This is the on preaching podcast with H.B. Charles Jr.

The podcast dedicated to helping you preach faithfully, clearly, and better.

Good day and thanks for listening to the podcast.

In this episode, I want to talk to you about preparing to preach.

A few years ago, I was in a conversation with a young man who had joined our church

and he discussed his desire to preach and his concern that in the last

church he served in in another city he was not given many opportunities to preach i asked him

why he felt like he was not used to preach. He gave me various reasons. His particular explanation for what

his former pastor would say is that he did not prepare. And so I began to ask him preparation-related

questions and determined that his former pastor was right. He was eager to preach,

determined to preach, passionate about preaching, but had no desire whatsoever to prepare himself

to preach. I finished the conversation and tried to move on with my day, but I kept going back to

that conversation with that young man and was not able to shake that conversation until this

sentence came to mind that I was able to jot down and process later on. The sentence is simply this.

A desire to preach without a discipline to study is a desire to perform.

A passion to preach without an accompanying desire, passion,

diligence in study is just a desire to perform.

Preaching is not performance. Preaching is proclaiming the message of God to the people of God

from the word of God and it requires diligent preparation.

This is all the more true in as much as I believe faithful preaching is expositional preaching.

Expositional preaching is that preaching that explains what the text means by what it says,

exhorting the hearer to trust and obey the God intended meaning and message of the text. To say it again, the heart of exposition

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