I am richly blessed as a pastor. I just got back from having breakfast with one of the men in the church and it was as much about his desire to encourage me as it was about my desire to impart some blessing to him. It was a great time. That notwithstanding there are days... my but there are days when I wonder about it. I don't question my call, I'm past that for now.
Mondays are usually the worst days of the week for me. I remember Joe Stowell (I think) saying that pastors suffer from Post-adrenaline-depression on Monday's and then citing a few studies to back it up. I think he's right. Sunday night I'm usually bushed. Monday I'm usually Blue and by Tuesday I'm feeling the pressure of next Sunday not to mention this Wednesday night and the scheduled and unscheduled visits and discipleship times.

One of the more difficult aspects of Pastoral ministry for me is trying to determine what to weigh my success or failure in the ministry against. What exactly is my yardstick?
Right on time here comes Dan Phillips With a most excellent series: The hardest aspect of pastoral ministry Addressing the exact problem.

1. (part one)

Day two of the MBI pastor's conference started out with a bang. Dr. Albert Mohler president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary delivered a bang up message on why we preach. Here are my scrambling notes. They may not be complete or coherent but they are what they are. I'm going to try and separate most of the sessions because it's just too much to put them all in one post. Plus I can spread them out a bit better that way :-)

Deuteronomy 4 serves as the backdrop for our preaching so go read it.
Luke 16 the sufficiency of the word of God.
Preaching and the big story Luke 24 "...didn't or hearts burn within us..."

This whole business of preaching is something that we should understand on a Tuesday morning but there is a crisis of preaching in the evangelical church. How likely are you to hear an explicitly evangelical exposition of the word of God in the pulpit? Unfortunately there are people urging pastors to do anything other than the exposition of the scriptures from the pulpit. People with "itching ears" that don't want to hear the Bible being taught - but will take almost anything else in it's place.

The exposition of the scriptures is easy,you have to be clever to mess it up.

Nehemiah 8 stands as a great example of exegetical preaching. Verse 8 (Neh 8:8) is a short course in homiletics: READ and EXPLAIN.
It's like rinse, lather and repeat on the shampoo bottle. It's simple. There's nothing missing.

But what does it take? Let's look at the guy doing the preaching:
1. EDUCATION

Look at Ezra 7:11 "...learned in the words of the commandments..." he didn't just stand up and open his mouth,

2. PREPARATION

Greetings PBB fanatics,
I just (Thu, 08/07/2008 - 5:26pm) found on my Hard drive what may be a "long lost" volume!
"Prayer and Preaching" by Karl Barth
This book is perhaps best summarized by a quote from James Stewart in the preface,

This little book on Prayer and Preaching demonstrates wonderfully Barth's characteristic union of simplicity and profundity. Certainly in these pages there is a Word from the Lord for the revitalizing of the Church.

tcblack

PS. This is the first of the new PBB Alert Newsletters which you can sign up for by clicking subscriptions above.

The Elements of Preaching author: Warren Wiersbe David Wiersbe rating: asin: 0842307575 binding: Mass Market Paperback list price: $6.99 USD amazon price: $6.99 USD

I found this little gem nestled in the middle of my Logos Library. Quite some time ago one my my accidental mentors, John Koessler told a classroom full of future pastors to read at least one preaching book every year. I really need to do that more often.
Having found this one, I took it's format as a sort of modified devotional and powered through it in just a few weeks. I could have read it in one afternoon but I found it pithy enough to cause

I woke up after a very long sleep. I had just finished doing the 30 Hour Famine with our youth the day before and had gone to bed early on Saturday with full hope of a night's restful sleep. I felt rested and all was well. In the kitchen I set the coffee pot to go and walked into my office to boot up my computer. I still hadn't printed my sermon out - even though it was ready a few days prior. After listening to the familiar beep and whine of the fans signaling a normal boot had begun I walked back into the kitchen and poured my hot coffee. It was time to pray, read my Bible and print my sermon. Back to the office I returned and I realized I had made a dreadful mistake.
Four days earlier I had set up the computer to do a full file system and disk surface check using chkdsk /v /r. My run for coffee had made me miss the prompt to skip the check. My computer would be tied up for the next four hours before I could ever print. My sermon would not be printed. It's the stuff of nightmares but I was already awake.

I'm a sermon series kind of guy. I like to preach sermon series and I
like to listen and learn from a series. I don't normally function well