Welcome back to the Aspastor John podcast. This podcast launched nine years ago yesterday

on John Piper's 67th birthday. Amazing. I'm so grateful to God for his sustaining grace over

these nine years. Someone recently alerted me to the fact that I have now been the host

of this podcast for exactly 20% of my life. Amazing. The years have flown by. Pastor John

is no longer 67. He's now 76 as of yesterday and still at it to celebrate his birthday.

We look back on his life today through the lens of a question when we get a lot, should

I become a preacher? It's a question we get from many men who are thinking about vocation,

calling and whether ministry is the path laid out for them. And in making such a big decision,

many factors must be weighed in. Of course, a true in Pastor John's case as well. He shared the

story of his path into the pulpit in a new series of preaching videos we released on YouTube.

Those videos were filmed back when Pastor John was 71 years old. The videos though are now

online and you can find them all on YouTube. Just go there and search for the preaching class.

You'll find a playlist comprised of 31 videos. But today I want to feature the audio from one

of the early episodes in that series, a lecture lecture number one titled The Making of a Preacher.

It gets at this question, should I become a preacher? Here's Pastor John's story.

The longer I live, and I'm age 71 right now, the longer I live and think about ministry, the more I

believe in the power and the preciousness and the necessity of preaching in the life of the church,

some of you are watching this maybe age 40, 50, as a businessman, wondering if you should

become a preacher. Others of you might be 15 years old, others in school, in college or seminary,

and what I thought might be helpful to do immediately in this series on preaching is to tell

my story. You might call it the making of a preacher because it's a story of quite significant

improbabilities and you may feel that way about yourself. Let me give you the short version

...