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.

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