I’ve preached long enough to know that there is a real temptation in preaching.
One of the great dangers of preaching is that we focus so much on the style and delivery of our sermons that we forget about the people sitting in the pews. We forget that the sermon is meant to help, encourage, instruct, or rebuke in some way all those who are studying along with us as we present God’s Word.
That doesn’t mean we should never pay any attention to how we deliver a sermon. However, we do need to keep our priorities straight.
Whether or not our sermons have three alliterated points, a story, and a poem matters much less than if we are correctly communicating God’s Word to the people in the pews.
Perhaps we tend to spend far more time getting our sermon outline and PowerPoint just right than we do allowing God’s Word to sink down into our own hearts.
Maybe we sometimes struggle with remembering the people in the pew because we forgot the first person who needed to listen to the sermon - us.
There is a valuable lesson from Ezra for us as preachers and teachers of God’s Word.
For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the Law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel. (Ezra 7:10)
Notice the order of this passage:
Ezra prepared his heart to seek the Law of the Lord.
Then he did it.
Finally, he taught it.
Sometimes as preachers, we skip straight to teaching God’s Word before we have prepared our own hearts to seek it and do it ourselves. I know I have been guilty of this before.
How can we present God’s Word to the people in the pew and expect them to open their hearts to the truth if we have not done the same thing?
Donald Sunukjian defined the biblical preacher as saying, “Look at what God is saying…to us.”
As preachers, let’s remember the people in the pews by remembering ourselves first.