The Pastor Must Preach
Last year in our study of the New Testament church, I taught a three-part series on the office of pastor. Since our expositions of the church were comprehensive, it was necessary to examine the positions of leadership which are pastors and deacons. The pastor is the foremost leader as he is the undershepherd of the Chief Shepherd who is our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the pastor’s job to represent Christ and to lead the flock as He would lead them. With this description, you can see the weight of responsibility the pastor carries especially when the scriptures tell us he must give an account to the Chief Shepherd of his stewardship.
Because of the pastor’s visibility, everything he is and does is scrutinized. This includes his personality, knowledge, oratory, and many other qualifications extending to his family as well. The pastor is to be circumspect in all these because of the one he represents. Satan throws many stumbling blocks in the paths of God’s people. Surely, the pastor must not be one of them! Before I am through with this series, I believe these many areas of the pastor’s ministry will become clearer to you.
From many years of experience, I can testify the pastor’s work is rigorous and demanding. Any pastor who has been at this for a while will not fail to tell you that meeting the many expectations of the office is spiritually, physically, and mentally exhausting. I choose to focus on only one aspect in this article which is preaching. Hours of work are put into preparing sermons which I believe should be the greatest singular focus of pastors. We must give God’s people His word and we must deliver it accurately and in the power of the Holy Spirit. At times, the preparation can feel too repetitious, and the pastor becomes worn out from the many hours of prep to deliver 45 minutes of exposition. Much material is fed into the sermon hopper before the finished product compactly emerges.
This job is week by week with little relief. Forty-hour work weeks are an unimaginable luxury. For me, sermon preparation starts on Monday and ends when the finishing touches are applied just before leaving home for church on Sunday mornings. When the 45 minutes of delivery are done, the cycle starts again on Monday morning with the same schedule. And yet with all the time preparing, there is often the sense it has not been enough. When it is far too late to change, an anxious feeling usually arises on late Saturday afternoon. It extends into the few minutes before walking into the pulpit that something will go wrong. The delivery will be poor and the reception of it even poorer. This anxiety lingers until the first few words are spoken and the sermon text begins to flow. At the end, the congregation analyzes what they heard, and the pastor awaits the results. Most comments are polite and perhaps not too much to be trusted. It’s the silence of no comments that usually tells the most.
What I have just described cannot be the ultimate test of the success of preaching. The real test is, do they come back? Will they be there next week to hear another in the same series, and will they faithfully attend do show that what they hear has been received and recognized as integral to their spiritual growth?
My discouragements in ministry are often cojoined with departures. I do not want people to leave. I too often evaluate this as failure when more often I am lifted from discouragement by a note of appreciation from the departing that says they learned more of the Bible at Berean than they thought possible or had experienced in other places of their Christian sojourn. This is when joy seeps out of the tedious repetitiveness of preparations for the never-ending succession of Sundays.
The pastor’s job has many facets but none as critical as preaching. I pray for the power of the Holy Spirit to do it many, many more Sundays.
Pastor V. Mark Smith