The Sermon He Could Not Preach to Himself

He did it well. That is not false modesty, it is a professional assessment.

He did not over-talk. He read the passage without performing it. He said the widow's name four times and got it right every time, and he told the story about the shed and the wrong-sized door, and the whole room laughed the way a room laughs at a funeral, which is like water finding a crack. He said the true things about the resurrection and he said them plainly and he did not use the word journey once.

He was good at his job on Friday, and the man in the box had been his friend for eleven years.

Then he got in the car.

Twenty six minutes home. Somewhere around minute nine it occurred to him that he had just spent an hour handing out something he could not get one crumb of into himself, and that this has been true for a while now, and that he does not know when it started.

He is not in crisis. That is what makes it hard to talk about. He prays. He gets up early. He is not having a spectacular collapse that would at least be legible to somebody. He is a man who says true sentences all week and drives home with none of them, and the gap between the pulpit and the driveway has been widening for about two years.

At the light on the edge of town he said out loud, to nobody: I would like somebody to say it to me.

Sit in the car a minute longer. Nobody here needs you to be the minister.

The mercies are on a daily delivery

Start where Jeremiah started, which was in the middle of the worst thing he had ever seen.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22

People quote that on a mug. It was written in a ruin, by a man looking at a destroyed city, in a book that is literally called weeping. Two verses earlier he says his soul is bowed down within him. The line about mercies being new every morning is not the observation of a cheerful man. It is what somebody says while he is still sitting in it.

Which is the first thing to hand you: this verse was not written to be preached from a platform. It was written by a man in your seat.

So take it as it stands in the car. You are inside a supply that renews on a daily basis and cannot be exhausted by a Friday. Lamentations 3:22 says His mercies never come to an end, and the Spirit who inspired a grieving man to write that down did not intend it to be for everybody except the one holding the microphone.

New every morning is not a poetic flourish either. It is a delivery schedule. It means the thing you ran out of on Friday was never meant to be a reservoir you keep filled; it is a portion that arrives, and it arrives tomorrow whether or not you managed today.

The gap between the pulpit and the car

Now the widening gap, because that is the actual complaint and it deserves a straight answer.

There is a specific hazard in this work. Handling the Scriptures professionally for long enough will train a man to receive them with the part of his mind that is asking how it preaches. That is not hypocrisy and it is not a lack of love for the text. It is an occupational reflex, and it can quietly turn a means of grace into a raw material.

The result is a man who can say a true thing to four hundred people and cannot say it to one person in a car.

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 words on Friday is not a different Spirit from the one in the passenger seat at minute nine.

And here is the part nobody says to pastors. You were burying your friend. Eleven years. The reason the words would not go in is not primarily theological; it is that a man who is grieving cannot officiate at his own grief and receive at the same time. You were working. A man cannot be served a meal while he is carrying the tray.

You have not been failing at this for two years. You have been doing a job that requires you to be the one talking, at exactly the times in your life when you most needed to be the one listening. Nothing written anywhere calls that a failure, and the Spirit has not held those two years against you.

Who ministers to the minister

Here is the small practical thing, and it is not a program.

God has never made the shepherd feed himself. Every image Scripture uses puts the pastor inside the flock rather than outside it, and there is not one verse anywhere that exempts a minister from being ministered to.

Which means the way through is not a better devotional discipline. It is a person. Somebody who is allowed to say a true thing to you in the plain voice you use on other people, without you having to grade it, and without you being on duty.

You are permitted to need that. That is written into the whole shape of the body of Christ, and the Spirit distributes gifts to a church precisely so that no one member has to run on his own supply.

Start smaller than you think. One person. Not a counselor, not necessarily, and not a conference. One person you can say the sentence to that you said at the light on the edge of town.