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The 5 Greatest Heart Challenges Preachers Face
Sunday is Always Coming
Nothing in preaching goes unchallenged. Some time ago, I saw a survey in which a group of pastors was asked, “What are your two or three biggest challenges in preaching?” One pastor’s answer struck me with particular force: “Not being discouraged after I preach.”1 Who of us doesn’t deal with this? It’s true: There is no neutral ground. So it is deeply important that we preachers purpose to let the gospel function in and on the labor of our preaching.
There are very real and very persistent heart challenges in preaching. We should identify and name them. We shouldn’t be content to let things remain fuzzy or vague. We need clarity and definition.
Travail and dying must happen every week. Sundays are relentless. Like waves on a beach, they just keep coming and coming and coming. It’s amazing what can go on inside of us—emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually—as we prepare to deliver God’s word to God’s people. That’s typically where the real travail and dying take place. It’s not that there are no challenges when we are actually preaching, but the vast majority of the fight is when we’re alone in our studies. I want to identify and name five common heart challenges for preachers and help us get clarity on them. Along the way, I want to clearly and carefully bring the gospel to bear on these realities of the heart in order to help the gospel function in and on our preaching.
The Heart of Preaching
Mike Bullmore
Mike Bullmore’s The Heart of Preaching explores the functional centrality of the gospel in the life of a preacher, helping pastors shape their character, content, and mindset toward a gospel-centered life.
1. Laziness Versus Happy Labor
Sometime during seminary, I heard a guest speaker say, “Pastoral ministry is a place where lazy men can hide.” I saw and felt the truth of that. It sobered me. It continues to sober me.
In the face of the temptation to laziness, there must be a conscious purpose to work, and to work hard. There needs to be a kind of Pauline purposefulness. The apostle Paul says, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).
Theologian Jay Adams once made this very stark assessment:
I have had the opportunity to hear much preaching over the last few years, some very good, some mediocre, most very bad. What is the problem with preaching? There is no one problem, of course . . . but if there is one thing that stands out most, perhaps it is the problem I mention today.
What I am about to say may not strike you as being as specific as other things I have written, yet I believe it is at the bottom of a number of other difficulties. My point is that good preaching demands hard work. From listening to sermons and from talking to hundreds of preachers about preaching, I am convinced that the basic reason for poor preaching is the failure to spend adequate time and energy in preparation. Many preachers—perhaps most—simply don’t work long enough on their sermons.2
I’m reminded of two pieces of advice Paul gave to Timothy: (1) “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15); and (2) “Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Tim. 4:13–15). All these calls to work! Clearly, nobody simply drifts into excellence.
2. Self-Pity Versus Joy
To one degree or another, we’re all tempted to self-pity. Early in my preaching career, the relentlessness of Sundays was just starting to sink in. I would drive to the church on Saturday mornings to finish my sermon preparation, and I’d look out my car window and notice men doing what men do on Saturdays—things like playing ball with their sons or mowing the lawn. Mowing the lawn never looked so attractive. I found myself staring longingly. I’d pull up alongside a car and see a dad with his kids, and I’d imagine the most warm and affectionate scenario my mind could come up with. I’d start wishing I was in that place instead of going to do what I had to do. I could feel my heart moving toward self-pity.
More recently, it’s not so much self-pity over the work I have to do when everyone else has the day off that troubles me. It’s self-pity over the lack of understanding and appreciation of how hard I work. People just don’t realize how many expectations were on me throughout the week; they don’t realize how much work was involved in preparing my sermon. Poor me!
And then I read this passage from the book of Acts:
They beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus. (5:40–42)
I’m arguing from greater to lesser. Certainly if these early preachers could rejoice in the face of real persecution and real threats of death then I can rejoice despite the relatively small burden of preparing to preach. There ought to be a sense of privilege we feel in our labor, even a joy. If at some point joyfulness over your privilege to preach doesn’t kick in, then there’s likely some self-pity that needs to be addressed.
3. Manipulation of Scripture Versus Integrity
All preachers face the temptation to suit biblical texts to their own purposes. We want to make a text do something it was never intended to do. We want to get some pastoral work done—address some issue or accomplish some purpose. We’ve all experienced this. I don’t think I’ve ever prepared a sermon in which I didn’t face this particular temptation.
Listen to the great Welsh preacher D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones speaking to this crucial point:
I well remember the first time I heard a certain famous preacher on the radio. He told us that he was going to preach on “Turning the place of your crucifixion into a garden.” One wondered immediately as to the possible source of that theme. He soon told us that his text was to be found at the beginning of the eighteenth chapter of John’s Gospel where we read, “In the place where he was crucified there was a garden.” That was what the text said. But, you see, the sermon was on “turning” the place of your crucifixion into a garden. But there was nothing about that in the text. There was a garden there; the garden was there before the crucifixion. It was not the crucifixion that produced the garden. However, in order to give himself the opportunity of preaching a very sentimental sermon about how people suffering from illnesses could and should react to their trial, he did violence to his text. He told us that good people who took it in a beautiful spirit, and never grumbled and never complained, turned their place of crucifixion into a garden. We were then treated to a series of affecting sentimental stories of such people for about twenty-five minutes to half an hour. Now there is only one thing to say about that—that is just utter dishonesty; there is nothing else to say about it.3
In fact, in the same context, Lloyd-Jones uses a much stronger word to describe this practice—“prostitution.”
After a few other examples, Lloyd-Jones concludes:
We must be honest with our texts; and we must take them always in their context. That is an absolute rule. These other men do not observe that; they are not interested in that, they are always looking for “ideas.” They want a theme, an idea; and then they philosophise on that, giving expression to their own thoughts and moralisings. That is utterly to abuse the Word of God.4
I recognize that the situation to which Lloyd-Jones refers is a bit extreme, but the temptation is real and we all face it. We need to seriously consider the warning implied in 2 Corinthians 4:2: “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.”
However frequently we preach, there will always be a temptation to “tamper with God’s word.” We can read those words of Paul and think, “I don’t do that.” But we need to pause and ask ourselves this question: What does tampering with God’s word look like for me? How am I tempted?
4. Pride Versus “Contempt of Praise”
There is a particular form of pride—the desire for recognition, credit, and acknowledgment. This desire is remarkably strong and persistent for preachers. It doesn’t go away after we’ve preached for a while.
Usually, during our first year or so of preaching, we’re looking for feedback. We want to know how it’s landing and how we can improve. Of course, this heart issue is present and active from the beginning, but it doesn’t really kick in until after we’ve been preaching for a while. Then, suddenly, we find that we want to be recognized as responsible for the good change that’s happening in the church. If someone comes to faith or a marriage is restored, we like to think it’s because of our preaching. There’s a growing desire to be recognized by our people, our peers, and those we look up to.
This bluntly realistic assessment from the early church father John Chrysostom captures preaching in a nutshell:
It is impossible to acquire this power [of preaching] except by these two qualities: contempt of praise and the force of eloquence. If either is lacking, the one left is made useless through divorce from the other. If a preacher despises praise, yet does not produce the kind of teaching which is “with grace, seasoned with salt,” he is despised by the people and gets no advantage from his sublimity.5
Let me pause this quote for a moment and translate what Chrysostom has said into more familiar language. He means that it’s impossible to acquire power in preaching unless we have both humility and a preaching gift. Both are necessary. In other words, we might be the most humble guy in the world, but if we can’t preach there is no sense in just being humble in the pulpit.
Chrysostom then continues,
And if he manages this side of things [i.e., eloquence] perfectly well, but is a slave to the sound of applause, again an equal damage threatens both him and the people, because through his passion for praise he aims to speak more for the pleasure than the profit of his hearers.6
There’s the flip side: If we preach well but aren’t humble, we’re wasting our breath.
I’ve had a quote posted over my desk in my study for many years now: “Aspire to excellence without making praise for that excellence the goal of your aspiration.”7
Let me be clear: The desire for recognition and credit dies hard. We put it down one week and it rises back up the next. We learn from the Westminster Shorter Catechism that the chief end of man is to glorify God.8 Immediately following that it should say, “And the chief temptation of man is to glorify himself.” We will battle this until we die, but it’s a good and worthy fight.
5. Unbelief Versus Belief
This is the greatest heart challenge of all, and we will fight it until we die. We certainly can grow in our faith, but God will never bring us to a place where we no longer have to exercise any faith at all. One day we will walk by sight. Now we walk by faith. And we need to exercise that faith in both our sermon preparation and in the preaching itself.
First, we must exercise faith in our sermon preparation because we almost always come to a point where we face a wall, a roadblock. Depending on where we are in the week, we can be tempted to think, “I need to choose a different text,” or, “I wonder if so-and-so can preach this Sunday.” We might even be tempted to say to ourselves, “Why am I doing this?”
In these moments, we must push through by faith. We must exercise belief in particular convictions about God’s word. He has spoken, and he intends his word for the good of his people.
Furthermore, he has chosen to use the apparent foolishness of preaching in the life of his church, and he has commissioned us to stand and preach, promising to give us everything we need for the task. As we recite these truths to ourselves, as we believe what God has said, we battle unbelief with gospel weapons.
Second, we must exercise faith as we stand in the pulpit. We’ll regularly face the question “Is my preaching actually accomplishing anything?” There’s one passage I regularly call to mind to help me fight this particular battle against unbelief:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
(Isa. 55:10–11)
This is the clearest statement of the efficacy of God’s word in all of Scripture. What a great thing to remind ourselves as we are walking up to the pulpit: “My word . . . shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
What does belief look like? It looks like expectant prayer throughout your sermon preparation. Your entire preparation process should be an experience of unbroken communion with God. I’ve found some of the sweetest times of communion with God to happen in my study during sermon preparation. Then, as you walk up to the pulpit, your heart should be calling out to God, “Words of pow’r that can never fail: let their truth prevail over unbelief”9—especially your own.
Notes:
- From an informal survey of pastors in the Sovereign Grace Churches network, conducted in 2008.
- Jay E. Adams, “Editorial: Good Preaching Is Hard Work,” The Journal of Pastoral Practice 4, no. 2 (1980), 1..
- Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching & Preachers (Zondervan, 1997), 199–200. The sentence “In the place where he was crucified there was a garden” is actually found not in John 18 but in John 19:41 (KJV).
- Lloyd-Jones, Preaching & Preachers, 201
- John Chrysostom, “Temptations of the Teacher,” in Six Books on the Priesthood, trans. And intro. Graham Neville (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 128–29.
- Chrysostom, “Temptations of the Teacher,” 129.
- This is a statement I composed myself after I was inspired by something I read.
- See Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., Creeds, Confessions, & Catechisms: A Reader’s Edition (Crossway, 2022), 411.
- From the hymn “Speak, O Lord,” Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, 2005.
This article is adapted from The Heart of Preaching: The Functional Centrality of the Gospel in the Life and Work of the Preacher by Mike Bullmore.
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