Transformed Through Preaching

One of the greatest joys that I get to experience as a pastor is the joy of seeing people under my spiritual care grow in their experience of God and their confidence in serving him. A number of years ago now I developed a homiletics course for the layperson in the church to help them discover and develop the give of preaching in their lives. Over the years I have had the great privilege of taking people through my curriculum and mentorship in a one-on-one basis but never did I have the joy of actually facilitating a class of students as I had always envisioned until this past spring.

Over the last 2½ months we have journeyed together though text, lecture, discussion and homework to discover just what is the heart of preaching and next week, those who persisted to the end will deliver their final assignments and we will celebrate what God has done in their lives. The feedback that I have received over the duration of the course so far was that it was intense (perhaps too intense early on) and that it was heady – but over time I witnessed something truly miraculous happen – my students grew, and overcame the challenges that I had placed before them to become something more than they were before – they have learned a deeper appreciation for and mastery of the written and preached word of God.

I have heard testimonies from those who discovered in their assignment on listening to an evaluating sermons, a keener ability to discern godly teaching from empty pop-psychology; I have heard testimonies from those who had never cracked the spine on a commentary before, about the richness and depth of God’s word in ways that they had never contemplated before, now laid before them by scholars who gave given them the keys to unlock the lenses of genre, context and history; and I have seen people who were nervous and unsure of their own worthiness to preach deliver bold and Spirit-empowered messages rooted soundly in the text with deep personal and corporate implications. What excites me most though, is that I believe some of them have learned the joy that I get to experience on an almost weekly basis, whereby I encounter God in the task of preaching and am transformed by him.

Now it’s true that we all meet and encounter God in our own unique ways according to how he has made us, and I don’t mean to elevate one encounter above any other or paint people into a corner in any way – but where some people meet God primarily in their prayer times, or in their daily reading of the word, or in corporate worship or outdoors in creation – I experience God most vividly when I sit down for the task of preparing a word for the church. There is something about what the author of our class textbook Tom Long calls the act of witness, whereby God encounters me and I him through the analytical and creative act of trying to communicate his message to the church. Those who have frequented my office over the past year will be familiar with my busy and colourful whiteboard, routinely filled up with marker strokes of inspiration, and inquiry and even sometimes revelation of God’s truth that I had failed before to fully (or even begin to) grasp. In the process of preparing to preach I have experienced many of my most profound “eureka” moments about God and his love for his church, this world, and me and I have experienced conviction the like of which I rarely experience through any other means.

There is an old adage that says that every good sermon is preached first to the audience of the one person who resides in the preacher’s mirror – I don’t know if my sermons are always “good” from an objective standpoint, but I know that more often than not I preach what I need to hear from God. And when I do, I always get something out of it.  My prayer for my soon-to-be Preachers From the Bleachers graduates, and for anyone else who volunteers to be a witness to the living word of God on behalf of the community of faith, is that they would hear it too; that they would, as I repeatedly have, be transformed through preaching.