I'd like to change the title of this article from "seven things I've learned," to "seven things I'm learning." In fact, I think I might even want to change it to, "seven things I think I'm beginning to learn, a little bit, about preaching."

I'm trying to capture something personal, something subjective. I'm trying to capture what I've called "the heart and soul of preaching." So, here are seven things I'm beginning to learn about preaching after having taught it for 15 years.

There is a connection between preaching and pastoral leadership.
I have been amazed at the opportunity that preaching affords for pastoral leadership. I did not anticipate this.

Now, don't make the mistake of thinking that the opportunity and leverage for leadership is coming just because "you've got the floor now." That's not what it's about. It's about the powerful tool that preaching is for pastoral leadership. So let's talk about using preaching to lead.

You are not a guest speaker who shows up every week. You're a pastor. You are a pastor who has been commanded by God to pay careful attention to the flock in which—that's an important preposition, by the way—the Holy Spirit has made you an overseer. So you need to see every opportunity to preach not just as an opportunity to faithfully communicate the truth of God, but also as an opportunity to exercise pastoral leadership and care.

I don't know if this is your experience, but sometimes in the midst of sermon preparation—especially when it's happening Saturday night—I slip into this mentality: Let's just get through this one. Let's just get this one done. I'll try to be a bit more effective in my time management next week.

And right there, we need to say: No. I will not go there. This is an opportunity that is not to be missed. God, help me to keep my mind in a place that will help me to use this opportunity.

Listen to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

The greatest danger for me, the greatest temptation to me, is that I should walk into the pulpit next Sunday because it was announced last Sunday that I would be doing so. Of course, it is right that a man should not break his contract, but that I am simply doing it because, well, another Sunday has come …

So what does this mean, using your preaching to lead? Well, it certainly means that you are faithfully leading in terms of doctrinal definition. But I want to especially focus on something else here. Using your preaching to lead also means thinking carefully about the spiritual needs of your congregation.

Every year in the fall, I take some time to get before God and pray: God, where do we need to be going? What are the things that you're trying to accomplish? What are the things that are happening that need to be addressed?

Next, having determined those priorities, we want to fuel those priorities with exposition-driven, Spirit-empowered preaching. In other words, once we've figured out where God wants us to go, we need to drive our people there through Spirit-filled preaching.

It also means connecting preaching with other parts of church life. For example, we have an annual memory program that we intentionally tie in with our preaching. This year we're memorizing Romans 6, and we'll be preaching through Romans 6. Last year a good part of our preaching time was in Hebrews, and so our Scripture memory for the year was under the rubric of "fixing your eyes on Jesus"—it was all verses about Jesus, many of them from the book of Hebrews.

There is a difference between independent sermons and a unified teaching ministry.
We must see our preaching as cumulative. The reason you need to see it that way is not just because you'll need to go over stuff over and over again. I mean, if you think only in terms of independent sermons, you will drive yourself to distraction because you'll preach on gossip, and that very week they'll be gossiping. Even after you just preached on it. In fact, worse than that, you'll be gossiping!

Don't think in terms of, Okay, I've got that subject done. There is a cumulative effect. You're going to have to go over stuff again and again, but you also need to see that whatever you're preaching on is part of something bigger. You cannot think in terms of independent sermons even when you preach independent sermons.

For example, I typically try to preach a sermon that's not connected to a series for the last Sunday of every year and the first Sunday of every year. I will typically preach from a psalm the last Sunday of the year and from a psalm the first Sunday of the year, because I just want people to end the year and begin the year with a big vision of God. But even those independent sermons are part of something bigger. And while extended series help you to avoid this kind of atomistic approach, even series need to be seen as part of something bigger.

The metaphor of building a house helps me think about this. You're building a house for your people to live in. It takes time. It's a life-long project. It has specific parts. There are certain things that need to get done in that house. A house needs a roof. A house needs windows. And it will need regular upkeep.

Early in my ministry I thought: Okay, the first two years of my preaching I'm just going to establish the foundation of the gospel. Get the church established in the gospel, and then we'll be able to kind of build on that for the rest of our lives. Well you know what happened? People started coming after those two years. And I kept wanting to say, "Can you just go listen to the tapes from the first two years to catch up?"

While you're building, you've got to keep checking back over what you've already covered. You've finished the foundation, and now you're building this wall. Before moving on to the next wall, you'll need to say, "Let's go back and make sure the foundation is in place." Or you'll be working on the ceiling and notice that a window is getting a little loose, so you'll go back and get that window tightened up. It takes effort, but over time you are building a house for your people to live in.

Clarity matters a lot.
The third thing I've learned is that clarity matters even more than I thought it did. And I thought it mattered a lot. There are two kinds: large-scale clarity and small-scale clarity. Large-scale clarity is one of the things that I do fairly early in my sermon preparation, writing down the basic flow of my sermon. If I can't get down in a page or two, I have to start over.

I'm trying to string a clothesline from the beginning of my sermon to the end that I can hang everything on. There's got to be a clear line from the beginning to the end, and everything that you put in your sermon has got to be justified by its contribution to the advancement of that point. Nothing else goes in.

Secondly, there's small-scale clarity. Quotes and illustrations and other supporting materials are very important, but when you use them, it tends to be a place that people lose track of clarity. You have to make sure that the function of the illustration is clear to the listener and contributing to the point.

Be succinct. Boil down quotes and illustrations as much as possible. Your people should never be thinking Oh that was interesting but what was the connection? I don't see the connection.

The weight of your preaching flows from your own conviction.
The weight of your preaching comes from the weight of truth mediated through your own conviction, not from a manufactured passion or some confidence in your crafting.

There were many times in my early enthusiasm as a preaching pastor that I found myself saying during preparation, That's the point where I need to be passionate. Well, it only took one or two times of just dreadful flops to cure me of that kind of premeditation. It lent itself to artificiality. You must trust to the Spirit of God that he will provide all the preaching passion that you need at the appropriate time if you have given yourself to the content of this Word.

So what should it be like? Well, your job is to spend time with your Bible so that you are able to feel the burden of the text—able to feel the weight of it on your own soul. You care about it. It matters to you not just as a preacher but as a creature who needs truth from God. You have begun to feel the weight of God's truth here. When that happens, I believe, there comes a gravity and a joy to your preaching—when God's Word has its effect on your own heart.

Let me try to capture this with a few historical examples. This is from Martin Lloyd-Jones' description of Robert Murray McCheyne:

[He] walked into his pulpit at Dundee and before he opened his mouth people would begin to weep and were broken down. Why? Well, there was a solemnity about the man. [Now don't read there was a melancholy about the man.] He had come from the presence of God. He did not trip into his pulpit lightly and crack a joke or two to put everybody at ease and to prepare the atmosphere. No, there was a radiance of God about him. There was a terrible seriousness.

Here's a description of the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. When the 19th century scholar Sereno Dwight was asked, "Do you think Edwards was an eloquent preacher?" he replied:

He had no studied varieties of the voice and no strong emphasis. He scarcely gestured or even moved. And he made no attempt by the elegance of his style or the beauty of his pictures to gratify the taste and fascinate the imagination. But if you mean by eloquence the power of presenting important truth before an audience with overwhelming weight of argument and with such intenseness of feeling that the whole soul of the speaker is thrown into every part of conception and delivery so that the solemn attention of the whole audience is riveted from the beginning to the end and impressions are left that cannot be effaced, well then, Mr. Edwards was the most eloquent man I ever heard speak.

I'm not suggesting that any of us is going to be a McCheyne or an Edwards, but I am suggesting that there is a place where weight comes from. I'm learning that the weight of our preaching comes from the weight of truth mediated through your own conviction. Preaching is less a treatise on biblical material and more a communication of the burden, the intention of the text. Preaching is not coverage of biblical material—it's the accomplishment of a biblical intention. Don't drive a wedge between biblical content and biblical intention. Obviously the intention of a text is communicated through the material of the text, through the content of the text. But the end of preaching is not informative; the end of preaching is persuasive. Your sermon's purpose always, always finds its identity completely in line with the purpose of the text.

You need to imagine God sitting out in your congregation looking at you. You need to check in with him every once in a while to see what look he's got on his face, whether his look says, I see where you got that, but that's not what I was trying to say. Or whether a look on his face that says, Yes. Yes. That's what I was saying. That's what I called you to say. This will give your sermons unity. It will give your sermons focus. I think it will give your sermons effectiveness.

The craving for recognition needs to die.

Number five: The craving for recognition is strong and it needs to die. I'm not just talking about the desire for praise here. That's there. But there is something bigger that I'm trying to capture in this word recognition: The desire to be acknowledged. It's a craving for all your work to be recognized. It's a craving to somehow be recognized. The craving for recognition is very strong, and it needs to die.

I'm beginning to think that for pastors who preach weekly, they need a definitive work of mortification in this area. I believe God desires and frequently brings about this work early, maybe even in the first few years. That seems to me to make sense. If he's going to use you over a long period of time there's a work he needs to get done early. God will bring the young preacher through some refining.

Now don't automatically assume that all the distress in your life is due to this work of God. Sometimes there's the stress of transition, adjusting to a new rhythm that you haven't been used to before. Sometimes it's the stress of pastoral load. Sometimes it's the stress of needing to actually grow in your preaching. There are things that actually need to be adjusted. Sometimes it's the stress of carrying sin. But nonetheless, I believe it is not uncommon for God to walk a young preacher through a process of refinement.

There's nothing more terrible than to be in the pulpit alone. We are utterly and completely dependent on God.

Let me share with you what God did for me. About two years into my preaching I was regularly experiencing an unusual amount of anxiety in the morning late in the week. It didn't take long for my wife Bev and I to figure out that it was connected to the preaching responsibility, because it was particularly acute on Thursday mornings. I could hold it off Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. But I would wake up on Thursday mornings with heaviness, and it was sometimes approaching despair. It went on for a matter of months and it got worse, so that we got concerned about it.

So Beverly ministered to me in ways that were profound. She prayed for me. She would get up with me. She would speak to me. She would write me notes. It was amazing. But it went on. It just went on and we couldn't quite figure it out: God, what's going on?

We drew some other men into this. There were three or four guys that I very purposefully laid this out. We explored. Was I overextended? Was there a sin issue? Apart from this mortification thing was there some other sin issue that God was pressing on me—a Psalm 51 type pressing. Is there something like that?

Our best understanding was this: This was not something to try to escape. This was not something that was going to be fixable by identifying some solution. This was something God was walking us through. The best thing to do was to humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and let him do his work. It was not fun. I believe God was weaning me from myself and was cultivating a desperation for him and a desire for him to be recognized, not me. I think God was training me in a verse that I had chosen as a teenager, according to my earnest expectation and my hope that "in nothing I shall be ashamed but that with all boldness as always so now also Christ should be magnified in my body whether by life or by death." So I think that's what was happening. I know for me there was a definitive work that God was doing and I believe God did.

But having done that work there is still a need for an ongoing work. You will always wrestle with yourself as a rival to God. So you will need to have some mechanisms in place—some habits of thought, some habits of practice—before you preach and after you preach to purposefully put this to death. One of the greatest helps to me in this regard has been the passage in 1 Corinthians 4. 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 became for me a companion. I think it's a good one to have in your arsenal.

This, then, is how you ought to regard us: as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful. I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.

Now I think those realities—the reality of stewardship, the reality of the fact that what's required of stewards is faithfulness, the fact that God will judge you and the fact that he will commend—will help you to invest fully in your labor while at the same time sitting very loosely from yourself.

So that after you're done preaching whether in the presence of recognition or in the absence of recognition, whether in the presence of feedback or the absence of feedback, whether in the presence of praise or the absence of praise your heart will still say, "Oh, I'm already thinking about next week. I'm already investing in next week's responsibility."

Effectiveness in your preaching is dependent on God.

Number six: Effectiveness in your preaching really is utterly and completely dependent on God. Listen to the words of Spurgeon: "All the hope of our ministry lies in the Spirit of God operating on the spirits of men." You are utterly and completely dependent on God, and God is faithful.

Listen to the words of Dr. John Piper:

How utterly dependent we are on the Holy Spirit in the work of preaching. All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You go to your study. You look down at your pitiful manuscript and you kneel down and you cry, "God, this is so weak. Who do I think I am? What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odor of death to death and the fragrance of life to life. My God, who is sufficient for these things?"

I think it was Lloyd-Jones who said at one point, "To me there is nothing more terrible for a preacher than to be in the pulpit alone, without the conscious smile of God." There's nothing more terrible than to be in the pulpit alone. We are utterly and completely dependent on God. But God is faithful.

Yes you are utterly and completely dependent on him for strength, for illumination and insight both during your study, during your writing, during your preaching, but especially for the efficacy of the Word during your preaching. God must perform a miracle every Sunday. But he does it. He does it and he delights to do it. God really does use your preaching. Real transformation happens.

He uses means. He does it through spiritual gifting. God gives gifts, and he intends to use them to accomplish something. You can trust God for that. Spiritual gifting both requires faith and it encourages faith. God's asking you to exercise faith. But the fact of spiritual gifting also ought to encourage your faith. Thinking about the reality of spiritual gifting will shift your focus from self-confidence to trust in God.

He also works through the act of ministry of the Holy Spirit. During your preparation. I'm so encouraged by this growing awareness of the Spirit's activity during sermon preparation. I've grown to love this, especially during the writing. This has been kind of an interesting thing. I used to only love the research part and didn't like the writing part. Now I love the writing part because it's a place where I'm experiencing God's presence.

I have recently gotten in the habit of having another little pad by my writing desk and all I do is keep a tally for every time that I sense God has just given me words and phrases. You feel like you're being borne along; the active presence of the Holy Spirit of God in your writing.

Then during the preaching, there is what Lloyd-Jones calls the conscious smile of God, this awareness of God's presence. You're experiencing, I don't know how to say it, something bigger than yourself is happening while you are preaching. So I'm learning to cultivate a greater awareness of God's presence by his Spirit, and I have a greater desire for God's presence by his Spirit in preparation and delivery.

Yes, all the hope of our ministry lies in the Spirit of God operating on the spirits of men. Any genuine change is a distinct work of God. It's very important that you know that. It's very important we remind ourselves of that. We are completely and utterly dependent on God, and God is faithful.

Now let me just mention two other means of grace to you in preaching. I want to talk about the prayers of the people and the prayers of your spouses.

Implore the prayers of your people on your behalf. Yes there's the possibility of doing this in a self-promoting or a self-absorbed way: Please pray for me. But it doesn't have to be that way. Ask them to pray regularly for you. Ask them to pray for the Spirit's power. Ask them to pray for humility, boldness, and words. I believe there is a particular eagerness on God's part to bless his people as they gather on Sunday morning, and to bless them particularly with his Word. So ask the people to pray, and if possible have a group of them praying for you and with you on Sunday mornings.

Some years ago we started a prayer gathering at nine o'clock on Sunday mornings. Our service starts at ten. I had no idea how much strength I would derive from that meeting. It ends typically with folks gathering around me or whoever is preaching that morning. It can be awkward. In fact what I appreciate so much about the guy who gives leadership to this is he knows it's awkward and yet he tells me pretty much every week "I know this is awkward for you, but we're going to keep doing it. We're going to keep doing this, gathering around you and praying." And I tell you, I can't wait to find out in heaven all that God did because of that. Even in this lifetime when I'm an old man sitting on a rocking chair on a porch and I reflect back on my life, those are going to be sweet memories, nine o'clock Sunday mornings.

Then very specifically I would encourage you to implore the prayers of your spouse. I believe preaching prospers under the prophetic voice of a close ally. Godly spouses are a gift, and they have a role to play. Implore your spouse to carry this burden with you, to pray for you, to speak to you words of encouragement, biblical encouragement. Don't be content with nice words. Biblical encouragement is putting something in you that wasn't there before—putting strength in your heart that wasn't there before, putting hope in your heart that wasn't there before, putting courage in your heart that wasn't there before. I think the best model of this in Scripture is Jonathan going out to David, who's now running from Saul. He's out in the desert of Ziph and nobody knows here he is but Jonathan finds him. And he goes out. And you know what 1 Samuel 23:16 says? "Jonathan helped him find strength in God." He put something in his heart that was not there before. That's encouragement.

Preaching is a costly act of love.

Finally, number seven: Preaching is a costly act of love. Ultimately preaching is an act of love, but it's a costly act. Bruce Thielemann said, "The pulpit calls those anointed to it as the sea calls its sailors. And like the sea, it batters and bruises and does not rest. To preach, to really preach is to die naked a little at a time and to know each time you do it that you must do it again."

So just a little note of encouragement, I thought I'd give you another quote. Even more poignant. E.M. Bounds: "Life giving preaching costs the preacher much. Death to self. Crucifixion to the world. The travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from one who has been crucified."

So how should you pray? You should pray, God, give me love for this people that goes beyond my awareness of the cost. Give me a love for you and your Word that is born out of labor in your Word, that on Sunday mornings that love might shine like a diamond. Help me to lay down my life so that my preaching can give life.

It's not just your prayers, it's your presence as well as you give yourself away every Sunday. As you spend yourself every Sunday you can't make that up. That flows out of care. That flows out of love. So the question is this: Do you care about what you're preaching? Do you care about the people to whom you are preaching? Or—here's the sobering part—do you primarily care about yourself in preaching? It is love for Christ and the love of Christ that should control you.

So let me leave you with these words of Paul and this question: "I resolve to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified." Are those words the standard for both the content and the character of your preaching? Is that both the content and the character of your preaching?

Amen.

Mike Bullmore senior pastor of CrossWay Community Church in Bristol, Wisconsin.