God, Your Word & Not Mine

I am blessed to be able to preach tomorrow at my church, Living Hope!  I have a love/hate relationship with preaching.  On one hand I love it!  I love digging into God’s word and finding those connecting points between God’s word and our lives today.  I love spending time in prayer asking God what he wants to communicate through this particular passage.  I love the art of sermon writing, as it is definitely an art form.  It is an art form that can take years and years to master (if it can ever be mastered), so there are always ways to improve and find better and clearer ways to communicate God’s word – which means a wonderful challenge each and every time.  I love being able to be a part of opening God’s word up to people in a new and different way that they may not have thought of before.

On the other hand, it is also one of the hardest parts of my job.  It can be very difficult to try to put God’s word into a form that is clear and concise.  One small passage can have lots of possible sermon themes in it and it can be hard to focus on just one without getting distracted by all the other options.  There are other times when I feel the message of a passage so deeply because of past experience or how God is working my life, that I just can’t find the words to actually communicate what my heart wants to say about the passage.  Preaching can also be like taking a project that is very personal and that you have poured your heart and soul into and putting it out there for the world to see (and comment on).  Oftentimes, no matter how good the sermon may be, I feel like what I am going to say does not do justice to God’s word at all.  God’s word is just so amazing, alive and wonderful that it is impossible to duplicate that in a sermon. 

Keeping both sides of my love/hate relationship with preaching in mind, I spend a lot of time in prayer.  I am praying before, after, and sometimes even during the sermon.  On Sunday mornings, this prayer is always the same, every time I preach.  “God, Your word and not mine.  If there is anything that is said during this service that is not of you, please let it fall from our hearts and minds so that only your word remains.  May it only be your word that is written on our hearts, and may we be truly transformed by it.”

My prayer for every pastor and every church this Sunday is that God would work in and through the sermon and the service, that God’s word would be written on people’s hearts, and that our lives may be transformed by Him.

Don’t have a church to worship with?  Come and join us!  Living Hope Evangelical Church meets for worship at Brownell Middle School (260 Chalfonte, GPF) on Sunday mornings at 10:30am.

God bless, Rev. Liz Arakelian, www.LivingHopeEC.org