At a number of conferences, I have had the privilege and joy of sitting in the front row to hear my friend John Piper speak. And a few times I have been assigned to speak after him. It’s never my preference to speak after John. Preaching after John is always a humbling experience.

As you know, I cannot preach like John Piper. But what I have discovered over time is that great preachers like John, Charles Spurgeon, and Jonathan Edwards do model practices all preachers can emulate and benefit from.

At the Together for the Gospel conference, I had the privilege to participate with Mark, Al, and Lig in interviewing John. During the panel discussion, John provided us with a glimpse into how he prepares his sermons, and how he prepares his heart as he prepares his sermons.

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C.J. Mahaney: Most of these guys are already in the process of preparing a sermon for this Sunday. If they were to meet with you for lunch, how would you counsel them about both the preparation process and the preaching event?

John Piper: The most important thing I want to say in answer to that question is this: There isn’t any technique to preaching. It is not a technique. It is not a profession that you go to a homiletics class to learn how to do.

God is doing sermon preparation when your throat is blazing with yellow pustules and you have a fever and you feel like quitting. He is doing sermon preparation there. Don’t begrudge the seminary of suffering. Don’t begrudge the marriage difficulties. Don’t begrudge the parental stuff that is so hard. He is making you a preacher. He is making you a pastor.

So the main preparation work is walking with him through it all, and going deep with him, and being there and not running away from it into endless food or television. That would be a—very practical thing to do would be to get rid of your television so that you have some time, family time and reading time and reflection time, and basically keep your mind free from pornography.

We were talking about this pornography thing over lunch the other day, and we who are 60 years old were reflecting on how difficult it was to get pornography when we were teenagers. The implication of that is that in my brain I have two pornographic images from my teen years. I found a Playboy in a Laundromat, and they were passing a really weird book around in the locker room one day. I remember both images like I saw them yesterday. Most of you have a thousand images in your brain. That really makes sermon preparation hard, but not impossible. He died to purify our conscience, although you make your job a lot harder if you keep going to that cesspool.

…Keep your minds from being contaminated, because the preparation moment is a heart/mind thing in which every three minutes you are crying out to the Lord as you are reading your text in Greek or Hebrew or English. You are reading it and you are saying, “God, please. I have got to have a word. I have got to have a word for my people. Let me see what is really here.” That is a prayer for the mind part. My points must be here in the text. I can’t make this up. My people have to see it. I have to see it. I don’t want to pull rank on these folks by quoting Greek—and they say, “I don’t see that,” and I say, “Well, believe me it is there.” I don’t want to do that. I want them to see what is really there, so I need to see what is really there. So I am pleading with the Lord, “Show me what is there.”

And then I am pleading just as strong, “Help me to feel what is there. If it is a horrible thing, help me to feel horrible. If it is a beautiful thing, help me to feel thrilled over its beauty. Bring this dead heart into some kind of conformity—moral, affectual conformity to what is really there.”

Those are my two kinds of prayers, light and heat. If you try to work it up without the Holy Spirit giving it, people will know. They will know. Your people will know sooner or later. “I don’t think that was a real affection. That was planned.”

So there are a thousand details I could say about the preparation moment as far as poking at the text, but the preaching moment is the same. You plead with the Lord.

I do APTAT, before I stand up.

A—I admit, O Lord, that I can do nothing of any lasting value.

P—I pray for self forgetfulness, for fullness of the Holy Spirit, for love, for humility, for passion, for zeal, for prophetic utterance that may come to my mind while I am preaching so that I can say things that I hadn’t prepared that might penetrate where nothing else would.

T—I trust a particular promise from the Lord that I have found in my devotions early in the morning. So today I read Deborah’s song in Judges 5 as well as Psalm 84 between 6:30 and 7:00 this morning, and pointed out a verse to Mark as we were sitting there. “Oh my soul, ride on in strength.” That was my word this morning.

The Lord gave a word from his Word this morning: “Ride on in strength.” So I take that. That’s my T: trust. So as I am walking up, I am saying, “This is your work. It has come. Don’t leave me here. You have got to do something here. I am counting on you.”

And he is saying, “I got this under control.” He is God.

A—Then you act. You have got to do it. It is your hands that are moving. It is your voice that is moving. You have got to do this. Walking by the Spirit, putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, bearing the fruits of the Spirit is a mystery. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10, ESV). That is the mystery. So sermon preparation is: You put out when you are preparing and when you are preaching. You put out, but if you have prayed and done APTAT and God is merciful, you won’t be putting out. He will be putting out.

T—Thank God. And when you have acted and you go sit down, you thank him. He is going to do, and is doing what he is going to do, and he regularly does more than you think he does.

I don’t think after 28 years of preaching that I can correlate with any degree of confidence my sense of effectiveness in the moment and the true effectiveness of the moment. I don’t know any keys to know how to correlate those two. This keeps me from being too excited or too depressed.

The Lord will be sure to put me in my place if I do the one and lift me up if I do the other, because he said, “I am working out there in ways you can’t make happen at all. You thought that was a good thing to say? That wasn’t it. You missed it. That wasn’t what did it. This thing over here that you didn’t even know I gave you did it, and you will find out in heaven that that happened.”

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Listen to the T4G panel discussion here.

 

 

The Sovereign Grace Leadership Interviews feature a roundtable discussion among C.J. Mahaney (president of Sovereign Grace Ministries), Jeff Purswell (dean of our Pastors College), and Joshua Harris (senior pastor of Covenant Life Church). The three gather on a regular basis to discuss a wide array of theological and practical leadership issues.

In the second episode, the topic turns to care for the pastor’s own soul. Harris’ opening question sets the stage:

Pastors are obviously called to care for the souls of others, and yet today we want to turn the focus and ask: How does a pastor make sure that he is caring for his own soul? What does it look like for a man to pursue his own personal relationship with God and make sure he is growing spiritually?

The full hourlong podcast, “The Pastor and His Soul,” can be downloaded here.

In this second excerpt from the upcoming Sovereign Grace Leadership Interview podcast, “The Pastor and His Soul,” C.J. highlights counsel from C.H. Spurgeon and how it’s helped him cast his burdens upon the Lord. And C.J. warns of the weariness of soul that results when we seek to carry these burdens ourselves.

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C.J. Mahaney: We must be prepared for the experience of weariness of soul, particularly when one is involved in pastoral ministry, because each day we are carrying in our hearts those entrusted to our care.

A certain percentage of those individuals are experiencing the gift and test of prosperity. And when we interact with them, we rejoice with them as we hear how God is blessing and providing for them.

But there will always be a certain percentage of the congregation who are experiencing the test of adversity and who are suffering. And it is our privilege, our role, and our responsibility to care for them.

There will always be a certain percentage in the congregation who are fighting particular besetting sins, and it doesn’t appear to us they are making consistent progress. And though we are deploying the best information we have on biblical counseling, it doesn’t appear that progress is being made.

And, of course, there are each week unexpected incidents of suffering and death. One cannot be interacting with individuals in the various seasons of life, walking through severe suffering over a lengthy period of time, and remain unaffected by what they are experiencing. We are affected, and if we do not pay attention to our own souls, after a period of time, we will become weary if we do not regularly at the outset of the day keep watch over our souls. And then, throughout the day, we must pay attention to our souls and be casting our cares upon the Lord.

I came across a quote by Mr. Spurgeon recently where he said, “I always feel it well just to put in a few words of prayer between everything I do.” That is seriously helpful counsel, because too often I don’t put in just a few words of prayer. I move from one meeting to the next meeting, and cares are accumulating in my soul because I am not stopping at a certain point to “put in a few words of prayer.”

I don’t necessarily need, nor do I have, an extended period of time to pray during the day. But that moment of dependence upon God, trusting in God, casting a care upon God, can make all the difference in the maintenance of my soul. And I have always found it so helpful and so encouraging and so relevant that in the context of addressing elders, Peter exhorts us to be “casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7 ESV).

It would appear that as Peter thinks of exhorting the elders and caring for the elders, he intentionally and strategically places this passage there, knowing this is our daily temptation.

So that’s how I seek to monitor my heart, not only with the consistent practice of spiritual disciplines at the beginning of the day, but also this attention to my soul throughout the day, so that I am not eventually overwhelmed by the cares present every day.…

I think if you overheard me pray, you wouldn’t be impressed with the content of my prayers (and maybe that can be an encouragement to all who are listening). My prayers are simple because I am simple. When I think of casting all my cares, it is a simple acknowledgement that I am dependent upon God. At the conclusion of pastoral interactions, I must acknowledge that at best I can be a means of grace. They need the God of all grace, and I am insufficient in myself to care for them and provide for them the grace they need. Therefore I must humble myself and acknowledge my dependence upon God.

And I think that very act of pausing to pray is an act of weakening pride in my life, acknowledging that I am a dependent creature, I am not self-sufficient.

But if I understand faith, it is not simply or solely acknowledging my dependence. It also involves actively trusting the God revealed in this passage, who does indeed care for them and has demonstrated that care, ultimately, by crushing his Son on Calvary for them.

Therefore, I trust you, Lord, for this individual, and I trust to you my care for this individual. I trust your sovereignty. I trust your goodness. I trust your wisdom to intervene and to provide.

Those words would form the content of my prayer, which I hope express a certain sincerity and, I trust, certain humility in prayer that makes all the difference in my soul. And I am aware that when I neglect that practice, weariness eventually sets in to my soul, a weariness rooted in pride and self-sufficiency.

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The full hourlong podcast, “The Pastor and His Soul,” will be available for download this Tuesday (iTunes).