Pastor, here is the danger: You have been uniquely entrusted with a high and holy calling in a local church, and instead of spending and being spent, throwing yourself into the task with all of your might, you are wasting time being jealous of someone else’s charge and gifts. Faithful shepherding means trusting God with your task rather than trying to be God. It is doubtful that before Christ on the last day you will be wishing you would have had someone else’s sheep for which to give an account as the one charged with watching over their souls (Hebrews 13:17).

Preacher, you can preach better than John MacArthur, John Piper, David Platt, and H.B. Charles. I wonder if that surprises you? It should not. You can preach better to your flock than any of those world-renowned expositional preachers. If you played their sermons at your church by way of video or hologram, it would be far less effective than the biblically faithful, Christ-centered sermons you preach to your congregation. If this were not true, we should all just get recordings of preachers like D. Martyn Lloyd Jones or Adrian Rogers and sit out with the congregation on Sunday mornings.

You may not have the gifting of historic pulpit legends past and present, but you do have the same Word of God, gospel of Christ, and calling as a shepherd of Jesus Christ. You also have something they do not have: the specific flock entrusted to you by Jesus to shepherd with His Word.

Feed the Sheep

John Broadus was the first to teach preaching at Southern Seminary where I now have the privilege to do the same. Consider the personal way Broadus describes the preaching moment at the beginning of his classic, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons:

When a man who is apt in teaching, whose soul is on fire with the truth which he trusts has saved him and hopes will save others, speaks to his fellow-men, face to face, eye to eye, and electric sympathies flash to and fro between him and his hearers, till they lift each other up, higher and higher, into the intensest thought, and the most impassioned emotion—higher and yet higher, till they are borne as on chariots of fire above the world,—there is a power to move men, to influence character, life, destiny, such as no printed page can ever possess.[1]

Read More