Changing Lives Through Preaching and Worship

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The question every preacher has to ask himself is, "Is this the best I can give?" If the answer is yes, that is all we can do.
—Gardner C. Taylor

As a young man, I recoiled from the idea of being a preacher. I wanted to go to law school and become a criminal lawyer. My boyhood friends in Louisiana tried to discourage me from that idea; at that time no black person had ever been admitted to the Louisiana bar, and my well-meaning friends asked me where I was going to practice law—in the middle of the Mississippi River?

In my senior year of college, I was admitted to the University of Michigan Law School. But before I left, I had a fearful automobile accident; it touched me at the very center of my being, and through that experience I heard the Lord's call to the ministry. I felt both an enormous relief and a great embarrassment—for several years.

So I did not start off with any great confidence or sense of appreciation and awe about being a preacher. I wasn't sure it was a worthwhile thing for a young, healthy, thoughtful man to do. Even when I came to Concord Baptist at thirty years old, I still had some of that in me.

While I'm a better preacher than I was thirty years ago, I'm not as good a preacher as I want to be. After many sermons I still think, I didn't get at it the way I should have. Now and then I get a wonderful sense of having been delivered fully through a sermon, but it doesn't last long, and by Tuesday or Wednesday that sermon begins to look awfully wooden and stale.

...

I think of a sermon as a journey, a trip I want to make. I want to know where I'm starting, how to get there, and where I'll end up. Getting an idea is the beginning of that journey.

I rarely know what I'm going to preach about ...

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