Preaching for the First Time

Last Thursday around noon I got a voicemail from one of the elders of my church wanting to know if I could preach on Sunday. My initial response was to say no - thinking that I just wouldn't have time to prepare knowing that I would be working at the shelter that night, giving me only Friday afternoon and Saturday to prepare ... and oh by the way my wife would be working both of those afternoons. Speaking of my lovely wife, when I mentioned the message to her, she promptly encourages me to say yes. After all, I had just spent a couple of weeks on a rather large paper exegeting a passage from Mark, and I already had created a sermon outline for the passage. After a small amount of thought, I decided to accept the offer.

I went through the process of revamping my paper into something I could preach on, and with the limited amount of time I had I was getting a little nervous about not having some quiet time away from the apartment to practice the actual delivery. Any attempts I made in the apartment were short lived and pretty much non-productive - it just felt as if I were reading everything and it didn't feel at all natural. Truth be told - I've never done much "practicing" for any "public" speaking I've done in the past ... I basically just work it out in my head and then go with it. But I knew this wasn't something that I could "just go with." So I got up early Sunday morning and headed to church to practice. My hope was to go through it twice before anyone else showed up; instead I went through it once and felt pretty good about it, so I decided to leave it at that.

When the time came in the service to get up and preach, it all came pretty easy. I went out on Saturday and bought a new camcorder so I could record it and review it later ... as well as share with all the folks back home. Surprisingly, I actually didn't even think about it being on - which I guess was a good thing. I also thought I would be a lot more nervous, but I guess after spending lots and lots of hours standing in front of classroom teaching, it just came naturally.

It wasn't a perfect presentation. Looking back there were things I wish I would have said differently. There are things I wanted to include but forgot. I would have liked to been able to add a little more creativity to the presentation, but with the limited time I just needed to get something presentable. All in all, the Lord was very gracious to me in all of this. Things could have gone much worse ... which could have led me back to the business world forsaking this whole Venture!

If you'd like to see the video, drop me an e-mail and I'll send you a link. Once you're on the list, you'll be able to see all future sermons that I'm able to record.

Thanks to everyone for all your prayers! The level of comfort I felt through this whole process was evident of the grace that came from your prayers!