The Preacher’s Vision
Originally recorded at Cities Church, St. Paul, MN — August 21, 2025
Full transcript
I am so grateful to be here with you all. Jonathan, thank you for this opportunity to serve a, my brother Mathis just said it in the back, a very dear group of brothers, fellow preachers, those called and tasked with preaching the word of God to God's people. I count this a great privilege and I also count this as a wonderful opportunity among you to grow in preaching. So thank you for your attendance. And again, thank you for this invitation.
Let me pray one more time. Father in your presence, we gather that we would grow in this tremendous call that you've given us to proclaim your word. And to that end, I pray that you would help us to do so. As your spirit will be at work in ways that we can perceive and in 10,000 ways that we may not be able to perceive. Shaping, molding, crafting us into the likeness of your son and granting us to be useful in the master's house.
So I pray for my brothers. I pray that these words that are on my iPad, father, to say to them, I pray that it would be one for your glory, that it would be for the glory of your son, that it'd be useful for the spirit to use, that it'd be for the good of my brothers and it'd be for the joy in sharing. I pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.
My assignment this morning, brothers, is to discuss the preacher's vision in his preaching. By preaching, I mean the person who is called to proclaim the word of God. Isn't it stunning? Isn't it in fact beyond stunning that the God of the universe has set you apart by his grace to proclaim his word? Be freshly amazed, brothers, that God has called you to preach.
Be freshly amazed at this privilege. And would your hearts always wonder and say, what a privilege it is to feed the church of Christ that has been purchased by his blood? This is why I'm glad to be here with you all this morning. By preaching, I mean proclaiming and explaining and applying God's word to his people. What is the preacher's vision when he does this then?
There are two questions at the heart of my assignment this morning. Question one is, what are we aiming for in our preaching? And question two is, what is the goal? We can readily see how important this topic is, can we not? Whether one knows it or not, whether one has developed it or not, whether one has articulated it, whether you have thought about it, every preacher in this room is fueled by vision.
Let me first explain how I'm using the word vision. A number of years ago at Bethlehem College Seminary, our then president walked us through a series of questions to chart our way forward as an institution. The questions revolved around mission and vision and strategy. These three words that have a rich relationship with one another, and yet often could be misunderstood. Mission, he described it like this.
Mission is what we aim to do. It describes an action that we engage in. Here is a mission text for preachers. You know where I'm going. Second Timothy chapter four, verse number two.
Preach the word, right? Be ready in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with complete patience and teaching. What fuels this mission is its imperative nature of this text. This is not a suggestion. This is not something simply you do at your convenience.
This is not something that you do because you're good at it. No, preach, imperative, the word. This is what preachers do. Preaching the word informs the preacher's mission. Vision, on the other hand, describes what we as preachers long to see.
Wrapped up in the word vision, in fact, is the act of seeing. Mission has action words and vision has descriptive words. Mission has imperatives and vision has images. By God's grace, the actions of our mission bear fruit. It gives success to it.
Then vision, it names the outcome that we hope to see. This way of describing vision informs my assignment this morning. When I ask about the preacher's vision, what I'm asking is, what does the preacher hope to see in his preaching? What is the outcome that he longs for as he carries out the mission of preaching God's word? The mission of preaching is successful by God's grace.
What is the desired result? That desired result, what he hopes to see, is the preacher's vision. Again, brothers, isn't it crystal clear how important of a topic that this is, to nail down clearly and to stand 10 toes down on, right? Isn't it easy to answer what the preacher's vision is in 10,000 different ways? We know the dangers of getting this question wrong, do we not?
We know the dangers here. We've seen the poison creep in, maybe even into our own heart. A brother who knows the mission rightly, you know, second Timothy, you know you're called to preach the word, but crashes out on the vision. What does he hope to see? What is the outcome he hopes for in the recesses of his heart?
He secretly hopes that his name will be made great. His church will blow up. His sermons will catapult him into the spotlight. He longs for recognition as the one whose teaching changes lives, whose sermons become books, whose platform expands, whose influence stretches beyond his pastorate. He wants his voice to carry weight, his eloquence and his humor to be praised, his hermeneutical precision and homiletical creativity to be admired.
And underneath it all, his pride is fed. His ego's stroked. His fear of being a nobody is soothed. His hunger to be seen as theological is satisfied. The idols multiply and the list just goes on and on and on and on.
No doubt, brothers, no doubt at all, that we must give ourselves to the actions that aid in the mission of preaching, right? Indeed, it is a good use of your time to grow in your hermeneutics. The text demands that you grow in your ability to see what the text says and then say what the text says rightly. No doubt in saying what the text says, we should grow in our hermeneutical skills as you bring the art of crafting words together to bear on the text and the craft words with artistry that demands the very best use of your words. That's good.
We aim to say what the text says skillfully, right? Nobody wants a plate with a pile of onions on the side, a pile of celery, a pile of shrimp, and a cup of chicken stock on the side. Nobody wants to eat that. But if you put those things together, you get something called gumbo. Come on, somebody.
And that changes the story, right? Now we're cooking with some gas here. Piles of ingredients is now a meal for your people to feast on. These skills of hermeneutics and hermeneutics are though matters of the hand that we should give ourselves to put to work in the mission of preaching. Vision, though, brothers, is a matter of the eyes.
And our eyes are always connected to our hearts. Our eyes, what you want to see, are a window into what your heart desires to see. What your vision is as a preacher, what you aim to see, it strikes at the level of our heart, which strikes at the level of our desires. Now sermon prep for this morning sent me on a search through a good amount of banker boxes to find this. Anybody got banker boxes at house where your books are and things like that?
And you're looking for the one book that's in the last banker box that you uncover? Sermon prep sent me searching for this right here. This is something that I constructed way back in high school. I graduated high school in 1995. This was back in the day.
And in essence, I called it a vision book. In this book, I was crafting a vision for my 17 year old self of what I wanted to be in life, what I wanted to see in my life, what was my vision in life, which was, as you could tell here with some pictures, to play in the NBA. That was my vision. And I crafted a vision book that had all different types of statements. In fact, I must've been struggling with confidence because that's what I titled this thing at the beginning, confidence.
And I have words in here that point me to greater confidence like confidence is everything I wrote in here as a young 17 year old. Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. You see, I'm ready to run into the court with stuff like that, right? I can accept failure.
Everyone fails at something, but I cannot accept not trying. I'm just writing these things down. Practice equals preparation and that equals peak performance. And not only did I put words in here, but as you could tell, I put also various pictures. Michael Jordan back in North Carolina days and my boy Patrick Ewing, of which I have a seven foot Patrick Ewing poster and Michael Jordan some more and all the way through.
Pictures and images to draw from, to emulate from, to help me draw a fresh vision. Here's an example of what my vision was that I wanted to see. I wrote this. I'm not afraid to try to get into the University of North Carolina. Step-by-step, I'm gonna get there soon enough and play for Dean Smith, play at the Dean Dome, my next ultimate dream.
Well, I didn't get into North Carolina. I did get into Michigan. And my dreams just transferred from being a Tar Heel to being a Wolverine. And I went to school there, not simply to go to school, but to try my best to realize this vision and walk on to the basketball team. And as soon as I got on the court with those D athletes, D1 athletes, I realized very quickly that there's levels to this thing right here.
In fact, I saw very quickly that my vision needed a massive overhaul. Brother Tony, one day Isaiah Thomas walks into the gym during practice. The Isaiah Thomas, Pistons. And Allen Houston walks into the gym. Allen was still playing for the Pistons at the time.
I'm on the bench. And I said, okay, Allen is gonna do work. We had some, in 1995, we had a couple of blue chip D1 athletes who went to the league. One of them was track to trailer. This brother was 6'8", 300 pounds, moved like a point guard.
That's when I realized I probably not gonna make it to the NBA. I said, Allen Houston is gonna do work. He's a current NBA player and he did work. He didn't miss a jump shot. 20 footer, 30 footer, he didn't miss one.
Nothing but the bottom of the net, pop, pop, pop. But I said, Isaiah Thomas, that boy old. He was retired at that time. Said these D1 athletes are gonna mop Isaiah Thomas up. Brothers, let me tell you something.
Isaiah Thomas as a retired man cooked those boys. And I said, man, can you imagine Isaiah in his prime? Michael in his prime, Bron Bron in his prime. I better get a different vision. I better get a different plan.
I bring this book before you today because it represented what I wanted to see, what I desired, what my vision was, all coming from the heart of young, naive Louis guests. And it drove my mission to making the team, even to my detriment of not going to class. By my definition of mission and vision that I put in front of you, we can see the vital importance of getting the vision right. In fact, vision is what fuels mission. What you hope to see is what drives what you do.
It behooves us to ask then, where do we get this vision from? What shapes our desires that turn into influences of what we want to see? And brothers, I got some good news for you this morning. You don't have to search within yourself to find the preacher's vision. Is that good news?
The preacher's vision, in other words, does not originate from his own heart. Don't go looking for it there. We don't need to invent our own content for a vision book on preaching. God has already given it to us. He's given it to us in a book where a variety of preachers, proclaimers of his own word, set forth and point us in the right direction.
They set an example. And as proclaimers of God's word, we follow their example. From them, we learn that the preacher's aim in preaching is twofold. God's glory and the good of his people. If you don't remember anything I'll say today, the preacher's aim is twofold.
It's God's glory, it's the good of his people. What is the goal of the preacher? It is this, that in the proclamation of God's word, God would be glorified and his people would know his word for their good. The preacher's vision, his desired outcome, is for glory not of his own and for a good, not simply of his own. In other words, the preacher's vision is outside of himself.
It's other focus and to that end, because it's outside of himself and it's others focus, it is also the preacher's joy. What are we aiming for in our preaching brothers? Glory and good. And here is the good news about this aim. The glory of God and the good of your people are not at odds with one another, right?
I want you to consider for a moment how preaching aims to glorify God in the proclamation of his own word. Through preaching, our triune God reveals himself and is known. The preacher, like Isaiah in Isaiah 40, calls out to his people to say, behold your God. Behold him in his manifold attributes. Behold him in his holiness and behold him in his majesty, his love and his power, his sovereignty, his greatness and his might.
Behold him. Behold him in his plans and purposes and his pleasures and his promises. Behold him as your rock and as your refuge and as your savior. Behold him most clearly in Christ who came to make him known and when he did, he turned around and said, I glorified you on earth by doing so. The preacher's vision, his aim, what he hopes to see is that his people ascribe to the Lord the glory that is due to his name.
And preaching God's word makes it crystal clear while glory is due to his name. Crystal clear. Preaching God's word aims to make it crystal clear while it is the most right thing in all of the universe to say not unto us, oh Lord, not unto us, but to your name be the glory. And it makes it crystal clear how the most tragic reality in all of our universe is that we humans have exchanged that glory. Almost like we're returning an unwanted item back to Amazon.
Isn't that tragic? Test this brothers. Can you name a greater aim in preaching than the glory of God? The one who said, I am Yahweh, this is my name and my glory I give to no other. And neither does his preachers.
While the glory of God is the preacher's ultimate aim, notice that it is never isolated from the good of his people. Want you to consider how the proclamation of God's word is for the good of his people. In the preaching of the word, the triune God is made known to your people. How can we come close to scratching the surface of the depth of this type of goodness for your people? To know God.
J.I. Packer says, what are we made for? To know God. What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God. What is the eternal life that Jesus gives?
Knowledge of God. This is eternal life that they may know you the only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent. What is the best thing in life? Bringing more joy, delight, contentment than anything else he asks? You know the answer brothers.
The knowledge of God. It's the best thing. Jeremiah 9, 23 to 24. Don't boast in your wisdom. Don't boast in your might.
Don't boast in your riches. But you want to boast? Boast in this, that you understand me and that you know me. That I'm the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth for these things I delight. Packer goes on to say what makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective.
Something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance. And this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted and more compelling goal can there be than to know God? One of the most beautiful promises of the new covenant is knowledge of God. Jeremiah 31, 34, it's coming a day when no longer shall one teach his neighbor and his brother saying, know the Lord.
No, on that day, all of them are gonna know me from the least to the greatest. Isn't that beautiful brothers? All of them are gonna know me. And in this way, God is glorified in the good of his person, of his people knowing him. His glory is displayed in his people's greatest good, which is knowledge of him.
The good of your people, knowing God through his word works out in 10,000 ways, does it not? Growth happens. Transformation occurs. Strength is garnered. Suffering is endured.
Communities are built. Lives are laid down. Comfort, encouragement and hope are birthed. Profitable teaching, correction, reproof and training and righteousness equip the people of God to do the work of God. Holiness is pursued.
Feeble needs are strengthened. The strongholds of false teachings are demolished. Identity is formed. Perseverance is fueled. And then the unsearchable riches of Christ are tasted.
Oh my goodness. Tasted. Joy is had. The triune God is enjoyed. The church is built.
The lost are pursued. Unreached people groups are reached. People are loved. Satisfaction in God is tasted. And as someone somewhere once said, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
We can go on to the preeminent Old Testament teacher Moses to see what a preacher's vision ought to be. The book of Deuteronomy gives us excellent examples as it contains Moses' final sermons for God's glory of being known through his word and for the good of his people. Consider the following verses. Deuteronomy chapter four, verse number one. And now, oh Israel, listen to the statues.
Listen, listen, listen to the statues and the rules that I'm teaching you and do them that you may live. And go in and take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers is giving you. What did this Old Testament preacher want to see in his proclamation? He wanted to see the people of God in their obedience, live and enjoy the grace of God's good promises to them. Deuteronomy chapter six, four to six.
Hear, oh Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your might. And these words that I command you shall be on your heart. What does the Old Testament preacher want to see in his proclamation? He wanted to see the people of God know their God and to love him with their veryness, everything that's in them.
Deuteronomy chapter six, 17 to 19. You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his testimonies and his statues, which he commanded you. And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it might go well with you and that you may go in and take possession of the good land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. What does the Old Testament preacher want to see in his proclamation here? He wanted to instill in his people a life of quorum day, right, a life lived before God doing what was right and doing what was good in his sight and enjoying the life that goes with it.
Deuteronomy chapter 10, verses 12 to 13. And now Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all of your heart and your soul and to keep the commandments and statues of the Lord of which I'm commanding you today. You know the next three words here, brothers? For your good, for your good.
You see what the preacher wants? The glory of God's people, knowing him and the good of the life that results from it. Deuteronomy chapter 30, verse number 15 to 20. See, I've set before you today life and good and death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, by keeping his commandments, his statutes and rules, then you shall live and multiply and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering in to take possession of it.
Verse 19, I call heaven and earth to witness against you that I've set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore choose life, choose life that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, holding steadfast to him, for he is your life in the length of days. You see what this Old Testament preacher wanted to see happen in his proclamation. His vision was not for his promotion, not for his name, not for his fame or even for his comfort. His vision was wrapped up in the glory of God known through his word and his vision was wrapped up in the good of his people.
And these two are never at odds. The preeminent preacher of the Old Testament sets the mold for us. The preacher's vision is God's glory and his people's good. Time would fail us if we surveyed other preachers, proclaimers of God's word in the Old Testament, whose vision in their preaching was a desire to see the glory of God and the good of their people. We can go on and talk about Joshua and we can talk about Samuel's last sermon before they exited the story to see in their proclamation the glory of God and the good of their people.
We can glean from Ezra and the Levites as they read the law in Nehemiah chapter eight for the glory of God and the good of the people. Pick a prophet and see in that prophet's ministry a preaching of a vision for God's glory where his name is honored and glorified through his word and for the good of his people, where they are called to love and repent and return and grow and to live in line with God's word. I wanna direct our attention, however, to our good brother Paul in the New Testament. Do we see him carrying on the tradition of God's preachers whose vision is to see God's glory through proclamation and the good of his people? I think so.
In Romans 11, as he wraps up the exposition of the glory of the gospel, the power of God into salvation for Jew and Gentile culminating in a display of his infinite freedom, wisdom, and mercy seen in chapters nine through 11, what does he do? He ends his proclamation with a doxology. What did he want to see from his rich proclamation of the gospel in Romans one through 11? What was his vision? Is it not that God would be glorified through this gospel proclamation?
Romans 11, 33 to 36. Oh, the depth of the riches in wisdom and in knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments? How inscrutable are his ways? Who has known the mind of Yahweh?
Who has been his counselor? Who has given him a gift to him that he might be repaid for from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. Listen to Paul in second Corinthians say something that's worthy of a long walk to meditate on.
One person calls this section the basic thrust of Paul's preaching. His reasoning here is stunning. Second Corinthians four, five through six. For what we proclaim, what we speak, what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ is Lord with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God who said, let light shine out of the darkness has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Paul proclaims Jesus is Lord here, right? And why? Because the same God who said, let there be light in the beginning of the world has done the same thing in his heart so that he might see glory in Christ. Why do we proclaim? Because we want our people to see that same glory through our proclamation.
This is Paul, the preacher's vision and should be ours as well. We want our people to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ for their good. In Acts 13, we see in Paul and Barnabas' preaching in Antioch and Pisidia, we see that what comprises the preacher's vision, we see God glorified in the proclamation and the people come into Christ, which is their ultimate good. Acts 13, 46 to 49, Paul and Barnabas are speaking boldly and he says, it was necessary for the word of God to be spoken to you since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life. We're turning to the Gentiles.
For so the Lord has commanded us saying, I've made you a light to the Gentiles, that you may bring your salvations to the ends of the earth. And what happened when the Gentiles heard this, brothers? They began rejoicing and glorifying God because of the word of the Lord was spoken to them and many of them were appointed to eternal life. Of course, we must include 1 Corinthians 10, 31, should we not, where preacher fits underneath the banner of all things. 1 Corinthians 10, 31, so whatever you do, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
What does the preacher hope to see? What is his vision? What is his aim in preaching? Paul teaches us that above all things, the aim of preaching is nothing higher than the glory of God in his proclamation. The preacher is the proclaimer of God's word and therefore the proclaimer of God's glory, especially found in Christ.
Now, if I were to recreate my vision book here today, not for my delusions of grandeur as a very short NBA basketball player, but from the high calling of being a preacher, it would begin with this, a deep desire to proclaim God's word from scripture so that the fame of his glory will be heard and seen and tasted and experienced and enjoyed and believed in my preaching. Lewis Allen, in his book, The Preacher's Catechism, he utilizes a familiar question with a twist. He asked, what is God's chief end in preaching? God's chief end, he answers, is preaching to glorify his name. That therefore is the preacher's chief end as well.
God's glory in preaching is the preacher's vision. It is what he desires to see. It is what he aims for. My vision book would also include a deep desire for my people's good in the proclamation of God's word for his glory. Remember, God's glory and our people's good are not at odds.
They are not competing for the front of the line. God's glory, as 2 Corinthians 4 shows us, is ultimately found in Christ, and Christ is the greatest good of God's people, not only simply in receiving him, but also in coming to him, in reflecting him, not only in coming to Christ, but also in being conformed to his image. One person put it like this, that peoples must be led to Christ and then led on with Christ through preaching. The preacher's vision is to see his people become like Christ, which perfectly accords with God's glorious purpose found in Romans 8, 28 to 29. We know that for those who love God, all things work together for their good.
For those who are called according to his purpose, and what is this good? For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ, the image of his son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. Therefore, the preacher's vision learns from Paul to be in anguish, the very anguish of childbirth, until Christ is formed in your people. And here Paul helps me again, for he provides pictures of this very vision, pictures of what faithful preaching aim to do for the good of Jesus' people, and he gives us pictures of maturity to aim for. We have three daughters, my wife and I, eight, seven, and three.
I'm a girl dad through and through, and my boy Abner over here with three girls, right? One of the sweetest items that we have in our house is a seven foot tall wood measuring beam where we track their height year by year. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful addition to our house. In fact, our middle child has caught up to her older sister and now is taller and boasting about it here. Need to teach your Jeremiah about boasting in heights.
This is a picture, it's a measuring item. It's a picture that I would include in my vision book based on Paul's words given to us in Colossians. In Colossians chapter one, verses 28 to 29, I know you know this, him we proclaim, that's our task. Warning or admonishing everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom. Why Paul?
Why do we proclaim him in this fashion? So that we may present everyone mature in Christ. And Paul says, this is what I work hard for. This is what I toil for. This is what I struggle for.
This is the goal that I labor for. Struggling with all the energy, he says that he powerfully gives me to struggle with. What was Paul's aim in his proclamation and his admonition in his teaching? Full maturity, not in physical growth like the measuring beam in my house, but full maturity in Christ. What did Paul wanna see as a result of his preaching and teaching, brothers?
He wanted to see his people mature in Christ, which would be their ultimate good and be to God's ultimate glory. Paul's vision for maturity is not unique to Colossians. We see it again in Philippians. When hard pressed between the options of departing and going to be with the Lord, with Christ, which he said is far better. He turned around and says, no, I'm gonna hang out with you all for a little bit because it's necessary for you.
And why is it necessary for you? Why was Paul convinced of this, Philippians 1.25? I'm gonna remain and continue with you for your progress and for your joy in the faith. This is the vision that fuels the mission of preaching. It's been said that a plaque has been placed in pulpits across the land that tells the preacher, sir, we wish to see Jesus.
This is a good reminder of what preachers in the pulpit are called to do, is it not? I would expand it. Sir, we wish to see Jesus for our progress in Christ likeness, for our joy in the faith and for our good. This reminds a preacher why he is in the pulpit and what his aim is, not for his good or his fame, not to lift himself up before his people's good. Brothers, this is what we wanna see happen as we preach week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out, decade in and decade out, seasons when it's going well, seasons when it's not going well.
We wanna see our people not grow, we wanna see our people not only grow in their appreciation for preaching, we wanna see our people grow in Christ-like maturity in every single area of their lives, to grow up into Christ in every way. And God has ordained preaching empowered by his energy through the means for his people's maturation. When we look out over our people, when you stand into the pulpit on Sunday, may we see them standing up against a Christ-like maturity measuring beam. And would we toil with the energy that he provides to preach with such a vision to see their growth happen year over year over year by his kindness. In fact, the same vision is why Paul exhorts the Ephesians with another picture that aims for the good of maturity in Ephesians chapter four.
There he describes the gifts that Jesus has given to his church, which includes pastors and teachers. Why? You know this, brothers, Ephesians 4, 12 to 14, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of faith, the knowledge of the son of God. Here it is to mature manhood, to mature stature, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ so that we would no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried out by every wind of doctrine and by human cunning and by craftiness and deceitful schemes. No doubt, at some point, my girls are no longer going to make progress on this measuring beam.
This is why we got a seven foot one. We don't think they're gonna make it to that height, okay? But even when they stop growing tall, that doesn't stop our desire for their maturation. Matt Smetheris wrote on Twitter the other day that 40% of fatherhood is walking around the house turning off lights. I appreciated that, right?
This is correct. And yet 100% of fatherhood is aiming for your children to no longer be children, right? To mature and to grow. And this too is the preacher's vision in his proclamation of God's good word to God's people. That his people might yearn like newborn infants for pure spiritual milk so that by it, they may grow up into salvation.
That is the preacher's vision, brothers. To see his people no longer infants, but grow up into salvation, grow up into Christ. When we look at our people week after week, year after year, again, may we see them growing against the measuring beam of Christ's likeness until they attain, we all attain to the full stature of Christ, to the glory of God, who is made known in his proclamation of his word. In the beginning, I mentioned that our president walked us through a series of questions regarding mission, vision, and strategy. And I spent the majority of my time this morning between mission and vision, mostly on vision, of course.
If mission is what we do, and vision is what we hope to see, then strategy defines how we seek to accomplish the mission in order to see the vision come to pass. If the preacher's vision, his aim in preaching, what he hopes to see is God glorified and his people benefited. If he aims for glory and for good, how then brothers will we go about doing this? No doubt, as stated before, the mission text for the preacher is to preach the word in season and out of season. And one strategy for simply doing this is of course preaching, but even doing what you're doing today, which is attending workshops, spurring one another on in your preaching as we aim to be useful in the master's house.
But let me offer in closing two further strategic actions. First, if the preacher's aim is the glory of God, then the preacher himself must make God's glory his personal aim, his personal aim. Here's the question that I must keep in front of my own heart. Am I taken up with the glory of God? Am I taken up with it?
Or do we hear about it? I hear about it so much that it's just kind of becoming familiar. Am I taken up with the glory of God? Is my heart enthralled with God's glory, supremely seen in Christ? Not heart that gets spouted, but enthralled with God's glory.
Do I increasingly, Louis guess heart, do I increasingly want the one thing of Psalm 27, four. One thing have I asked of you, Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life and to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord. Is God's glory have an effect on my own soul? I will not be able to get up and preach to people for God's glory to affect their soul, if it hasn't affected my soul. Piper put it well here.
He said, the greatest warfare in the preacher's life is the treasure of the glory of God above all things. Brothers, we will not taste the preacher's vision for his people until we taste the preacher's vision of the glory of God for ourselves. So our number one strategy then is to grow in our love for the glory of God above all things. And to that end, we learn to pray like Moses did often. Lord, show me your glory.
Show it to me, in season, out of season. Show it to me when preaching is going well. Show it to me when nobody feels like nobody's paying attention. Show me your glory. Second, if the preacher's aim is the good of his people, then he must follow Paul's example of profound, pastoral, other-centeredness, looking outside of himself.
Would you listen to Paul? First Thessalonians 3, this rocks me every time I read it. For now we live, if you didn't know this text brothers, how would you finish that sentence? Why do you live? How would you finish it?
What burns your heart out? What gets you out of bed? What causes you to become alive? This is stunning. Paul says, now we live if you are standing fast in the faith.
Philippians 1.25, again, convince of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and your joy in the faith. First Thessalonians 2.19, for what is my hope or joy or my crown of boasting before the Lord? What is it, Paul? Is it not you? Philippians 4.1, my brothers whom I love and long for my joy and my crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved.
Second Corinthians 1.24, not that we lord it over your faith but we work with you for your joy, for you to stand firm in the faith. So here's questions that I must keep in front of my heart and keep asking, am I taken up with the good of my people? Is my joy my people's good? Is that what causes me to live, to see them grow on that measuring wood? Strategy here is clear, aim by the strength that God supplies brothers and brothers to make your people's progress, your joy and your crown.
That's what it's about. Rejoice in their Christ likeness more than you rejoice in your preaching performance, amen? Gladly pour yourself out for their maturity as you visibly treasure their progress and walk with them when they seem like Christ is nowhere to be found in their life. God's glory and your people's good. Vision comes from the desires of the heart, so pursue a heart that increasingly desires the glory of God and the good of his people in preaching.
I put this brothers in front of you today as what the preacher's vision is, let's pray. Father I'm grateful that your spirit is able to take weak words and to do fantastic things with them, Christ exalting things with them, God glorifying things with them. I pray father that what seems to be the case in the preachers of the Bible, that their aim in life is to see you glorified in the proclamation and to see your people's good. Father I pray that that would burn our hearts, that we would give ourselves to these things. Brothers in this room where there needs to be a renewal of that pursuit father, do that for him by your spirit.
Brothers who need encouragement to go in this direction, do that for him. Brothers in here who knows these things and are freshly reminded, remind them greatly again. But oh would you give us much grace that we may see you glorified in our preaching, supremely in Christ and that we would see our people grow in their Christ likeness. I pray these things in Jesus name, amen.
Preaching with Joyful Perseverance
Originally recorded at Cities Church, St. Paul, MN — August 21, 2025
Full transcript
It's a joy to be here today. We can always grow in our preaching. This really is a journey of a lifetime. I love how Paul says to Timothy, let them see your progress. I want people to see my progress.
I think about this often when I go to the gym at the YMCA where I work out. I work out mainly with senior adults just to give you a clue about my level of strength training. But I have a friend in the gym, Tom. He's 81 years old and he benched 235 on his 80th birthday. Yeah, Tom weighs 140.
He's been he's been in this gym for about 52 years. And when I go in, I see Tom and his buddies. They got their little notebooks tracking progress at 81. They're still tracking progress. And every time I go to the Y and I see this, it's a it's a sermon to me to always start, keep growing in the skill of preaching and in the work of ministry in general.
And so as we come to these events, there's always something we can pick up. You hear a lot, but maybe it's one or two things that you pick up. But more often than not, what I've experienced in these sorts of settings is what we need in addition to instruction is really just encouragement. Right. What we really need is for someone to tell us, hey, you're doing the right thing. Just keep doing it. Just keep preaching Christ until you see Christ.
I know it's difficult out there. I know it's challenging. I was recently talking to Ligon Duncan and he was talking about the podcast he's doing, Matt Smethurst. And Ligon said, it has just struck me in the course of this podcast that we're doing for pastors, how discouraged pastors are and just how they appreciate the podcast that's not yelling at them or criticizing them constantly, but is trying to encourage them. And I hope today to do a little bit of both to instruct and maybe more than anything, just to encourage you.
What we need is not superficial encouragement. What we need is is deeply theological encouragement, right? We need spiritual edification to to continue pressing on. And so let's think in that direction, as I think today with you about this topic of preaching with a joyful perseverance. Preaching with joyful perseverance.
Paul says to Timothy, 1 Timothy 5, 17, let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. It's labor. I love preaching. It is a privilege to do what I get to do. I've been a pastor since I was 27, 48 now, and I still remember being called into the ministry. I became a Christian in college.
I was on a baseball team. My second baseman led me to faith in Christ and began to study the Bible and heard a guy who would later become my mentor and preaching professor my junior year of college who went to be with the Lord this year, Jim Shaddix for three consecutive nights. He did what I later learned was called expository preaching. And I didn't know what you called it. But as I was sitting under it for three nights as a young college student, I said, I want to do that the rest of my life.
And I ended up graduating, sold my car, which was a beater, but would never make it to New Orleans. That's where he was teaching. Got on an airplane and flew down to New Orleans to to study with him. And it is a great privilege. With that said, it's very challenging and preaching can be quite exhausting as you add to it all the levels of responsibility that come with pastoring to preaching.
And so why is it? I think it's helpful sometimes for us to just step back and think about what we're doing and the craft of preaching, the work of preaching. Why is it difficult and how might we continue in this work? For starters, preparation and delivery can be very tiring. The study is often a thankless place to be.
You don't have people every time you write a sentence giving you a high five. Right. Oh, that's a nice little quote you just added there. Like you're you're spending hours often in isolation by yourself, digging through the books, thinking and praying and so on. And then as you've got all this adrenaline building up and you've got the moment of delivery and you deliver it and you've just had a week full of activity and responsibility and you think, man, the Sunday afternoon, maybe I'll go take a walk. You're going to take a nap, right?
Like you, you know that in that moment. First time I went to San Francisco, I saw the sea lions and the sea lions around the wharf and they just sort of flop around and make noise. That's what that's what I'm like on Sunday afternoon. It's just kind of like there's no real words. It's just kind of moaning, you know, for for a couple of.
That's because this work is exhausting. Now, it is exhausting for many reasons. And one of them is your results are often invisible. And that makes this line of work very strange. There are some professions where you can see immediate impact.
So I like to cut the grass. OK, I imagine up here you snowblow, right? I don't know what you do up here. Do you have grass? I've seen a little bit of grass. Yeah. But man, when I cut the grass, I drive my wife crazy because I'll walk out and look at it multiple times on a Saturday.
And you're thinking, I am somebody, right? You see what I did right there? That looks fantastic. But that's preaching is it's often invisible. You sometimes you see some visible results, but are they real?
Like, is that real fruit? Sometimes it is. Sometimes, you know, it ends up not being so. And then there are times where you think nobody's listening to you at all. And they come up to you. This happened to me many times speaking at youth camps through the years.
I think these kids are just asleep. And they're like, that changed my life like that. We never know. And so that's a weird place that can be tiring. Another reason it's exhausting is your message is controversial.
You deal every week with things that people have a hard time accepting and believing. Like we don't have the luxury of having a profession where what we're talking about is of marginal importance. What we're talking about, if we're preaching the Bible, will be well, people will find offensive, will be difficult, and we're handling it all the time every single week. In addition, our listeners are often very critical. Someone once said that preaching is like dying naked a little at a time and then knowing you've got to do it all over again next week.
People will always see your flaws. Luther, in his great little book, Table Talk, there's a sort of a collection of sayings he said around the dinner table. He has nine traits of a great preacher, and one of them is this. He should suffer himself to be mocked and jeered at by everyone. In addition, many people just straight up hate the idea of preachers and pastors.
I remember being in England several years ago and I was talking to the waitress. She was coming by, doing a great job, being very friendly, asked me where I was from. I told her, and she's refilling drinks, so what brings you to England? And I said, I got some meetings. And what do you do?
Said, I'm a pastor. And the look on her face, I will just never forget it. I might as well said, I kill kittens. That's what I do. I kill kittens because she was just so startled by this.
Like, I can't stomach being around a pastor. Well, this is not new, the disdain for preaching. And I don't think it's going to improve necessarily. In 1857, the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote, there is perhaps no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind.
So what are you preparing to do on Sunday? I'm going to inflict some hardship on some people. Put that on your business card. He went on in that article to say that the preaching clergyman was the boar of the age. One definition in the old chamber's dictionary of preaching is to give advice in a tedious and obtrusive manner.
And the sermon is defined as a lengthy moral or advisory speech. In 1954, W.E. Sangster said, preaching is in the shadows. The world does not believe in it. Perhaps it never believed in it much, but in England, at least, it believed in it once more than it believes now.
That was in 54. In 58, Donald Cogan, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, said that the devil had effectively silenced many preachers. He said they go to their pulpits as men who have lost their battle before they start. The ground of conviction has slipped from their feet. Oh, that's why we do these things right here, like these events, right?
To deepen our convictions. Many today think that preaching is like fighting a war with a sword when there are much better weapons today. Isn't there a better methodology? And so the general mood of the church in the world, in many places, not everywhere, but in many places, is against preaching. Some will view it as hate speech as society continues to move in a secular direction, and many will be constantly skeptical of the motivations of preachers as they read about scandal after scandal.
And in the tech age, we're going to continue to hear these arguments that there's no place for a 30 minute or 40 minute, or if you're a bee back there in the back, a 50 minute monologue on a good day. Besides, if they wanted to listen to a great preacher, they can just go online and listen to one of the best. We're up against a lot. And on top of all of that, what we're doing is spiritual warfare. You ever think about the parable of the four soils where Jesus said that the seed is thrown on the path and then the rocky soil on the thorns on the path.
He says the devil comes and takes the word. I think about that often when I'm thinking about preaching, that there is an activity of the evil one present in the room as the word is going out, who wants to take the word out of people's hearts. It's spiritual warfare. It's the text that Lewis brought to us in 2 Corinthians 4, that the God of this age has blinded the minds of those who are hearing the gospel. And so why is it exhausting?
You're doing that. All of those things up against culture, up against your own self, up against the evil one. And so how do we continue? How do we respond? How do we keep preaching with joyful perseverance when up against these challenges? I think the secret for me is we must think theologically about this task.
I think to continue preaching, you have to have deep theological convictions that undergird preaching. These preaching, these convictions are timeless. And these convictions are energizing. This is where the joy comes. In our theology, this is where the energy comes from.
John Stott in his classic book, Between Two Worlds, said the essential secret to effective preaching is not mastering certain techniques. It's being mastered by certain convictions. Technique is important. Rhetoric is important. We need to be as good as we can and all of those things.
But what is the real secret is being mastered by something, being dominated by certain convictions, convictions that brought you to preach in the first place, convictions that keep you faithful for the long haul. What are some of those convictions? I'm glad you asked. Here's five of them. One, your belief in the word of God is absolutely fundamental.
We'll come back to St. Timothy three and four here in just a moment. But what you believe about the Bible will inevitably shape how you use the Bible. Right? You look at mainline traditions, you look at liberal traditions, you look at their theology of the Bible, and it's no surprise that you see what you see in pulpits.
Preaching, Stott says, is indispensable to Christianity. Without preaching, a necessary part of its authenticity has been lost. For Christianity is, in its very essence, a religion of the word of God. Now, that's never changing, no matter what culture does. And that's how we continue preaching is to keep believing that, right?
The nature of the Bible is unchanging. Christopher Ashe has a great little book called The Priority of Preaching, and he builds his whole case on preaching around the book of Deuteronomy. And he basically says, you know, Deuteronomy is not the most exciting book. There's not a lot of action. Moses dies.
Wouldn't be a great movie. But what's he doing? He's taking the law of God, as we just heard, and he's announcing it. He's preaching it. And he says, well, here we have a situation where we have the word of God written, and yet Moses is called to preach it.
Preaching is tied to this, right? Paul could write the inspired letter to the Romans and write in chapter one, yet I'm eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome. If you thought, man, you've just written the greatest letter of all time. You don't need to go to Rome. I'm eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome.
That's important. Your belief in the resurrection impacts your view of preaching. Paul says, if there is no resurrection, then our preaching is in vain. Because the tomb is empty, we do have something to preach every single week. That's not changing.
That tomb's not going to be reoccupied by him. He died never to die again. And if the tomb is empty, the pulpit is to remain occupied. Week by week, by week, by week. Your belief thirdly in the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ necessitates preaching.
In Colossians 1, 15 and following, Paul gives that beautiful Christological hymn where he talks about Christ and how he makes the invisible God visible. He speaks about Christ in creation, Christ sustaining all things, and Christ's cross, Christ's church, and so on. And then he gets down to chapter one, verse 28, and he says, him we proclaim. Or as the Phillips paraphrases that verse, so naturally we proclaim him. If all of this is true about Jesus, then we must preach.
And it is all true. Your belief about the Holy Spirit is a fourth theological conviction. Acts chapter two, on the day of Pentecost, a lot happened, right? But after all the signs that happened in Pentecost, the very first thing that happens once this new age dawns is Peter preached the sermon. 3,000 were converted.
The coming of the Spirit did not mean we do a wayward proclamation. The coming of the Spirit actually empowered the proclamation. And the Spirit is still at work in our preaching. And then a final conviction I'll mention is our belief in the office of pastor, elder. It is true that all Christians should be teaching, but it's also true that God has appointed some to the office of pastor and elder in the context of a local church, and they should devote much time and energy to prayer and preaching the word.
Now, all of those are very important and we could add more to that list, but my point is, as you think about the challenges of preaching and the temptation to abandon preaching or neglect it, or beat yourself up when you think you do a bad job about it and mope around and just give up altogether, I would say, use your theology, right? Just don't sign to it, yes, I agree to it, but let it work itself deeply in your soul where you say, Jesus Christ is alive, I'm going to go preach. This is his word, I'm going to go preach. The Spirit is at work when I'm preaching, I'm going to go preach. I've been called to the office of pastor and central to that task is preaching and teaching. Now, oh, that's just a little introduction.
2 Timothy chapter 3, I want to think through this particular text with you and drill down, hopefully by way of encouraging you in one particular text to keep at it with joy. All right. 2 Timothy 3, 14 down to 4, verse 4, a passage you're all very familiar with, I'm sure. There are two things here, two categories or two sections we can look at this text, verses 14 down to verse 17, and then 4, 1 to 4. And what you see in this passage is the logical connection between if this is true about the Bible, then naturally we should want to preach it, right? A story I use a lot around my neck of the woods, UNC Chapel Hill, it's from Bart Ehrman, one of the leading agnostics in the country. He does this little experiment with freshmen every year at UNC Chapel Hill where he'll ask them three questions.
First question I'll ask him is how many of you believe that the Bible is God's word? And at UNC Chapel Hill, a number of students will raise their hands, a very large class. Then I'll ask them a second question and he'll say, how many of you have read? And he'll just pick a popular book at the time. How many of you've read? I don't know what that would even be right now. Hunger Games is not new anymore.
That's what popped in my head. But they all they all raise their hand, you know. And then he asked the third question. How many of you read the whole Bible? And like no hand goes up in the air.
And I've had students who've been in this class to tell me about this whole experience. And Ehrman, who wants to poke holes in everything, will say what we would say probably. Listen, I could understand why you would want to read Suzanne Collins' book, The Hunger Games. She's a great writer. But if you really believe God wrote a book, wouldn't you want to read it? And I think Paul takes it in the next step for preachers. If God wrote a book, wouldn't you want to preach it?
And it's so bizarre to me that people who would sign a doctrinal statement stating they believe that the Bible's God's inspired word failed to preach it, failed to have any substance in their messages. Like, what do we think we have better stuff? If God wrote a book, wouldn't we want to preach it? So he tells Timothy to continue in this book, verses 14 to 17. Notice how he sets it up when he says, but as for you, that's a that's a key little phrase in the pastoral, especially in Second Timothy.
He's essentially telling Timothy to be different. He's contrasting what he's about to say to Timothy with the false teachers that he's just been talking about. You see that pivot again in verse five, as for you, he'll set some things up and then he'll say, essentially, you do the opposite, you be different. But as for you, goes on to say, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and from childhood how you've been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ. The first thing, the first exhortation there is to continue.
Continue. Now, that sounds very ordinary, sounds almost boring to continue. But at the heart of the Christian faith is just that, continue. At the heart of our ministry of the word is continue. A wonderful Christian life is a Christian life that continues, that continues to be faithful.
A wonderful Christian ministry is one that just keeps going in the face of opposition, in the face of trial, in the face of difficulty. Keep going. Continue. Notice what he's continued to do. Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed.
So I love that first bit, keep learning, continue learning. This is one of the ways in which our preaching is always alive. It's fresh, as people can drink from a living fountain and not a stagnant pond, is that we're always learning. We're always embracing. We're always thinking.
We're never experts, as H.P. Charles says. We're always learners. I'm never an expert. We should take that posture.
I'm always a learner. Let them see your progress. I think it's important for people to see you progress in your learning as a leader and as a preacher. I was talking one time to Old Testament prop Jim Hamilton at Southern Seminary, and he was telling me about a panel discussion. He was on with Peter Gentry and Dwayne Garrett, some premier Old Testament scholars, and they were discussing typology in the Old Testament, specifically the person of Joseph in Genesis.
And in response to a question, Gentry, whom Hamilton considers as one of the premier Bible scholars of the day, said to him, it may be that I need to do further study in the Old Testament, and I'm quite certain of that. He was the key translator of the Septuagint in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. And he's saying, I think I need to learn the Old Testament a little bit more. I think I need more study. Keep learning.
I love how Paul even says in this chapter, right? Bring the books. Like, Paul, why do you need books? Because we continue learning. Now, what I tell our people a lot, I just said this last Sunday, actually, is you learn what you want to learn.
It's amazing what guys can learn. They can be experts in fantasy football, right? They can learn how to fix stuff on YouTube. They're amazing when it comes to learning. But what is it that you are learning?
Paul says to Timothy, keep learning, notice, and keep believing. That's also important. Continue believing. In a day of apostasy, in a day of deconstruction, don't ever stop, brothers. Believing the truth of the Bible, the truth of the gospel.
Don't adjust the Bible, but trust the Bible. Keep reminding yourself of why you need the Bible. Now, why should we continue in the word? Well, he answers that in verses 15 and 16. Three reasons.
Continue learning and believing because, first of all, the Bible leads us to Jesus. The scriptures are able to make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. For Paul, of course, this referred to the Old Testament. That the Old Testament is a book that is pointing us to Jesus. This is like Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 15, Christ died for our sins.
According to the scriptures, he was buried and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. That the Bible is a book that leads us to Christ. When Philip found Nathaniel in John 1, he says, I think we found him whom Moses and all the prophets spoke about. And you think, well, maybe he just got a little too excited. And then we read in chapter 5 of John, where Jesus tells the religious leaders, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life.
Yet it is they that bear witness about me. If you actually believe Moses, you would believe me because Moses wrote about me. I'm like, I think Philip got it right. The Bible is a beautiful book of redemption of which Jesus is the hero. And there is a messianic wind that just blows through the pages of the God breathed Bible.
Everywhere we go, we hear whispers. We see signs. We see pointers, predictions, echoes, all woven in the pages of this book. Why do we keep learning it and believing it and preaching it? Because we see Christ in it.
As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1, for all the promises of God find their yes in him. I love that. All the promises of God, what God pledged, Christ fulfilled. And I love that idea that Jesus has God's big yes to the world. A lot of people hear of Christianity and they just hear it as a no religion, all the things you can't do.
And there are a lot of nos, but there's a big yes. Jesus is God's big yes that all of the anticipations and predictions of the Messiah have been decisively and irreversibly declared to be yes in Jesus Christ. All of the types and shadows and echoes and illusions and predictions and promises. That's why we love the Bible, right? Jesus is God's big yes to the ancient promise in Genesis 315 that he would crush the head of the serpent.
He's the better ark who provides salvation to everyone who runs to him for refuge. He's God's big yes to the promise of Abraham that through him, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. He's the greater Melchizedek, that mysterious figure who comes to Abraham with bread and wine. He is the beloved son who was not spared like Isaac, but was delivered up for our salvation. He is the yes to the promise that the scepter would never depart from Judah.
He's a disruptive baby like Moses, and he is a greater mediator than Moses and shepherd than Moses, who's given us a greater deliverance than the one in the Exodus. Paul says, Christ, our Passover lamb has been slain. The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He's the true manna from heaven that satisfies hungry hearts. The water from the rock that satisfies the fulfillment of the law, the true Sabbath rest, the ultimate temple and tabernacle who gives us access to God's presence.
The better Joshua who's leading us to a better promised land, a greater Boaz who feeds the hungry at his table and brings us into the family. He's God's big yes that one from David's line would reign forever. The royal king of Psalm 72, whose reign would be endless and boundless and gracious. Micah's shepherd who's coming forth from Bethlehem is from old, from ancient of days, and he shall be our peace. He's all over Isaiah's book, isn't he?
The chosen servant, the suffering servant, and Daniel, he is the stone fashioned out of nowhere who will conquer empires. He's the bright and morning star who will come again and dispel all human darkness and wipe tears off of our faces and give us a new body fitted for a new creation. And that's just the beginning. To read the Old Testament without Jesus's ministry and view would be like reading a mystery novel without the final chapter. We would call the publisher and say, where's the chapter at?
In other words, we love the Bible because the Bible is about our Messiah. We know about God generally in creation, but you can't go from sunsets to substitution apart from the Bible. You can't go from a pine cone to propitiation apart from a Bible. See, we rejoice in the Bible because we love the hero of the Bible. And as we open it up, we see him.
We see his glory. We see his beauty as Lewis reminded us of glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And that's who we point people to. So personally, let's study to see him. Let's delight in him.
J.C. Ryle said, I charge everyone to ask himself frequently what the Bible is to him. Is it a Bible in which you have found nothing more than good moral precepts and sound advice, or is it a Bible in which you have found Christ? Is it a Bible in which Christ is all? If not, I tell you plainly, you have not used your Bible with the right purpose.
You are like a man, listen, who studies the solar system and leaves out in his studies, the sun, which is the center of it all. And he adds, it is no wonder you find your Bible to be a dull book, studying the solar system without looking at the sun. I like that quote. That's why I quoted. It's been not just personally, we study to see him, but evangelistically, we open the Bible like Philip in the Ethiopian eunuch and we point people to him.
And pastorally, we're walking people down the aisle, we're walking the bride down the aisle to see the groom week by week by week. Why do we continue learning and believing? Because the scriptures lead us to Jesus. Secondly, he says God speaks to us from it, that the Bible is God breathes, breathed out by God. This is affirming, of course, that our view of the total inspiration of scripture, that the Bible is, uh, as we could say, expired, it's breathed out by God.
I used to tell my kids, Hey, if you want to hear God speak, you need to open this book. Like I said, you can think of it like God's mouth, right? When you open the word of God, you open the mouth of God. It's not just that God was speaking, that God actually is speaking in the moment as we, as we encounter him. And that's why we, we are giving ourselves to an expositional model of preaching is because again, we believe that God wrote a book.
We would want to preach it. This is affirmed in various places. As you guys well know, second Peter one, 20 to 21, as Peter talks about that process of inspiration. And I love what precedes that in second Peter one 19, when he says, and we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Keep looking at this book.
It's like a lamp in a dark world until you see Jesus. We're like pilgrims journeying through this world, journeying through the night with the scripture, lighting up our paths until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts. A reference to the, to the coming of Jesus, Peter David's in his commentary says on that verse, then the light of Christ will be in our hearts and we will no longer need the scriptures. One treasures a love letter while the beloved is absent, but once he or she is present, the letter is laid aside in exchange for personal contact. Isn't that amazing?
So God speaks to us from this book and then God matures us through it. Verses 16 and 17, that's where he says, you know, of course it's profitable for teaching, reproved for correction, training in righteousness, teaches us many things, who we are, where we came from, what it means to be part of a church, how to organize a church, what, how to view marriage rightly and all of those things. And it also corrects us. It convicts, it consoles, it cuts, it comforts, it sets us on the right course. It disciplines, it trains us in righteousness.
We, we don't excel in holiness apart from the world, from the word and all of this, the imagery used there is that we may be complete, that we're incomplete. And here we're on about the sufficiency of scripture, right? That it's doing this work of completing us. Kevin DeYoung help, uh, offers a very helpful acronym about the nature of the scriptures with SCAN, S-C-A-N in his little book on the scriptures, sufficiency, clarity, authority, necessity, scan, sufficiency, that the scriptures contain everything we need for salvation and godliness, clarity, that we believe that the Bible is understandable, that it makes wise the simple, right? Authority, that the last word always goes to God's word.
Like the Bereans, we search to see if it's true. And if it's true, we believe it. The necessity of scripture, I've already mentioned that general revelation is not enough to save us. We need the gospel contained in God's word. And often in the church, the real challenge is, well, all of those can be challenges, but as in my own experience, it's the sufficiency of scripture that, that I'm often up against.
And this text is very, really important as we think about that. It doesn't mean that the scripture tells us everything we've ever wanted to know, but it does tell us the main things, the most important things. And so why do we continue learning and believing the scriptures? It leads us to Jesus. God is speaking to us from it, and God is maturing us by it.
In light of that, his exhortation, as you well know, in verses one to four is preach the word, you know, I say this a lot at Sin Network, we're not the only religions, religion that has preachers and missionaries, other religions have them, what makes our task unique is what we preach. It's, it's why we go to the nations. It's our content. It's the gospel. And as Paul says here, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead and by his appearing in his kingdom, preach the word, just notice there, just the audience that we preach in the sight of God, we are, we are never unnoticed by God.
You may feel unnoticed by people. If you don't have a big church or a big following, but God is present when you preach that ought to be enough. Jeremiah, let the prophet who has a dream, tell his dream, but let him who has my word, speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat declares the Lord is not my word. Like fire declares the Lord.
And like a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces. This is what we preach or Paul in second Corinthians four. We have this ministry by the mercy of God. We do not lose heart, but we have renounced disgraceful underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God.
The gospel is an open declaration. And the goal in preaching is to be clear, to openly declare that the goal is not for someone to think you're smart. It is for an intelligent 11 year old to track with you, to be clear. As Calvin once said, I have not corrupted one single passage of scripture nor twisted it. As far as I know, I have always studied to be simple.
My aim as we talk about methodology, we're not doing that here today necessarily, but as I've talked through a process of preparing weekly expositions, I usually use the words clear, compelling, and Christ-centered. And this clarity piece is so important because not everybody will be equally compelling, but one thing I think every preacher can really work hard at is to be clear. And if you're clear, it will bless people, right? If you can dive deeply into the word, giving yourself to great study of it, and then unifying a theme found in that text and developing a structure that supports that big theme, and then working it out as you explain the text and apply it and illustrate it, you'll have impact. So preach that word with clarity.
Notice what else he says, we preach constantly, in season, out of season. I think this means practically that there are going to be days where you don't always feel like bringing it, right? You may have some kind of family drama in the house, or you didn't get great sleep, or you could be under the weather, or there are many reasons why you might feel like you're out of season. COVID was a really out of season time in 2020. We were preaching out on a baseball field, like what in the world is happening right now?
We called it the sermon on the mound as we were out there. It was an out of season time, but you keep preaching. People got converted during those out of season moments. So it's not always about our feelings, right? It's really not about us at all.
As Luther said, regarding the Reformation, I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's word, otherwise I did nothing. The word did it all. That's important to remember because there are going to be times where you're up there and you feel like a Southwest Airline commercial when they're like, need to get away. And you're in the moment. You're like, ain't nobody, ain't nobody tracking on me. Right. And it can feel like a very hopeless exercise.
And I'm always encouraged by Paul in Acts 19 when he's in the Hall of Terenas. For two years, most scholars think he probably used the siesta time, rented a dumb hall. People gathered up and he taught. And you're like, well, what good can that do? Isn't there a better plan than that? And people start burning their magic books.
A riot has started in the city. Paul has to get out before they kill him. What's his methodology? He's over there teaching for a couple of hours during the siesta. Oh, that's harmless.
And I wonder what Paul felt like in some of those moments. Did he, did he see this sort of fruit? You never know what's happening. You just turn the word loose. In season and out of season.
Preach it constantly. And we preach it confrontationally. As he says, reprove and rebuke and exhort. Rebellious sheep need rebuke. Wayward sheep need corrected.
Anxious sheep and burdened sheep need to be encouraged. You know, and what I've experienced as both a pastor and a guy who preaches in various places is that pastoral preaching is so much different than the conference circuit. Because your, your listeners are not an audience. It's a people that you're shepherding, that you're accountable to. And I think in some ways that takes a little bit of pressure off.
Like you're, you don't have to hit a home run every week. Uh, what you are trying to do is to feed God's people, to lead God's people, to protect God's people, to guide God's people. And sometimes you've got to, you've got to say some hard things as you're in the text that's saying some hard things, some uncomfortable things. It's one of the reasons I like exposition is it forces me to talk about stuff I would otherwise not probably choose. Right?
Um, and so we preach it confrontationally and then toward here, the end of this exhortation in verse two, we preach it patiently. I think this is maybe the most challenging part. I'm not the most patient guy. Um, and I'm glad this verse is in the Bible. Preach with complete patience.
Back when I was in high school, we played a, I grew up in Kentucky. We played a high school basketball team, Muhlenberg North. And they had one play, this was before, there was no shot clock. They called it patience. They moved around and passed forever before they took a shot.
I hate it. I coached, they'd come down to court, I coached it patience. And that's kind of how I view the word and the whole concept of patience. And the whole concept is like, this is just going to be awful, right? But we must remember that this is actually consistent with how God grows people.
Sanctification is a slow process. The end gathering of people into the kingdom is a gradual, slow process. All the parables point in that direction. Even the analogy of fishing is helpful here. It helps set expectations.
I'm not a fisherman, but I have fished. And ordinarily when I've been out there, I'm thinking I should have brought a book. Like it says boring, like it takes forever. But you keep casting, you keep casting, you change lures, you keep it. This is, this is what we do over the world of farming.
We keep sowing. We keep trusting. We keep asking God for rain or in the world of fitness. You ask anybody about exercise at the keys of fitness. And one of the things you're going to say is once you get on a good plan, be patient, be consistent.
And that's important when preaching. We have a divinely ordained methodology to preach the word. And so keep doing it and be patient. My mentor Shaddix used to use this analogy that I've never forgotten. He said, you know, when your kids come down for breakfast in the morning, they don't look really much different than they did yesterday.
In fact, some of them had the same clothes on, right? And you feed them and he says, I go up to my, to the shower to clean up and I pass their pictures on the stairwell. And I think, man, they've grown. How did they grow? It wasn't instantaneously, right?
It wasn't overnight. It's because they were at breakfast every single day. And over time, there is a cumulative effect of feeding your children that leads to their growth. And so it is. I think with preaching, there is a cumulative effect of long-term faithfulness.
You have to be patient to see that kind of maturation. It is true. Sometimes the Lord, by his spirit, brings astonishing results in a moment. Praise God for that. And often it's the slow grind.
I think about Nehemiah 8. Ezra had preached somewhere around 14 years without seeing any extraordinary results. And then something happened in Nehemiah 8. He saw more responsiveness in one day than he saw in 14 years. You can imagine what this must have done in his soul.
But what's he doing any different? Is he doing anything differently? Doesn't seem to be. His whole ministry had been marked by faithful study and teaching of the word. David Morgan was once involved in the Welsh revivals and he experienced this.
He was known as a rather ordinary preacher, saw a little fruit, and then the Lord did something remarkable in a season of his ministry. People were converted. He saw fruit like he'd never seen before. And this is what he said. I went to bed one night like a lamb.
I woke up the next day and I knew I was a lion. And then after this season of revival, he said, I went to bed as a lion. And I woke up and I was a lamb again. You never know what God may do in a season. Like our responsibility is to be faithful in this moment, wherever we are.
And so we need to try to cultivate patience, right? And I think it's important to have the proper expectations with people. Not even Paul had 100% success rate. Judas heard Jesus preach. It wasn't like, man, if he could have had a better preacher.
Right? We need to meditate on God's patience with us regularly. We need to repent regularly of our lack of patience. We need to work the gospel deep down in our souls to realize what we deserve, but what God has given us instead to keep us from being harsh with people and having unrealistic expectations. We don't deserve to be preaching.
We deserve to be in hell. And I really, if you start every day with that in mind, it's a good day. You know, Ice Cube used to say it's a good day when you have to use your AK, right? It's a good day when you're not in hell, right? And so if you start with that sort of that place, then man, it really helps my disposition towards weird people.
It really helps my disposition towards people who are like, I just taught that. We taught 12 weeks in Genesis on reconciliation, and you guys are at odds with each other. They do not listen to anything I said. Boy, we need the gospel in our own souls. I used to tell my kids, do you realize people pay me to talk?
And you won't listen to a word I say. That's not a good thing to say, by the way. So how do you handle it? How do you preach with patience? I just have to go back to the well every, you know, my own.
I have to remember who I am and what God has done for me. This is not what I deserve. It requires a lot of prayer that the Lord would give us joyful perseverance. I think it involves reading good biographies. I've been blessed through the years by Piper's little biographies.
I still remember the first time he did Charles Simeon. And how they locked the church pews for seven years. And he stayed there for 54 years preaching in that church. Something that is really helpful isn't to get out of our world, in our time, and to realize you're not the first pastor to suffer, pal. So we preach it with patience.
Final piece here. I'm done theologically. He says that we preach it with complete teaching. I love how these two are put together, right? That preaching is heraldic.
It's an announcement of good news. It's statements of facts. The tomb is empty. The throne is occupied. Jesus is Lord.
Jesus is Lord. We're announcing good news, right? Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. But we have to come behind that sometimes and teach it. To tease out what it means to repent.
Tease out what it means to believe Jesus is Lord. Tease out why we believe in the resurrection and so on. So when we're preaching, we're also going to be doing some teaching. And we're specifically doing this as we think about theology, as we're catechizing our people, as we're trying to keep them away, as the text says in verses three and four, from turning away from listening to the truth. And that's one of the things you see is very striking about verses three and four, when he says the time's coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears will accumulate for themselves, teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
You might imagine if that's the case, Paul would tell Timothy to try something else. It's very counterintuitive. It's like he's saying, people don't want this, so keep doing it. Right. They're going to turn away from sound doctrine, so keep giving them sound doctrine.
And it's also a reminder to us that mankind will believe something. Right. Freud used to say that mankind is incurably religious, that they will believe something. And that's why the prosperity gospel is taking root in so many places around the world. It's because there's no presence of sound doctrine in those places, which is why we have to saturate the nations with sound doctrine, because people will believe something.
We need millions of faithful preachers around the world. We don't need 20 more sensational conference speakers. God bless those guys. What we really need, though, are millions of faithful expositors and to saturate the globe with them so that sound doctrine is taught and people believe it and embrace it, and they don't build their life on a false hope and on a false gospel. So preaching with joyful perseverance.
I just point you back again to our theology. That theology keeps us faithful. It energizes our work. And to do this with a Christ-centered focus, to preach Him, brothers, until you see Him. Then I won't have to open his iPad and preach any more sermons or open those notes, right?
That I will see him face to face. And when we see him on that day, we will be glad we preached with joyful perseverance. May God grant us a marathon ministry that is faithful in one season to the next season. What a gift it is to be able to do what we do. May the Lord grant us a special unction in this season.
As we're learning together today, may we also pray together today that the Lord would do something in our own hearts, in our own ministries that would really just blow us away. Not for our credit or our glory, so grateful for Lewis's vision, but for his glory and for people's good that he would do beyond anything we could ever ask or imagine as we open our mouths to declare the unsearchable riches of Christ. Father, we thank you for your word. Today, we do pray that you would give us a marathon ministry. We know that this task is challenging and exhausting, but we thank you.
You've given us everything we need to be faithful. Help us to believe, to keep believing what we believe in this present hour. Lord, keep these brothers, keep myself away from false beliefs. So many of my friends have embrace. Keep us from moral failures that derail our ministries.
As one of my friends says, I'm one hotel away from ruining my life. Lord, help us, keep us, protect us. Grant us much favor and grace as we deliver your word, as we study your word. I pray for our young preachers here, guys who are just starting. One of my brothers said he preached his second sermon recently.
Lord, fill him with fresh encouragement today. Give him vision and give him a ministry that is incredibly fruitful and faithful to you. Thank you for older, seasoned ministers who are with us. I pray that you would give them a great final chapter, however long you allow them to have this season, as the psalmist says, that they would bear fruit in old age. Or what a great, what a great thought that is, that our latter years could be even more profitable and fruitful for your kingdom.
Keep us ever learning. May they always see our progress. May our people drink from a living fountain and not a stagnant pond. Just going back to tired cliches, may we always be eager to learn, study and preach. Give us fresh energy today.
Bless this, the Sundays that are coming up. All my brothers here in the room as they prepare, it's all, it's easy sometimes in these workshops, Lord, to feel overwhelmed by all of the things that people say. I pray that you would grant them hope. You grant them a sense of freedom and joy in the task and not a sense of burden for the task, but give them a reason to enjoy this work, Lord, as they put their hand to it, as they put their heart to it. And we give you all this together in Jesus' good name.
Everybody said, Amen.
Table Talk with Tony Merida and David Mathis
Originally recorded at Cities Church, St. Paul, MN — August 21, 2025
Full transcript
David Mathis
Here we go here. I get a chance for a few minutes to just do some little preacher to preacher rapid fire. I want to ask some of my quirky questions, my preaching professor questions, and then I'll throw it open for some other questions here. So if you're sitting on something, if you're thinking about that, I'm hoping to give you an opportunity here in a few minutes, and I'll try to dive in, get a little more background on Tony and draw out a few things
Tony Merida
I feel very insecure right now. I've watched countless Ask Pastor John videos, and I'm aware that I'm sitting in the John Piper seat right now.
David Mathis
We'll do what we can. You're ready for this. You studied for this. Maybe we'll get into your doctoral project or whatever, the project you did years ago. Let me pray for us and ask for God's blessing on this few minutes here.
Father, thank you for sending us Tony here for the day. Thank you for the messages that we have already been served by and nourished under from Tony, from Louis. Thank you for this camaraderie and fellowship of brother preachers. Thank you for the fresh encouragement in the gathering, in the seeing of these faces, in the hearing of your word to continue in the work to endure. It's so valuable for us preachers doing the hard work as Tony so clearly outlined there at the beginning. So would you bless even these few moments, the direction you take us, that you'd lead and guide this in its formality and informality of the table talk setting. Would you make this a blessing to these brother preachers, young and old? In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Let's see. All right. So Tony, am I right to think you've been preaching about 21 years? How often do you preach each year?
Tony Merida
So it's changed this year or last couple years because I'm doing more, a little bit more traveling. When I started Imago Dei, it was somewhere between 38 to 42 Sundays and now I'm down to like 32.
David Mathis
Yeah. And how long do you typically preach for?
Tony Merida
Well, that's also changed through the years. When I started our church, we had one service. We didn't have a lot of programming. I felt the encouragement, empowerment to preach longer than I currently do with multiple services and a bigger church with more educational opportunities and so on. That's a long answer to say. I aim for 30 minutes. I don't always hit 30 minutes. I probably average more like 34, but I'll see the kids turning to look at the clock at about 25 minutes in and he's not going to make it. He's just on point one. So yeah. So it's trimmed. I think some of that's due to just a lot of reps and honing your craft and learning how to be more concise than I used to be. Some of that is I start the prep process way earlier than I used to and I think starting late in the week, I was taking more of a first draft to the pulpit that hadn't been edited adequately. So I don't think the content so much has shrunk as much as
David Mathis
it is probably the conciseness. That's good. I'd love to talk some about your process. You mentioned it there. I don't know if you would be up for giving us a little overview. I know we could double click on this and go hours on it, but some big pieces that might help these brothers thinking through their different patterns. Not that they need to wear Saul's armor, but to give us some specifics on how one brother goes about it. So I've done this also differently
Tony Merida
through the years. I have a process, but how I do it just varies season to season. I have five steps. Study the text. That's obvious. We're just immersing ourselves in the text, understanding it, seeing how the gospel is tied to this text. Second step is unify the theme. So we're identifying in this text what is the big idea, the dominant theme of the text, and that should drive the dominant theme of the sermon. I think that's the key piece, by the way, to clarity is the unified theme. What is it that he's on about? Everybody should know that answer. It doesn't have to be a dynamic sermon, but if it can be clear and people know what the main thought is, the main idea, I think that's important. The third step is to construct an outline that supports that dominant theme. So there you have your points, and your points are not really points. They're really sub points of the big idea, right? And so I try to use as many points as I think the text has and say it in a way that's suitable for my audience. So I don't limit myself, say, to three points. It just kind of depends on the flow of the text, because I'm really preaching one big point, or trying to. Last night I preached on the prayer of Jehoshaphat, and I was trying to drive home this idea of seeking the Lord in dependent prayer. So there's a lot kind of under that, but that was sort of the umbrella. Step four is add what we call in homiletics, right, the functional elements of explanation, illustration, and application. So in each point, I'm at least explaining and applying. I may not illustrate in every point, but I want to explain what needs to be explained, and then try to apply that home. And then fifth, I construct or I write the introduction and conclusion. I like to do the introduction last rather than first, because I want to know what I'm introducing. Otherwise, I may be tempted to twist my text. That's what I used to do as a youth preacher. I had a great story about a cat, and then I'd twist the text to match my cat story. And you really should just kill the cat, and know what you're going to talk about, and then find a way to open it. Now, sometimes the opener comes before the last step of the process, and I don't say, well, I can't think about you right now, opener. You know, you grab it if it comes to you in the process. But that's the general spirit of what I do. I don't think of it, though, in that wooden format. I don't think I'm in step two now. Like a lot of preaching theory and study is instincts, right? You think about these mechanics, but when you are preaching a lot, you're more instinctive in doing those sorts of things.
The way I used to do it was I would, I mean, I had my first church, I had three different sermons. I had Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. So I was not doing any kind of advanced sermon prep for Sunday morning. It was, I was trying to get to it after the Wednesday night prayer meeting and Bible study. I would usually start Thursday. That was probably my weaker preaching, I think, looking back. Later, I started, when I only had one sermon to prepare a week, Sunday morning, I started preaching, eventually, I started preparing on Mondays. So Monday was writing day. And what I was trying to do was the week before, I would usually Thursday or Friday, I would work through all the exegetical questions of the upcoming text and try to know the big idea and my outline by Monday morning. And I like doing that because I like to compose the whole sermon in one flow of thought. And I like, I call it getting downhill. I liked being able to go downhill on Monday morning. It's also a very edifying process because Monday can be tiring. And just, that was a study day. The elders knew I was going to be doing prep at home. And I would submit a first draft on Slack to our elders. And by the end of Monday, I would tweak it up on Tuesday and edit it. And then the rest of the week, I would just let it marinate, still make tweaks, but they're minor. And I felt like the runway allowed me to preach from the heart. Because what I found is if I were starting later in the week, I was so concerned about what's in my notes and so concerned about missing something that's there. It was just very hard for me to preach from the heart to the hearts of people. And I think it's important to remember that preaching is an oral experience, right? It's heraldic. We're not writing a research paper. We're speaking publicly. And to do that, you really need a sense of naturalness in preaching from the heart. But we need to have some substance. And so, for me, that meant starting early in the week. Now, I start way earlier than that. I'm an advanced sermon prepper. So, I have weeks and weeks prepped. And I did that for a couple of reasons. One was I started working as a VP for SEND and my Mondays got eaten up with preaching workshops and other events and conferences. And I just didn't want to start again late in the week. So, I use the weeks where I'm not preaching two or three weeks in a row. And I need two days to prepare a sermon, not two entire days, but two big blocks of time. And I can get a sermon, I call it 80% finished. And then I move on to the next one. Then week of, I'll finish that 80%. And I can talk about the details of that if you're interested. But that's what I do now. I think maybe the takeaway is just you find what works for you and your season, what you need, and how is it that you can be clear, communicate the word, and do it from the heart. And I've changed season to season. But the way I'm doing it now is probably my favorite approach ever. Because now on Monday, I look at it on my iPad and it's almost finished.
And I just can marinate. And I think application is what you need time to think about that you don't get from commentaries. And if you're waiting late in the week, you're worried so much about getting the text right, you don't have a lot of reflective time on application to think about how we might apply this. So, a lot of that application comes week of, but it comes to me because I've prepped so much already to think about it. Does that get at what you meant by saying
David Mathis
Early on you were preaching your first draft? Yes. You weren't giving it enough time between the main composition moment and then the delivery
Tony Merida
Yeah. And that's mainly because that's how I did my studies in school. Like last minute, we're cramming. And yeah, it's not my preference. I think I'm more concise and it's just much easier to preach from the heart. It's the same thing with writing. You know, someone once said that the secret to good writing is not writing, it's good editing. And the key is like getting that shoddy first draft done. If you can get that done, then you can really get into the making that something. But if you only have the shoddy draft on Saturday night, that's what you got on Sunday morning, right? You don't have enough time. And the Lord can use the shoddiness. Don't get me wrong. Like he has for years. I mean, he works with us. So, praise the Lord for that. But I like having that time for editing.
David Mathis
Okay. I want to come back to opener, but I want to ask about the, you talk about running downhill on Monday when you've got the outline. Can we talk about the outline? I think that's such an important piece. Are you putting that together that it's uphill until the outline and now once you've got the clarity about the outline, now you're running downhill. Now I'm excited. Okay. Talk to me about that. What goes into getting to that outline? What are you trying to do with the outline? It seems to me that's a very important little part of sermon prep, but it's huge. So, linger on that for a minute here.
Tony Merida
I think one is the Calvin anecdote. We study to be simple. I think that for me, outlining isn't about being clever. It's really just about being clear that I want people to be able to really see, oh yeah, that's what those three verses are about. And that's what those four verses are about. And I think in doing that, we're helping people to study the Bible on their own, which I think is very important. So again, the outline for me is supporting the big idea, but I want it to really be rather obvious. And so my outlines are generally pretty simple. And for me, that's my own preference. But I do think it serves people. An outline is almost like how you practice hospitality. People come to your house, you're like, hey, that's where the bathroom is. This is where the vegetarian dish is. And this is where the, you know, et cetera. And there is sort of an expositional hospitality that is, I think, present in good preaching, where people know what we're doing. You know, like they know what we're looking at. Like, what's this about? And how does all this work together? I think, so when you're doing hospitality at your house, you're not trying to be clever, but you're trying to be clear and logical. And I think we're doing
David Mathis
something like that in outlining. With your outline, are you trying to, I guess with the main point, and then with the outline, are you wanting that to address the audience, address the congregation in the moment? Great point, great question. As opposed to like saying, Paul, dot, dot, dot, Jesus, John, David. Is it about the biblical text? Or are you wording the
Tony Merida
point to be to the people? Yeah. Well, people disagree about that. And I like to vary it personally. And in my preaching book, I have like, I think it's 11 ways to outline a text. And I like to look at the text itself and think about my audience and say, like, what's the best way to do that? So you do have sort of the pure exegetical model, which you're just giving headings, essentially. They're not really points or headings to the sections. Then you have sort of a homily approach where it's just a running commentary. And the verses essentially are the outline. You're just like next verse. You do that, I do that a lot at weddings. You know, you may take Ephesians 5, and nobody needs three points, you know, four points in a wedding message. But we're just sort of working our way through it. Or in a funeral, you may take a psalm or something. And then there's sort of a hybrid homily where you give a little structure, but then it's mainly running through the deal. Piper has done for years a lot of question answer, like he'll raise a question. He has a sermon in James 2 that is entitled, Does James Contradict Paul? And he's talking about how James uses the word justification versus how Paul uses it, right?
And I've seen Piper do that for years, just like the, here's the question I want to try to answer. And I'm often saying, I wasn't asking that question, but that's interesting. Like, did Jesus die for us or God? I remember that one. And I was like, okay, okay, let's go. So I think there are various ways. Again, it's back to we don't wear Saul's armor. For me, it's like what is really reflective of the text and then what's suitable to the audience. And I'm not trying to wow people personally with the outline. I think what was really important is just the clarity and quality of substance. Because one of the things that keeps people listening, I think is tension or interest. And some guys try to be overly clever, in my opinion, with tension, and they just kind of lead you along and they don't want to give you too much in the beginning. And it's just like, you know, build up. But I just think people lean in when the content's good. And so it's less about the outline, that's to help. But it's really like the real going from good to great is in those functional elements, the insights of the explanation, and the depth of application. And if you can have some engaging illustrations, that'll add some hot sauce and kind of take it to the next level, I think. So the outline's important. But for me, that's not where I would probably spend the majority of my time. I'm pretty content with just a clear, simple structure, because I don't put all the weight there.
David Mathis
You mentioned application there. Sometimes the pastor will have the tendency or perhaps the conviction to end with application. Do you think through trying to vary that? I do. Put it in different places, spread it all over? How do you think through that?
Tony Merida
Yeah, a lot of the old approach was we save our application for the end. And I think if you do that, the risk is that people will duck. If you do that every week, where it's predictable, they know it's coming, and it's kind of like, okay. But I like to shoot them during the whole deal, you know, like they can't duck. And Keller used to call this running and collected application. So the collected at the end, you're doing that, but it's not the only time they hear the application. And you're not introducing new material at the end. You're collecting what was already present, you know, in the body of a sermon. The same way you do a conclusion or a summary. You're not adding footnotes usually in a conclusion, right? You're gathering up what was just communicated.
Yeah.
David Mathis
Good. Okay. On the opener or in the editorial world, we talk about the lead. What's the lead on the article? What's the lead on the message? You're such a nerd, bro.
Tony Merida
I know. I totally- I'm kidding. No, I love you, bro.
David Mathis
What are you seeking? I love that you said you're resisting spending much time on introduction. If it comes to your head while you're working on point three, capture some notes, whatever. But you want to wait till the end to introduce so that your introduction doesn't twist where you're going. Talk to us more about that. What are you seeking to do in that opening, in that lead?
Tony Merida
Well, I know that Piper is not a fan of introductions. Like I've heard him and Dever argue that point. It's very interesting. Dever usually has great introductions. I would just say there are various ways to do an opener, various kinds of openers. I think what I started doing, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, and I learned this mainly from Dever, is trying to address the unbeliever and believer in the introduction. More than like what the opener is. That matters, but it's like I try to get everybody on the bus in the opener. And you don't have to be overly clever. It's like if you're talking about the church, Acts 2, 42 to 47. You know, you have something that's going to draw believers into this text, giving a reason why they should listen. But I want to throw something out to those who are just exploring the faith or something like that. I use that phrase a lot. If you're here and you're just exploring the faith. And that's a frequent experience at our church. People are doing that. They've never been to church for the, you know, one time before. Like we have a lot of mature believers, but a lot of unbelievers. I would say something like, hey, you may be turned off by the church, by stories you've heard in the church. I want you to see like what the Bible says that the church ought to be, because it's really beautiful and compelling. And so this is a great Sunday for you to be here, right? I use that line a lot. This is a great week for you to be here. And then I just make up a reason why it's a good week for them to be here.
And, but I, when it comes to exposition, I think that one of the dangers is like outsiders come in and they have an assumption. This is just for insiders and they feel disconnected early on. And I think it's important to try to bring them in. Now you don't have to do it always that explicitly. You can do that through story. You can do that through film, through art, through music. I like quoting music. Not everybody does, especially in the reform tradition. I had a guy just really criticized me one time for quoting the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I'll never forget it. And I'm trying to do, I think, a little bit of what Paul does, Mars Hill, in quoting the poets. You know, our people today are not reading poets. My people aren't, mostly. They're not reading Nietzsche either, but they're listening to, you know, whoever the pop stars are, right? Taylor Swift or whoever. And you don't have to immerse yourself into that world. Just have to keep your ears open. And I hear stuff all the time that are like, man, that's a counter gospel. Or that's, some songs are just dying for you to use them in illustration. You know, Shaboosie, he has that song, Good News. I wish I had some good news. I'm like, well, we got you, bro. We got, you know. And people who know nothing about the Bible, the unbelievers who are there, they can connect with that. And I think anything that we can give them, I don't want to be too long in an introduction. I think it needs to be like the porch on a house. It's a small porch, but it's inviting. It's welcoming. And generally speaking, I just think introductions are woven into creation. The sun doesn't come up immediately and just, wow, you know, like there's a slow, steady sunrise. Most things in art and life have an introduction. And so, I think that's generally the way people think. So, I try to vary what I might do. So, I'm an athlete, sports guy. I have to watch that all my illustrations are not, you know, sports and that kind of thing.
I like quotes sometimes. The reason the opener is also important to do at the end is like, your sermon may be really dense one week. You don't have much time at all to really spend on an introduction. That's me this Sunday. I got Paul at Mars Hill. It's just a lot in that sermon. And so, my opener is going to be really short. But there are other weeks I may have more time. There's probably more than you wanted, but just processing out loud.
David Mathis
And I love the little summary of like, I want to get everybody on the bus.
Tony Merida
Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought him up … Lloyd Jones would start like a doctor with the problem and the text was a solution. And that's the same idea that I'm thinking about with the unbeliever is like, what is it that's being addressed here? I use the example of the church and just identifying sort of a common problem that unbelievers may have and trying to show why this is significant.
David Mathis
I mean, you did that here for us when you talked about the hard work of preaching and it being labor. And just in like, just when I was totally convinced it's hard work. And then you said something else that made it harder work and something else. I mean, like we got a problem set up and that was really helpful. So it sounds like maybe you're doing a manuscript with this work and typing it out. Do you want to, you want to wax any here for us on manuscript, extent, strengths and weaknesses, how you wrestled through that over your 20 years?
Tony Merida
Yeah, I've done that differently through the years. I've always, since seminary, I should say, I wrote a manuscript, but what I've actually taken to the pulpit has varied through the years.
When I speak at youth events or college events, I'm often preaching sermons I'm familiar with, and I need less material and I'm really working hard for eye contact and engagement. And so I may just have a post-it note and just do my thing. In the church where it's new sermons, it's also not the pressure. People know me. I know I'm not the only place they're going to get content that week. And I don't feel the weight of being so engaged with eye contact and so on. So I basically write what I call a bulleted manuscript. And so I do colors. The colors only make sense to me. They don't make sense to anybody else. And I start every sentence on the left-hand column with a bullet. And I do that because my eyes are looking in the same place every time I look down. If I start a sentence in the middle, I can get really confused. And so I don't have any margins. Donnie will tell you I'm a marginless preacher. I take all those margins. Nobody needs margins. And so everything's right here. It's one full page. It gives me less pages, less scrolling. And that's what I do. So usually points are red. Illustrations are blue. Highlight stuff I don't want to miss, that kind of thing. The blue helps me also sort of set up my introduction to the illustration. I know when it's coming because it serves as a bit of a change and dynamic as you're doing an illustration. And so I don't want to ever be surprised, oh, I've got an illustration there. The colors kind of help me prepare for that delivery of the illustration. So now I take that up. But there have been times where I've been asked, for example, to write commentaries, First and Second Kings. And I'm like, man, I don't know.
Do I write the commentary chapter? Which is different because you're writing for a reader. What do I do? There I was really just kind of riffing. I was preaching without notes. But I've been in it a lot to write a full chapter or whatever. And I don't know. Donnie could tell you whether or not that was any good. But there was a season where I was preaching without notes, but I was writing commentaries. So it's all varied through the years. But now what I do is what I like because it's sustainable. I do 14 Helvetica font, 10 pages with the text embedded in the notes. I preach from pages. And if I had another three or gave myself another three to five hours, I could probably internalize it and just have a post-it note and preach it without notes. But that's another day of work that I just don't want to give. I'm fine just having notes and trying to
David Mathis
Preach with notes without being noticed. Is there anything at Bethlehem, Cities Church, TCT Churches, we're very much kind of a manuscripting culture. You may have seen some of those manuscripts that set the tone for that. Are there ways that you're trying to account for the dangers or excesses of manuscripting to make the moment more real and engaging?
Tony Merida
Yeah, I think the key is like being okay and being able to preach on your feet. So there are going to be moments. I mean, this happened last night, Brian and Donnie's church, just like stuff that's not in my notes. And just the Lord gives you thoughts and gives you ideas. And sometimes you want to linger somewhere. I didn't know that was going to land like that. There are even moments where I'm like, man, my point two and three is not anywhere near as good as this one. And they're really there. So it's like, what do you do then? Or do you have the ability to linger there for a moment? It's that sort of thing. So I just would say don't be enslaved to the manuscript. It's a tool, but it's not the end all. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
David Mathis
Thinking back, we got young guys in the room, a lot of young guys here. Thinking back to when you were getting going as a preacher. It was terrible. Just terrible. You continued, you kept learning. Any thoughts on what you needed to hear most in that first five years, that first 10 years?
Tony Merida
What Shaddix used to say, we would meet with him. This is a great mentoring model, by the way. This is a free one. He had 12 guys. We called it the Emmaus Road Group. And we would all come. Guys would bring their wives. I was the only not married guy. And we would have dinner. And then the ladies would go. I don't know what they did, but they went somewhere. And the guys would watch one of the sermon. At that time, it was a VHS, one of our sermons. Somebody was up each month. And then we would reconvene for dessert. The whole night was about three hours, four hours. And it was a blast. I just looked forward to it every month. His wife was an amazing cook. It was so fun. And I still remember watching my VHS, and I was so nervous having these 12 guys look at this sermon of mine. And my nickname is T-Bone.
And I remember him saying, you need more confidence, T-Bone. You need more confidence. He's like, you have great material. And I did. I was insecure. And that's what he was saying to me all the time. You need more confidence. So early, early preaching was, I need more content. I need better content. I did not grow up with exposition. I mean, that's why I went to study with Shaddix. I was like, that's what I need to be doing. I don't know how to do that. So he set me on a trajectory that I'm still on. And that's why I'm incredibly indebted to him. But yeah, I think there was that early on. I needed to work on everything, though. I mean, there was nothing that I didn't need to work on. I needed to enunciate better. I needed everything from outline, all of it. I was a work in progress. And then I started preaching in 2001 at a youth camp. I preached every day for 10 weeks, morning and evening. And I learned a lot through that. And I did that same camp another three, four summers in a row. And out of that, I got a lot of speaking engagements from those churches.
And that's really where I honed my craft. But I mean, we're into a couple hundred, 300 sermons before I ever felt like, you know, so it's a painful journey. Some guys are good from the jump. I mean, it's maybe they're just smarter than I was, or they came to ministry later in life, or they're naturally good speakers or whatever. But yeah, it was a process. And it still is. I mean, like I said, we're always growing. But early on, I took a lot of dings.
David Mathis
And yeah. I think I remember Keller saying you need about 200 to find out who you are as a preacher. Yeah. You talk about honing the craft there. Yeah. Sometimes we talk about a preaching gift as if it just falls from heaven or doesn't. Yeah. And would you speak into that for some of these younger guys who feel like, I have some aspirations in my heart. I don't know if I have the ability. Does that mean God just didn't drop the ability on? Is this an ability to cultivate? Is there a craft to be honed? And how would you have young guys orient on that? I mean, all of us in the room as preachers, but young guys in particular.
Tony Merida
It's a great question. I mean, yeah, I think preaching is both gift and skill development. So my responsibility is to develop everything God has given me. But it's not, it's not, I shouldn't be my expectation to have the same level of gifting that someone else has.
I mean, I've taught preaching classes many times where, you know, students have asked me, like, do I really need seminary? You know, like Spurgeon didn't go to seminary. I'm like, but you ain't Spurgeon, right? Like, they're like, Matt Chandler didn't go to seminary. Well, you're not Matt Chandler's, you know, like there's a certain gifting that God gives people. I mean, just look at church history, guys who did not have formal training that the Lord used mightily. There's a certain unction and gifting that we just need to acknowledge that there's a lot that's mysterious in preaching that we can't quantify. That's really hard to, why is that so powerful? Or, you know, but with that said, I do think preaching is science and art. Like we need to keep learning the science of exegesis, the science of seeing Christ naturally in the scriptures, but there's an art to how we're saying things, how we're arranging our material, how we're presenting ideas, how it all is coming together in a mosaic, you know. That's a journey of a lifetime, that learning process of skill development, which is why these workshops matter and why I encourage even seasoned pastors, I do this myself, to read at least one preaching book every year. I just think you'll glean something somewhere from a preaching book. So, I would say to the younger preachers, just understand that. Don't compare yourself to other guys. Some guys are going to be incredibly gifted. Be faithful with what the Lord has given you and try to be as best
David Mathis
As you can with what God has given you. Yeah, all right. So, a preaching book once a year at least. Some to recommend or some that have shaped you deeply. You mentioned Ash on the priority of preaching earlier. I love Christopher Ash. I didn't realize he had a preaching book, so I ordered that off Amazon. A lot of my early quotes came from Ash, yeah. He's a good brother. He's fantastic.
Tony Merida
He has a great commentary on the Psalms, and then he has a companion on teaching the Psalms. So, it's a preaching book just on how to preach the Psalms. …
David Mathis
Key influences or who would you toss out there and commend for these preachers to read?
Tony Merida
I probably wouldn't surprise most of my brothers here in the room with my list. Lloyd Jones, Preaching to Preachers, is a must. John Stott, Between Two Worlds. I'm a huge Spurgeon fan, so anything you can read from Spurgeon on preaching is helpful.
Piper, Supremacy of God in Preaching, Chapel, Christ-Centered Preaching, and Goldsworthy. Those are two keys, I think, on understanding the biblical narrative ….
Ash's book, The Priority of Preaching, is a small little book. And the whole argument is basically from the book of Deuteronomy.
I was talking to Lewis about it. He brings up how the people had the law, but Moses was still to preach it. It's kind of like Romans, right? I just talked about that. So, I like what he's doing in that book. The book, Saving Eutychus, there's some interesting anecdotes in there
Tony Merida
Phil Jensen has a book called The Archer and the Arrow. He has a great illustration about the Mona Lisa that I use a lot. It's really good. You know, it's unfortunate, but there are guys that no longer have a ministry or their ministry, they went, they experienced some scandal, moral scandal. So, I won't mention a couple of those books, but some of them are popping in my mind. They were very formative for me. Shaddix's books were probably the most formative. I wrote my dissertation on Piper. So, I've immersed myself in Piper. Keller, in the last 10 years and prior to his passing, was really instrumental in my preaching to unbelievers. So, he didn't write a ton on preaching, but his preaching book is really good. Those are some that come to the top of my head.
David Mathis
All right. I want to get back to the, well, let's go here now, quick, on preaching being a life skill, a lifetime of learning, anything you're consciously working on right now. Not that you have to always be consciously working on something. I'm making an assumption. Maybe you are, maybe you're not, but anything that you're working on now or recently?
Tony Merida
We just preached to the book of Genesis, and that was really tough sledding through a lot of Genesis. So, I would just say preaching from different genres. This past couple of years, we did 1 Corinthians, Song of Songs, Genesis, and I was like, man, why are we killing ourselves? It was a heavy lift. So, I'm like, we're doing Ephesians next. So, yeah, that's part of the preaching is one thing. What I really love is the content. You know, like I love exegesis. I love getting into the text. And so, most of my study is more like a New Testament or Old Testament scholar. Like, I just want to study thoroughly. So, I'd read the preaching book a year. I listen to guys do lectures on preaching, but what I am more interested in really are like scholars and experts in particular books of the Bible and just learning from them. That's what I like the most.
David Mathis
I think the first I heard of you is when you were working on the project on Piper. So, this is probably just more than 15 years ago. Maybe, is this in 06, 07, 09 in that area? I remember you sending the volume to John of the published dissertation. And so, what were some of the key gleanings there from that season, having that focus of study?
Anything you think back on, it's like, oh, I gleaned that in the season of kind of steeping in Piper?
Tony Merida
Here's an interesting and encouraging anecdote from that. I met Piper for the first time DGM conference, or Bethlehem Conference, and I said, hey, I'm Tony Merida. You don't know who I am. I'm all sweaty. I'm so nervous talking to John Piper. And like I said, I just want you to know I'm writing my dissertation on you. And he goes, please take recent sermons. And I was like, that's a good, that's good because nobody needs to listen to my old sermons. I'm glad they were pre-internet, man. And then we went on and had a conversation about what I was doing. And I really didn't set out to write on Piper. What I was trying to write on was how to integrate biblical theology with expository preaching, which is really how to do Christ-centered preaching from the whole Bible. And so, I needed a methodology, and I used Brian Chappell's methodology, and I needed a representative preacher to see if he was practicing Chappell's theory. Chappell was one of the three books at the time that Piper recommended at DGM on preaching. And so, I had a tight connection there. And so, I analyzed 108, I think it was 108 sermons from six genres of literature from Piper to see how he preached Christ from all of scripture. And one of the problems of the study is that Chappell actually goes all the way to the ledge but doesn't jump over. Like he says that a theocentric sermon is a Christ-centered sermon, where Goldsworthy would say one of the main questions of analyzing a sermon is how did it testify to Christ specifically. And Chappell, you know, I've talked to him about this before. He basically says, well, I'm assuming that if you're being redemptive and being theocentric, God-centered, you will preach the gospel. And I'm like, yeah, but you didn't say that in the book. And so, when I analyzed Piper's sermons, there were several actually from the Old Testament that did not give strong reference or any reference a few times to Christ. But they were theocentric, they were God-centered, of course. And then later he tightened that focus, you know, like even the mission statement at Bethlehem was added like through Jesus Christ. And there was a level of specificity that he was given there. So, I think if I would have used Goldsworthy to analyze Piper, it would have been a little different. So, I don't know where that needs to go. But I learned a lot, I would just say, just by, I read a ton, all of those sermons. And it was interesting. I had not heard an expositor in a conservative tradition talk about justice. It was like a new thing. Like a lot of his stuff in Isaiah, orphan care, racial reconciliation. Now, they weren't dominant themes, but they were there enough where I was like, I've ignored a lot of this. I haven't really paid attention to this. So, that was really interesting. More than anything, they were just deeply edifying. And, you know, I was already influenced by Piper, but that was a wonderful experience to finish it.
I wrote it during Katrina. I was in New Orleans and I had to live in like six or seven different places. My wife and I, we bounced around and it was a wild season to write a dissertation. So, I was glad when it's over, really, because a good dissertation is a finished dissertation.
David Mathis
All right. So, again, with younger guys in mind, what might you say to a younger guy who aspires? The Holy Ghost fire, shut up in their bones. They're ready to preach and they're young and nobody's asking them to preach yet. Advice?
Tony Merida
Yeah, been there. I mean, I would take every opportunity you can. You might be surprised what you find out there. Prisons, elderly homes. You'll be surprised what's out there. Now, you've got a YouTube audience. I'm not necessarily suggesting that, but I'm not suggesting it either. It is amazing what Gen Z and below, where they go for content. And it's a lot of YouTube, as you know. We just were having talks about this with TGC, like TGC focusing more attention on YouTube because of where people are going for content and information. I mean, I didn't have that. We didn't have an internet you could preach to. And even if it's just 12 people, at least you're honing your craft and saying something, right? I preach into audio cassettes, trying to learn how to practice. Like I wasn't preaching to anybody. I was just trying to learn how to communicate. I remember reading the Billy Graham biography, just as I am, that he was preaching out in the woods. And he'd come back and his friends were like, did the squirrels get saved, Billy? I think the point is like, be okay with humble beginnings. I never dreamed the Lord would give me opportunities. He's given me, not in my wildest imagination. I grew up in a tiny, small town in Appalachia. And I learned to preach in a church. My early preaching, I had no notice that it was more of an independent fundamentalist kind of church. And the pastor would get up and he would say, how many of y'all want to hear brother Tony preach? And everybody would go, amen, amen. Brother Tony, you come on and preach. No notice. And I would just preach. Be ready in season and out. Yeah, yeah. So I would, I remember one time it was around Christmas and I'd been leading some college guys through the book of Job. And I decided I'll just do that. That's where I've been. And the sermon went like 12 minutes. I was like, that's all I got. And he came up behind me and like finished the sermon.
He just like kept preaching on, I know my redeemer lives and shall stand at that ladder day. So humble beginnings. Disciple now is in trailers. You know, I've preached in so many places and I'm thankful for all of that. So take what you can get.
David Mathis
Some young guys want the mic but nobody's given it to them yet. Other guys, they're aspiring to preach and they're scared to death of public speaking. What would you say to that guy torn between I aspire to do this and a part of me doesn't want to do this? Yeah, I think that's a good place to be actually.
Tony Merida
There should be a desire to do it, but also a trepidation about what we're doing. A humility about what we're doing. You know? Yeah. What was the first part of your question?
David Mathis
The guy who, he wants to preach, but he's fearful of public speaking. That part. Yeah.
Tony Merida
I was thinking about Luther. He said, you just imagine people in front of you are blocks of wood. Luther sometimes apparently, believe it or not, felt that kind of trepidation. I don't know what I would say. I didn't, that wasn't what I struggle with. I was a senior president and played sport. I was very comfortable speaking, but it was more of, I don't want to get the text wrong. And it was the weight of what we were doing.
I think you'll just get over it. You really just need to keep doing it. Piper talked about being afraid to even pray in public and he did okay.
David Mathis
You keep pressing in. That's right. All right. I got one more, then open it up here. Team preaching. What do you think about that? Do you do it? What are the Tony Merida’s thoughts on team preaching?
Tony Merida
I'm a big fan of that. I'm a big fan of plurality of elders. I think New Testament's a big fan of that. You've got, I think there's strengths early on. We say to our church planters, like I'm a fan of team planting. So more than one elder, if you can't plant. Maybe early on, it's more one dominant voice for clarity. But over time, if you can flatten that out and share the pulpit, I just think there's a lot of benefits to that. You kind of guarding against the cult of personality, hearing it from different voices, the same message. I think if you're doing exposition, the focus becomes on the text and not who's preaching. And I think that's healthy.
If you want to have some kind of biblical diversity, I think the pulpit is very important that some of that is reflected. There are many, many advantages, I think, to plurality and shared pulpits. I know a lot of guys have elders, but they don't have shared pulpits. I think if that lead guy leaves, I think the continuity is much easier for the church to keep on going without collapsing. I'm not probably the majority opinion on this with a lot of my peers, but I'm a big fan. I mean, where we're at now is my favorite time in our life of our church, and I'm 30 to 32 weeks. But we've got really good guys too. I mean, so it really depends on your team. And some of your guys may not be ready for that amount of reps, but you could still... I think it's important that they see other guys are preaching, not just when you're on vacation. Like when you're there and you're part of the church taking in the word, I think that's healthy. So I would advocate for that. I think we've had a model for preaching that's kind of Moses off the mountain and even in study, right? Where it's isolated and you come say, thus says the Lord, where I think the New Testament is more of a plurality of elders and there could be a lot more communication and dialogue about the text and the sermon. There's a shared ministry of the word that all the elders are having. And working it out may look differently, but I think that sharing is really important.
David Mathis
That's good. All right. … Would you, I ask you to close us in prayer. And one thing that's exciting about this gathering for us is to strengthen current preachers and then to keep investing in the next generation of preachers in the Twin Cities. And would you pray for these men in their continuance, perseverance, joyful perseverance, and that seeds here would be sown and grow up, that the future preachers would be in this room that would be God's calming, non-anxious Christian hedonistic presence in the Twin Cities. Absolutely. Absolutely. Father,
Tony Merida
Thank you so much for what we've learned and experienced today. First, I just would pray for the word we heard from Lewis, that our great aim would be your glory. Even this Sunday, Lord, even this day, may your glory always be uppermost in our affections. We also pray, Lord, for our leadership outside of the pulpit, Lord, that credibility would be established outside of the pulpit, that we would live before you and not just perform, Lord, or treat the pulpit in a wrong way. Help us to be men as said of Ezra, that he devoted himself to the study of the word and to do it and then to teach it. May we be doers of the word and not forget what we looked at when we look in the mirror of your word, but be changed by it.
And Lord, we know also that a lot of our impact is going to happen after we're gone. And it may come through our children or children in our churches. And I just pray you would give us a vision for raising up a new generation of investing in not just those who are ready for leadership development now, but for those who are new Christians, Lord, that you would just give us a vision for your gospel to go forward in generations to come. So to do that, Lord, we need to crucify ourselves and our agendas and our egos and be thinking about the needs of others and the needs of future generations. And so grant us much grace in all of these ways. And I do pray for the work of the gospel in the Twin Cities, Lord, as the seed of the gospel is planted, that it would bear fruit. Thank you for these brothers who are here. Again, we pray for their great faithfulness and that they will continue into the great work to which you called us. And we thank you that we have the privilege of doing what we're doing. And we want to proclaim Christ until we see Christ. And I pray you would grant us grace until that day. In Jesus name. Amen.