A Missing Ingredient in Good Preaching

What made Billy Graham’s preaching effective? Grant Wacker’s answer to that question–in his very readable biography America’s Pastor–is multi-layered, but it’s his last point that got my attention.

The cumulative effect [of Graham’s preaching] left its mark. Visitors of all stripes, including those who self-consciously rejected Graham’s message, commented on his manifest sincerity. No one doubted that he believed everything he said, absolutely, without mental reservations. That trait recurred in uncounted reports.

And so did the appearance of utter effortlessness, like a professional athlete executing a play. Of course it was not effortless, but he made it look that way. Visitors did not feel that he was unprepared or did not know what to say or did not want to be there. In truth, before crusades began he prepared with days or weeks of physical exercise, study, and prayer. Graham acknowledged the tension of speaking to thousands of people, a tautness undoubtedly intensified by radio microphones and rolling television cameras transmitting every word and gesture to millions more. One crusade chairman said that before Graham went on, he carried “an inner and very finely controlled tension . . .a man under immense strain.” Yet when he entered the pulpit, his biographer William Martin aptly said, “fear departed and fire roared.”

One more ingredient, rarely noted but crucial, was simply old-fashioned enjoyment. Clearly the evangelist loved his work. He was comfortable in his own skin. How could he not be?

I wonder, brother preacher, if your people know that you enjoy your work? Maybe they know exactly what you feel about preaching; namely, that you are exhausted and the whole thing has become a relentless chore to you. Every pastor goes through Sundays and seasons where the burden seems heavy and the yoke anything but light. I know what it’s like to step into the pulpit not planning for a home run or a double off the wall, but just hoping that I might leg out an infield single. And yet, I hope there is still joy in the labor. And I hope my people can see it.

Does your church know that you are glad to be their pastor? Can they sense you like what you do? Are they aware (which probably comes through in being blissfully unaware of anything else) that you are comfortable being who you are? If you find old-fashioned enjoyment in preaching, you could still be a bad preacher–unfaithful, unbiblical, and all the rest. But without a genuine joy–at least more often than not–in the proclamation of God’s word, it will be hard to be a very good preacher over the long haul.

Could it be that simply being happy in being a pastor is one of the missing ingredients in your preaching ministry and in your pastoral work?