All our days: a preacher's greatest loves

“Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15)

The reading: Lewis Allen, The Preacher’s Catechism, Q6 “All Our Days” (ch. 6)

Every preacher is a lover. We have big hearts, big dreams, and big desires. But the preacher’s greatest loves may be his greatest dangers. If we are going to immerse ourselves in this precarious business of preaching, we need to get clear, as soon as we can, why we’re doing it. Failure to do this will definitely risk failure in our work.

Later in the same chapter, Allen says: “Most of us are working the night shift.”

Allen has in mind the priests of Psalm 134 “who stand by night in the house of the Lord”. At that hour they were working “effectively as security guards and cleaners”, and the work was “unexciting, unseen, and unappreciated”. Most preaching is like that, he says. It’s “torchlight work, carried out in the often dim light of faith,” and the fruit comes “week in, week out, and decade upon decade.” The freedom is in what the pilgrims call out to those priests: “Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord!” When we preach for God’s glory, and not for our own enjoyment of the work or the thanks of the people, we don’t need applause or visible results to keep going. God “sees you and honors all your labors.”

Alongside it

• H. B. Charles Jr, On Preaching, ch. 30 “The Bottom Line of Christian Ministry”: “He is our target audience. And your ministry will not be rewarded unless you work with all your heart to be a God-pleaser, not a people-pleaser.”
• Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching, ch. 1 “Word and Witness”: “You may never hear the applause of the world or pastor a church of thousands, but you can be confident that a life of godliness combined with clear explanations of Scripture’s saving and sanctifying grace will engage the power of the Spirit for the glory of God.”
• Tim Keller, Preaching, ch. 7, under “A Subtext of Worship”: it “aims beyond information, beyond capturing the imagination, and even beyond behavior change to the goal of changing what our heart most sets its affections on.”

Why it matters
Allen isn’t only talking about the obviously bad loves. He also names the respectable ones: “the chance to impress with our learning and our skill in using words,” and “the study we put into our preparation, regardless of whether our preaching helps the listeners or not.” If a preacher’s joy depends on the work going well, it will run dry long before the work does.

For me
Some of my loves are good gifts. I want the delivery to be good, every time. I like systems, and getting the system right can quietly overtake the joy of walking with God. Then there’s the one that hides best. After church I ask, “Do you think they got it?”, and often that’s adulation in disguise. None of these is wrong in itself. Allen’s question is what’s left when they’re taken away: a flat Sunday, a quiet chat, a week when the craft doesn’t sing. I want people to enjoy God’s love unfiltered. The same goes for me, and any love that comes before his is a filter too.