By God’s great grace, I’ve recently been entrusted with the privilege of preaching God’s Word regularly to His people in a wonderful Sunday School class of dear saints at Grace Community Church. As I begin the process of repeated study, preparation, and proclamation, everything in me desires to honor the Lord and to truly benefit His people. Even as I’ve been preparing for this week’s message, the sanctifying effect of studying God’s Word has been evident, as He has seen fit to amaze me again and again by the richness of His revealed truth.

Thinking on these things, I was reminded of a clip from a Q&A with John Piper, in which someone asks him where and how he learned to preach. The response he gives is something that I think (a) everyone currently in a regular preaching ministry or (b) everyone who aspires to that place of service should listen to intently. A transcript of the relevant portion (1:54 to 3:03) is below.

“I think the way I became a preacher was by being passionately thrilled by what I was seeing in the Bible in seminary. Passionately thrilled! When Philippians began to open to me, Galatians opened to me, Romans opened to me, the Sermon on the Mount opened to me in classes on exegesis—not homiletics but exegesis—everything in me was feeling, ‘I want to say this to somebody! I want to find a way to say this! Because this is awesome! This is incredible!’

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A good friend of mine recently asked me what I think of pastors using illustrations from movies in their sermons. My friend uses them because he thinks they are helpful in relating to a culture that increasingly has their world view formed through entertainment. In that sense I guess using an illustration from the cinema is a form of condesencion—God uses language to speak to us, we use stories from movies to speak to post-post-moderns.

But I don’t buy it. In my experience, illustrations sparked by the golden screen (or Netflix, or what have you) generally fail, and are almost always unhelpful. Here are seven reasons why:

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I had only been a Christian for a few years when a friend of mine told me that he was leaving our church for the Episcopal Church. His reasoning was simple: “they elevate the Eucharist to the center of the worship, while Protestant churches elevate preaching.” 

He went on: “Throughout church history, Christians have worshiped the body and blood of Jesus, not the words of men as they talk about the Bible.”

The charge kind of surprised me, and as a somewhat new believer I didn’t know how to respond. It actually provoked me to start reading church history books, where I discovered (lo and behold) that preaching was actually an important part of the early church worship, and not an invention of the enlightenment.

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This weekend I was installed as the new teaching pastor at Immanuel Bible Church in Springfield, VA. For my installation service, I asked Michael Easley to preach, because he has pastored this church faithfully for over a decade, before he left for Moody (he now pastors in Tennessee).

The night before my installation service, I met with Michael. He and his wife prayed for me and my wife, and Michael gave me a plaque with two quotes he said have shaped his preaching ministry. The first is simple: “The man IS the message.”

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