Transcript
If you're a pastor, you probably don't have detailed management of your schedule. If you're a preaching pastor, a lead pastor where your responsibility is to preach, you're probably not somebody managing your daily responsibilities. So you have to do that and what you have to do is carve out ample time that is untouchable to prepare to preach.
Guarding Your Preparation Time
That means you won't schedule appointments over that. It means you won't take phone calls over that. It means you won't plan family events over that. Unless there's a remarkable emergency, that is time that all of your staff, everybody around you knows is the time that you have dedicated to be prepared to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think one of the dark truths of preaching that's made so much of preaching in the modern church unhelpful and mediocre is lack of preparation. We're not investing the amount of time necessary to be ready to communicate this.
I'll be on a ministry weekend and I'll be on a Saturday leadership luncheon, and the preaching pastor will say, "I'm going to have to leave early. I got to get working on my sermon." My heart's crushed at that moment. I'm both sad and angry. I want to say to him don't bother because there's no way you're going to start on Saturday and develop the material and be familiar with the material enough that you'll be able to engage God's people in considering the wisdom and liberation and glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You just won't be able to.
So you have to determine from your first moment of pastor responsibility that you're going to be a guardian of the pulpit, that you're going to carve out the time that's needed for you so that when you hit Sunday, you are ready and excited about what you're going to communicate.
