I just preached my 1,635th sermon. Actually, I have no idea how many sermons I’ve actually preached, but that’s a pretty good guess based on how long I’ve been preaching and and how many sermons I preach each year.
Anything one does that many times can become routine. It can be easy to lose the wonder and fearfulness of standing behind a pulpit and proclaiming God’s word to people — or, for that matter, of sitting in a pew and listening to sermon after sermon.
That’s why I’m grateful for the example of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
Lloyd-Jones left behind over 4,000 recorded sermons. He preached longer and more often, and more skillfully, than I have. If anyone could have allowed preaching to become routine, it would be Lloyd-Jones.
On Friday evening, March 1, 1968, at the age of sixty-eight, Martyn Lloyd-Jones entered his pulpit at Westminster Chapel, London, to preach on the Epistle to the Romans. His message was the 372nd in a series he had started over ten years earlier.
His text that evening was Romans 14:17: “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”
Lloyd-Jones made it all the way to “peace,” and planned to cover “joy in the Holy Spirit” in his next sermon.
He never did. Before he could return to the pulpit, he was diagnosed with a condition that led to surgery. Two months later, he decided to retire. He never finished preaching through the verse.
He later told a group of preachers that God stopped him because he didn’t know enough about joy in the Spirit to speak about it.
Had Lloyd-Jones not become ill, he could have easily preached his 373rd message and nobody would have faulted him. But he saw God’s mercy in his illness: God prevented him from preaching beyond his experience.
Behavioralists talk about hedonic adaptation. It describes how we return to a baseline level of happiness despite all the good and bad things that happen to us. This can be good: when we suffer a tragedy, we tend to recover over time. But it’s also a challenge: we can easily take incredible blessings — the gift of a husband or wife, the blessing of salvation, or the privilege of preaching or hearing God’s word — for granted after a time. We lose site of the wonder that should accompany the blessings God has given us.
When it comes to preaching, we should pray that we never lose sight of the privilege. No matter how many thousands of sermons we preach, or how many sermons we hear, we should pray that we don’t begin to take things for granted. We should approach the sermon with holy awe each time, and beg God that it never becomes routine.
Lloyd-Jones didn’t take preaching for granted, even after preaching thousands of sermons. He still didn’t feel ready to preach a text that exceeded his experience.
I pray for the same sense of holy fear as I approach the pulpit, and for those who hear. Lord, help me not to take this lightly. Give me a sense of holy fear as I preach your word. Help us as a people to tremble at your word. Help us to never see this as just another sermon. I pray that the preaching and hearing of God’s word never becomes routine.