristic authors?

[32:00] – Our culture appears to be growing increasingly secular. If it's true that secularism is on the rise, what can we learn from the church fathers on engaging a “pagan” culture?

[36:06] – In patristic literature, a reader will be faced with thoughts or practices of the early church fathers that were incorrect. What concerns do you have for a pastor getting his feet wet in the patristic writings?

[41:46] – Would you agree that in patristic writings we see a stress on ethics over and above the gospel?

[45:08] – Dr. Duncan, you are a gifted patristic scholar and have been pastoring at First Presbyterian in Jackson for over twelve years now, preaching on a regular basis. How do your preaching and pastoral ministry reflect the impact of patristic authors?

 

(A continuation of C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: Sinclair, I am going to ask you to elaborate on four quotes. I have chosen four quotes among so many that I have benefited from personally in my study and used consistently in messages and books. I want to read them and then simply want you to comment on them, noting anything about their origin, or anything from them that you want to elaborate on. I would be most grateful.

The first quote states as follows:

The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are looking outward. We need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ.

What’s the origin of this statement? You obviously were observing this evangelical orientation as being inward and subjective and then drew attention to that orientation, exhorting us to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ. Why?

Sinclair Ferguson: This comes from a course on the doctrine of the church and the sacraments, and therefore since I am not saying anything here about the church or the sacraments, it is probably an off the top of my head comment in passing and I am not able to contextualize it.

CJM: By the way, I find that a little discouraging. This is off the top of your head?

SF: Well, come on, now. C.J., you say things off the top of your head.

CJM: Oh, yes, but they never make their way into print.

SF: I think it has arisen from a variety of things I have noticed over the years in the evangelical world. If I were to explain in a technical sense, I would say that I think one of the places where the impact of the Enlightenment has come home to roost is in the way in which I see the impact of a man called Friedrich Schleiermacher on the church. He was reacting to the intelligentsia of his day who were demeaning the gospel. And he really, in a way, turned the gospel on its head by saying it’s what happens internally that’s important.

And I think over my Christian life I have seen more and more how that has become true of evangelicalism. I mean, evangelical Christianity has a very broad subculture that now, probably since the 1960s, has been the kind of “born again” generation, where the really important thing was that you had been “born again” and you had an “experience.”

I began to notice that often being “born again” in the teaching of John 3 was dislocated from the rest of John 3, which had to do with believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and, through him, having salvation. And so sometimes when you had people interviewed who had been “born again,” there was no connectedness to the person of Christ at all.

And so I think I saw the pervasiveness of that and also in my own subculture—the Reformed subculture (if that is the best way to put it). I have been in that subculture all my life. I am a Presbyterian. I have never been anything but a Presbyterian, and that’s been my world.

I noticed in the revival of Reformed theology a glorious worldwide phenomenon. The revival of Calvinism brought much of the interest in terms of literature. The books that people read and were encouraged to read (and rightly encouraged to read) tended to be the ones that dealt with subjective experience.

And so in my subculture we were somewhat critical of the rest of the subculture of evangelicalism, and maybe particularly critical of the charismatic subculture that was all taken up with experience. We didn’t notice that actually, in some ways, we were just using a different mathematics for our experience. One of the books to which many people referred was John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, a hammer on the top of an Arminian’s head. And I observed that people, as I would put it, changed their mathematics about the atonement. But perhaps hadn’t really grasped what this was saying about the Lord Jesus himself and his glory.

And I guess, too, many people became Calvinists through their understanding of the application of redemption (sometimes called the ordo salutis). I began to see and hear people speaking about this almost without reference to the Lord Jesus, saying things like, “Regeneration causes faith, faith brings repentance, faith leads to sanctification.”

You remember those Find Waldo books? In the midst of all this I was saying, “But where is Jesus here?”

CJM: Excellent!

SF: I remember on one occasion listening to a series of sermons through one of the Gospels. Here was the basic motif of the sermons: Where are you in this Gospel story?

Now, there is an authenticity about that, but the real question is: Who is Jesus in this Gospel story?

And so, watching all this, I realized by looking at the literature that was being produced (including the literature I was producing), that it had more about how to live the Christian life....And so I think that is what lies behind this quote.

Curiously, I think it was C.S. Lewis that gave me the clue to this. When an undergraduate, I remember reading his book A Preface to Paradise Lost (on Milton’s book). And that wee book is not a well-known book of Lewis’s, but it is a great wee book with some stunning quotes.

In that book Lewis discusses what I had noticed in the kind of discussions as a student: Why is it that in Paradise Lost, if you ask who the hero is, just in terms of the literary power, Satan turns out to be the hero? And the literary critics had discussed this a good deal. But Lewis said it very simply. He said it’s far easier to portray evil than it is to portray perfect good.

And the more I thought about that, the more I realized: For preachers it’s much easier to seek to bring about conviction of sin and expose sin than to magnify and glory in the Lord Jesus.

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Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke 

In February, about 100 Sovereign Grace pastors gathered in Gaithersburg for our Pastors College Preaching Conference. They heard from Jeff Purswell (dean of the Pastors College), Mike Bullmore (longtime homiletics professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and now senior pastor of CrossWay Community Church in Bristol, Wisconsin) and myself. As expected, the pastors left the conference with a list of recommended books on this most important topic.

But pastors can be easily overwhelmed when they hear someone recommend numerous books on a topic. It can be hard to know where to begin.

Over the last few years, rather than just recommending books, I’ve begun recommending specific chapters of books. I do this for a number of reasons. Obviously, it’s easier for a pastor to read a chapter than an entire book. Reading one excellent chapter can create an appetite for the entire book. And some books contain helpful chapters but are not worth reading in their entirety.

Rather than recommending a small library of books on preaching, today we are featuring the five favorite chapters from each of the three speakers at the conference. I think this list will serve pastors and create realistic and achievable reading assignments on the important topic of preaching. Consider creating a reading plan for the next month developed around these chapters.

So here are the top five recommended chapters on preaching from Jeff Purswell, Mike Bullmore, and myself.

Jeff Purswell’s recommended chapters

1. “Why Preach?” by J.I. Packer. The Introduction to The Preacher and Preaching (P&R, 1986).

2. “Theological Foundations for Preaching” by John Stott. Chapter 3 in Between Two Worlds (Eerdmans, 1982).

3. “Preaching Christ from the Old Testament” by Ligon Duncan. Chapter 2 in Preaching the Cross (Crossway, 2007).

4. “The Gravity and Gladness of Preaching” by John Piper. Chapter 4 in The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Baker, 1990).

5. “Paul’s Theology of Preaching” by Dennis E. Johnson. Chapter 3 of Him We Proclaim (P&R, 2007).

Mike Bullmore’s recommended chapters

1. “A Redemptive Approach to Preaching” by Bryan Chapell. Chapter 10 in Christ-Centered Preaching (Baker, 2005).

2. “The Preacher” by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Chapter 6 in Preaching and Preachers (Zondervan, 1971).

3. “The Goal of Preaching” by John Piper. Chapter 1 in The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Baker, 1990).

4. “The Blind Eye and Deaf Ear” by C.H. Spurgeon. Various chapters in editions of Lectures to my Students.

5. “The Minister’s Fainting Fits” by C.H. Spurgeon. Various chapters in editions of Lectures to my Students.

C.J. Mahaney’s recommended chapters

1. “Expository Preaching: Charles Simeon and Ourselves” by J.I. Packer. Chapter 9 in Preach the Word (Crossway: 2007)

2. “The Whole Man” by R.C. Sproul. Chapter 4 in The Preacher and Preaching (P&R, 1986).

3. “The Pattern of Illustrations” by Bryan Chapell. Chapter 7 in Christ-Centered Preaching (Baker, 2005).

4. “The Preparation of the Preacher” by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Chapter 9 in Preaching and Preachers (Zondervan, 1971).

5. “Unction” by Tony Sargent. Chapter 3 in The Sacred Anointing: The Preaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Crossway, 1994).

In Sovereign Grace we are committed to the primacy of preaching in building the local church. And within this conviction is an awareness of the gravity of the preaching event.

At a recent conference on preaching, held at our Pastors College, Jeff Purswell (dean of the Pastors College) eloquently and passionately made this point. This excerpt (transcribed and posted below) will challenge all men called to preach and make a difference in our souls as we stand behind the sacred desk this Sunday and speak on behalf of God.

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Preaching is incarnational, meaning it calls for the presence of human personality. This sets preaching apart from other modes of communication. This sets preaching apart from personal Bible reading. That is why we don’t just hand out Bibles and read from Scripture on a Sunday morning. Why not? Because there is more going on in the preaching moment than just a delivery of information.

One of the things that enters here is biblical anthropology. We are people created in the image of God. We were created to know God, created to reflect God, and endowed with certain characteristics from God. And so we are created to know him.

Just as in the ancient Near East a king, in vast provinces he cannot travel to, would set up huge statues of himself which represented his presence and authority, in the same way God has set up an image of himself to represent and reflect himself. And that is man. And this impacts the way God communicates, as he speaks through divinely appointed messengers. After man was ejected from the Garden, God has communicated to his people by mediating his word through someone. Even the Scriptures were mediated from God through someone.

God didn’t just deliver the Israelites. God could have just wiped out the Egyptians and delivered Israel. No. He sent a messenger to reveal God to him. “Tell him I AM has sent you.” And then after delivering them he appointed this messenger to not only give them his law, but then to interpret that law. So Deuteronomy is basically comprised of three sermons of Moses explicating this law. And then, of course, throughout the rest of the Old Testament we read the prophets. The most accurate definition of a prophet is one who speaks God’s words. “I will put my words in his mouth” (Deuteronomy 18:18). That is the definition of a prophet.

And then, of course, the ultimate revelation is through the person of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. He is a particular kind of revelation, a different kind of revelation, not just one prophet through a line of other prophets, but a qualitatively different revelation (Hebrews 1:1–2). And then the apostles stand in that same succession. Now preachers stand in that same succession.

Listen to this quote from a classic essay on preaching by J.I. Packer in The Preacher and Preaching. Packer writes,

God’s standard way of securing and maintaining His person-to-person communication with us His human creatures is through the agency of persons whom He sends to us as His messengers.…Such were the prophets and apostles, and such supremely was Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son.…That is the succession in which preachers today are called to stand.

It’s sobering that this is “the succession in which preachers today are called to stand.” The moment of preaching is not simply one in which you—by virtue of your job or by virtue of the nameplate on your office door—get to stand up and share some thoughts. No. You are not sharing thoughts. You are not Jay Leno. You are not a talking head. You are standing in the very stead of God.

Oh, that is a frightening thing.

It’s not only a divine message you are bringing, but you are meant to be a suitable vessel for that message, embodying its truth, exemplifying an appropriate response to its claims, impassioned by the weight of the message and the urgency of the moment.

-Jeff Purswell, address from February 14, 2008