Preaching to the Pastor

I'm taking Advanced Preaching this semester, and I'm finding more to love and more to hate about preparing sermons. One of the biggest things I love is doing the background work, and digging up new information, making new connections across Scripture, and seeing how God worked in the Bible and the possibilities of how He can still work today.

Then comes the application. Not that I hate discovering how God's truth back then still works out for us today, but I hate what that invariably means for me: change.

Here's the dealio: I'm working on a sermon for class, and it's from Exodus 34, where Moses prays to God after God promised to restore His covenant when Israel had broken it. What I'm struck with, though, is how different this little prayer is from my own prayer life. Basically, I suck at praying, and that's unacceptable.

Sure, I like praying to God. I'm just undisciplined and spend most of the time trying to figure out what to pray. I also think that people unwittingly do others a disservice when they describe prayer as "just talking to God." That may be less intimidating to the neophytes, but we should really work harder at training prayer warriors. In my experience, I've found very few people who can do more than thank God for the day, and for being who He is.

Here's my point. It's time for me and thee to really start looking to pray like the men and women of God in the Bible. Instead of just thanking God for who He is, let's find out exactly who He is in the Bible and in our current lives and thank and praise Him for specific things, ask Him for things like "going in our midst," and even (gasp!) confessing specific instances of our sinfulness, and repenting of it.



Yikes! Who knows what may happen after all this? It boggles the mind.