Preaching Out of Season

For the one who has to stand up Sunday and say what he can't feel

I stopped in the middle of a sermon once and told our church something pastors don't usually say out loud. Ministry is difficult. It's hard to stand up and preach and teach week after week. People come and people go, and every bit of it is personal. Standing up there is an exposing moment for a teacher.

If you teach, whether it's a pulpit or a Sunday school class or a small group in your living room, you know the particular version of that I mean. It's Saturday night, the lesson is about the joy of grace, and you feel none of it. You've spent the week snapping at your kids, skipping your own Bible reading, and doubting things you'll be asked to explain with confidence in twelve hours. And a voice starts asking what kind of fraud gets up in front of people to say what he can't feel.

"Lest I Myself Should Become Disqualified"

There's a verse that seems written for that voice. Paul says:

But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:27)

Read that on a bad Saturday and it lands hard. If Paul worried about being disqualified after preaching to others, what chance do you have?

When I preached through this passage, I pointed out the phrase most of us skip, when I have preached to others. Paul never says God will disqualify him. The concern is his credibility in front of people. If I stand up and preach a disciplined life and then live like a crazy person in public, the people listening will stop giving my words any weight. That concern is real, and it's about whether others can hear you. Whether God still has you was decided at the cross, long before you ever opened a commentary.

Feeling empty and living a lie are two different things. On Sunday morning you're preaching what Jesus did, not a report on your feelings, and that's as true at eleven on Saturday night, when you can't feel any of it, as it is on the best morning of your life.

The Study at 11:20

The banker's lamp on his desk is the only light on in the house. There's an open Bible, a legal pad with the first paragraph crossed out four times, and a small pile of crumpled pages on the floor by the trash can he keeps missing. The bookshelves around him are full of men who seemed to know exactly what they believed. He's been staring at the same sentence for twenty minutes: Grace changes everything. He believes it. He just can't remember the last time it felt like it changed anything in him.

In Weakness and Much Trembling

Here's how Paul described his own arrival in Corinth:

And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. (1 Corinthians 2:1-3)

Paul, the brilliant student who was on his way to the top of Israel's religious world, walked into Corinth shaking. And he tells us why the weakness didn't sink the message. He preached Jesus Christ and Him crucified, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1 Corinthians 2:5). When I taught that chapter, I said Paul chose to come in without the flamboyance, because he didn't want the church giving him all the attention.

That should take an enormous weight off your shoulders. The power was never in your confidence. It was in the cross you were pointing to.

In Season and Out of Season

In his last letter, Paul wrote to a young pastor: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season (2 Timothy 4:2). Out of season means the times that aren't convenient, the weeks when you don't feel ready. Paul knew those weeks. At the end of the same letter he writes, At my first defense no one stood with me, but all forsook me... But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me, so that the message might be preached fully through me (2 Timothy 4:16-17).

Through me. The man who'd been abandoned by nearly everyone didn't say the message was preached by his strength. It went through him, carried by a Lord who stood next to him when no one else would.

I still come to the big, famous passages with some fear and trembling, because I know how much is at stake in getting them right. But I don't step up there alone, and neither do you.

Some Saturdays the lesson won't come together, and you'll stand up the next morning with notes you don't love and a heart that feels a step behind your mouth. Stand up anyway. Preach what Jesus did. It will be just as true coming out of you on that Sunday as on any other.

He tears off the crossed-out page, writes one line across the top of a clean one, Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and starts again from there.