By Robert C. Pitman
Preparing for the preaching event involves personal spiritual preparation. The preacher prepares himself. He must be prepared spiritually by meeting certain prerequisites and by developing and maintaining disciplines. He strives for mental preparation, which involves a commitment to biblical exegesis instead of personal eisegesis. The preacher must also be prepared logistically. The study area in which sermons are prepared is important in successful sermon preparation.
This article examines the spiritual preparation for preaching and sets forth strategies by which they can be incorporated into the life of a messenger of God.
Advertisement
The preacher in the pulpit of a local church should be a genuine man of God, meeting certain spiritual qualifications. First, he must possess genuine salvation. While an unsaved man may preach from a pulpit, his words will ring hollow; and his message will be nothing more than religious verbiage. Frank Pollard believed that the man who dares to stand in a pulpit to declare the Word of God must have experienced the God about Whom he preaches: "An unsaved preacher is an armless person teaching the art of pitching a baseball. It is a bankrupt person teaching economics and investment. It is an alcoholic lecturing on abstinence. It is a guide showing people things he has never seen, taking them to places he has never been."1
Second, God must have called the preacher to preach. Gilbert Guffin observed the necessity of the divine call:
Of vital importance to a comprehensive preparation for the ministry is the fact that it shall have a deep and abiding sense of its divine call. That ministry which has not a profound assurance of the divine urge within it is doomed in the course of time to lose its sense of urgency and possibly to come to failure. When God's prophets speak and labor under an undoubted conviction of their heaven-given commission to speak His message in His Name, they will be indomitable and their message commanding and dynamic.2
Without a direct call from God to preach, the man who fills the pulpit will feel inadequate and be inadequate. When pressures come or opposition arises, the uncalled man tends to take personal offense and leave the service of God. Jerry Vines wrote about the importance of a clear call from God:
Every preacher must have certainty about his call, a confidence that will make him willing and able to pay the price of hard work. Your perspective about your call to preach largely determines how you approach the pulpit. If you are going to be effective as a preacher of the gospel, you must understand that you have a prophet's call. Preach with an awesome sense that God is preaching through you.3
The preparation of the preacher includes developing and maintaining certain spiritual disciplines in his life. First, he must pray. Prayer, the lifeline that exists between the preacher and God, enables the preacher to have a prophetic word. In the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, prayer was a vital part of the spiritual life of great men of God. Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, Peter, and even Jesus made prayer the focus of their life. If these men recognized the importance of prayer, the modern preacher must also come to that recognition. James Stewart codified the reason the preacher must be a man of prayer: "The basic reason why a minister must pray is not because he is a minister (that would savor of official piety, always an odious thing), but because he is a poor, needy creature dependent on God's grace."4