I'm preaching through Mark's gospel, and I love it. (Though whatever I'm preaching through tends, at the moment, to be my favorite part of the Bible.) But I was thinking about what hard work it is — the research, the meditating on the text, the conceptualizing of what God is trying to say to me and my people through this particular text — all this is very hard and tiring work. I love it, but it's draining. And I haven't even started the physical preparation of preaching through the sermon (out loud) three or four times. I'll do that late Saturday night and very early Sunday morning.
But for this blog what came to mind is how many pastors are unwilling to invest all that hard work into their preaching. So they either buy their sermons (or download somebody else's work from the internet), or they do some cursory work on their text but find very little new to say. Either way, they are cheating themselves and their people. And, after a while, if you have little new to say, you have to move on to another congregation, because people quickly tire of "the same old thing" every Sunday.
Now, in truth, all we do have is "the same old story" every Sunday; but the Bible is such a rich texture of different presentations of that gospel that we have an almost infinite storehouse from which to draw. It's the same old story, but we have so many ways to tell it. So, for the pastor who is willing to do the hard work, preaching can be fresh each Sunday — for him and for his people. And that's been what has kept me going for over 30 years in the same pulpit!
