I Am A Pastor

After working for more than twenty years as a pastor, I can tell you that sermon planning, preparation, and filing is definitely one of those tasks. When I first came to our church, I picked sermon passages on a whim, and when the message was done, I essentially threw it out. However, as I continued to preach week after week, the inadequacies of this system quickly became apparent. As a brand new pastor picking passages on a whim, I quickly reached the end of the texts that were familiar to me. The longer I preached, the more likely it was that I revisited a passage, in which case I would want to return to all of the notes and such that I had taken the last time I was there. And as I continued to minister in the same church for five, ten, and fifteen years, it became important that I develop a system whereby I do not get stuck in a rut, constantly revisiting the same passages or themes. Consequently, I began to develop a system for planning, preparing, and filing sermons.

In 2 Chronicles 11:13-17, the priests and Levites took their stand with Rehoboam because he was the lesser of two evils. Granted, he allowed them to worship the Lord, but in the end, he was just as spiritually bankrupt as his northern counterpart. The alliance was doomed from the start, and any such alliance we forge today is doomed, too.

Colossians 1:28-29 served as the what, why, and how for his work as an apostle, helping to guide what he would (and would not) do, reminding him of its importance when things grew difficult, and explaining how it was even possible. Today, this declaration serves a similar purpose for pastors and other ministers.

The closer I get to God, the softer his voice gets. I think there are two reasons for this. First, because I am closer, he has no need to speak more loudly. And second, more importantly, as close I am, he wants to draw me closer still.

I am a fisherman. Sadly, I do not get to fish nearly as much as I would like to, but some of my earliest memories are fishing with my family. Over the years, I remember trips when we put fish in the boat as quickly as we could drop our lines in the water, and […]

When we are in need of revival, either individually or corporately, the two things which must happen before that revival will ever come are revealed in this passage: we must obey the commands of the Lord and pray for the Spirit to bring us back to life. These two things go hand-in-hand. They do not work independently of each other.

In my previous post, I shared three things I learned from my high school math teacher and cross country/track coach, Bob Scott. But there was one other thing that I learned from Mr. Scott that I thought worthy of sharing. You see, Mr. Scott will probably never be a footnote in someone’s history book, let […]

Last night, I learned that Bob Scott passed away. In the history of the world, there have no doubt been countless men named Bob Scott, but there has only ever been one Bob Scott. As a husband and father, he was surely among the best. For those who wanted to learn, he was a superb […]

In my previous post, I explained how easy – and dangerous – it is for pastors to slide into cynicism. In that post, I observed that cynicism is the antithesis of hope, an extreme form of worry. In fact, I wrote, “Whereas doubt suggests that a thing might not happen, cynicism assumes that the thing […]

If cynicism does not paralyze us, it leaves us marching grimly toward certain death for a dubious cause. At least, if the cause was worthy, we would be martyrs.