He Always Lives to Make Intercession

He can do the sermon in his sleep and that is not a boast, it is the diagnosis.

Assurance. He has preached it eleven or twelve times over the years and it is good. It is not glib, it deals with the objections honestly, and there is a woman in his congregation who told him after one of them that she had slept properly for the first time in a decade and he believes her.

The drive home is nine minutes.

Somewhere in those nine minutes, most times he has preached it, the whole thing detaches. Not intellectually. He does not stop believing it and he could argue it with anybody. It simply stops applying to him, in some way he cannot get at, and by the time he is on his own drive he is a man who has just handed out something he cannot eat.

He has never used the word hypocrite about himself out loud, and he has thought it, and he has thought about how self indulgent it is to think it, and then thought it again anyway.

He is fifty three. He has told nobody. There is a specific and unpleasant loneliness in being the person a whole church takes their assurance from, and privately having none that will stay put.

What he actually wants, if he is honest, is not a better argument. He has all the arguments. He wants somebody to be doing something about him that he is not doing himself.

Sit down here, because that is precisely what is written, and you have preached past it.

Somebody is praying for you right now

Here it is, and it is not a verse about your effort at all.

Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.Hebrews 7:25

Read the reason clause. He is able to save completely because He always lives to make intercession. The security is not grounded in the strength of the person being saved. It is grounded in the fact that Christ is not finished and has not moved on.

Always lives. Present, continuous, right now, while you are on a nine minute drive detaching from your own sermon.

You are being prayed for by somebody who does not stop. Hebrews 7:25 gives the reason for the completeness of the saving, and the Spirit put it in the present tense so that a man in a car at half past twelve on a Sunday would have something happening rather than something to remember.

That is the thing you said you wanted. Somebody doing something about you that you are not doing yourself.

Why it detaches on the drive

Now the mechanism, because it will help to know that this is a known hazard rather than a defect in you.

There is a specific occupational injury in this work. You handle the promises professionally, which means the part of your mind that engages them is the part asking how they land, where the objection comes, what the illustration should be. That is craft and it is not sin.

But the same reflex fires when the promise comes toward you, and the reflex turns a word addressed to you into a word you are assessing. You cannot receive something you are marking. Nothing written anywhere asked a preacher to grade a promise before taking it, and the Spirit is not the examiner in that car.

That is what happens in the nine minutes. Not a loss of faith. A trained reflex, doing what it was trained to do, at the worst possible moment.

You are not a fraud. Nothing written anywhere makes the ability to feel your own sermon the test of whether you belong to Christ, and the Spirit who gave you the material on Sunday morning is the same Spirit in the passenger seat at twenty past twelve.

What to do in the nine minutes

Here is the practical part and it is small.

Do not review the sermon. That is the reflex and it will run automatically unless something else is put in the space.

Instead, say one sentence out loud in the car, and make it about Him rather than about you or about the message. He always lives to make intercession for me. Say it in the plainest voice you own, the one you use for directions rather than for a congregation.

The difference matters more than it sounds. Preaching voice engages the craft. Ordinary voice does not.

You have a right to receive what you handed out. Hebrews 7:25 names those who draw near to God through Him, with no clause exempting the man who preached it that morning, and the Spirit does not reclassify a minister as staff.

And find one person, outside your congregation, who is allowed to say a true thing to you without you grading it. That is not a program. It is one phone number and a standing arrangement, and most men in your position do not have it, and it is the single most common reason they end badly.

There is a reason this cannot be self supplied, and it is the same reason the sermon detaches. A man cannot both be the source of a word and its recipient at the same moment. Somebody else has to say it. That is not a weakness in the design of ministry, it is the design: Hebrews itself was written to a congregation and tells them to exhort one another daily, which is an instruction that only works if everybody in the room is sometimes on the receiving end, and the Spirit distributes what a church needs across a church for exactly that reason.