Rick Reed, The Heart of the Preacher: Preparing Your Soul to Proclaim the Word. Lexham Press, 2019. 160 pages.
I love preaching.
It’s genuinely a privilege to open up God’s Word and teach it to his people. It’s a privilege to proclaim the gospel to those who don’t know it. I’m truly blessed to be able to work for a church that sets aside a large part of my work week to prepare for that task. Translating, exegeting, applying, language-crafting—most weeks, I relish every part of the preaching task.
But preaching is also hard work. In seminary, my preaching professor warned us repeatedly, “Sunday is always coming.” Especially for young preachers still gaining their pulpit legs, Sunday can be full of devilish attacks aiming to discourage you from trusting God’s Word even as you preach it.
These attacks may come through small things, like when I had to preach with construction level drilling on the other side of a wall or when I couldn’t take my eyes off the guy nodding off in the front row. More often it has to do with the fear of man that rears up when I’m about to preach a passage that directly addresses
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