About a year ago, I was meditating on the annunciation of John the Baptist’s birth, how it came at the time of burning of incense (prayer), and how in Revelation, the moment when it is revealed that Jesus is worthy to open the scroll ends with a description of the golden bowls of incense at the altar in Heaven. And the incense is the prayers of the saints. There was something deep about preaching there: John is the great preacher announcing Jesus, and the passage in Revelation (Chapter 5) is the core of the faith: Jesus is worthy of the honor, power, and glory bestowed on Him by the Father. I had been really seeking the Lord about preaching, and what kept coming through in some reading (E.M. Bounds particularly) was that preaching needs to be bathed in prayer. It needs to be more prayer than study, actually.
Let me share how things have gone since then. I do not think my preaching is “better.” But I think it has more force, or perhaps I am bolder. At any rate, some things kept coming out of the idea that I should give my preaching over to prayer—to praying about what Scriptures to preach, what to say, etc.
The first thing came when I started listening to some whining about preaching in French, how people could not follow the sermon, etc. So I laid off. But then the Africans started wondering why they were not able to really be part of the service. So I thought, I just have to keep on. But I was frustrated with how it broke things up for me, how when I have to stop to translate, I lose flow. This is the sick side of me. I like to tell stories in preaching, and it is hard for me to translate my crazy anecdotes into French. So I was partially ok with laying off preaching in French, because I felt more comfortable doing it in English, letting it flow how I wanted to, etc. What a chump. It took me a while to say, “I need to pray about this.” I did, and got the answer: “Prepare the sermon in French first.”
Ok, great. Then one day in our Monday prayers at Maggie’s house, I was just sitting there enjoying the prayer time, the voices sharing with each other, with God, when He broke in: “Prepare the sermon on your knees.” I knew that I had been praying over my sermons, and letting prayer lead it all, and I knew this was not a metaphorical way of talking. This was literal. I was supposed to prepare the sermon not only by prayer, but on my knees.
Not long after this, when I had not shared this with many people, and not yet Jessica, Jessica got me a prayer kneeler. I had mentioned that I wanted one, but not why (and when I mentioned it I had no specific reason why, just that I like to pray). I used to think I would put the prayer kneeler upstairs when I moved the boys room downstairs. But then I thought the problem with the boys being upstairs was all their toys were up there, and they never really played with much. I did not want prayer to be an after thought. So now the prayer kneeler kind of rolls around the living room, ending up here and there. And the sermon gets done there.
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