I was struck by how much time Miller spent talking about character. Most books on pastoral leadership and church growth center on techniques, but it was refreshing to see him spend such a bulk of time on character. Without character, you won’t last in ministry. I also appreciated how by the time you are Miller’s age, in your mid-70′s, the things that used to matter don’t matter like they used to.

The other thing he emphasized was tenure, gutting it out when being a leader or pastor becomes difficult. The average pastor now stays at his church 18 months. This is one of the main reasons for a lack of effectiveness among pastors and churches. I am 3 and a half years into Revolution and we are more effective and healthy than we’ve ever been. I thought back to my 18 month mark and it was one of the hardest seasons of my leadership, but on the other side of that came a lot of vitality.

Here are a few things that jumped out, some of the best advice if it were:

• “People will endure anything in a church except an absence of vitality.”
• Not everyone seems to believe it, but at the center of this minor formula for success is tenure. So many of the letters in this book focus on the long haul and the power of sticking to one thing: tenure.
• Every call makes one statement: One preaches because one must.
• “Pastoral care is a world of unbearable pain. However high we lift our spirits in personal or public worship, it is good to remember that many in our congregations come and go from our worship with broken hearts. In some ways this is what is most wrong with public invitations. We ask all those who are shrinking back from life to come forward. But they are refugees from sociability. They want to hide; they do not want to come forward. They want to hide out, so pastors must go to their hiding places. We must come down from our soaring worship and agree to enter the world of unbearable hurt.”
• Churches that ignore their communities will not grow, and churches that will not globalize don’t matter much.
• When you can’t find Jesus, just play Jesus for someone else, and you’ll soon have all the Jesus your errant heart can hold.
• Theology only really matters when it is affecting and changing the culture.
• Read the Bible as though the faith depended upon it.
• Never ask your people to do anything you have never done and wouldn’t do. Never ask them to run a play you consider beneath your dignity.
• Visions should always be bigger than our life span.
• One of the things I wish I had learned earlier is that my sermons do not have to get better week by week. This would seem an easy thing to know. But we get caught in a trap for approval. We are so eager for our people to keep bragging us up, and so we work even harder, to keep getting better. This is a snare. Avoid it.
• Anytime you speak over people’s heads to exhibit your own brilliance, you injure the gospel.
• People will sooner or later guess by the powerless life you live that you’ve lost your openness with a holy God.
• Never go into the pulpit without a definite plan to change the world in some way. Preaching is to change.
• The apostle Paul was more famous for his trials than his successes, I suppose.

If you are a young church planter or leader, then this is a book that should move up your reading list.

• Part 1: What to Preach On
• Part 2: The Goal of Preaching
• Part 3: Calendar
• Part 4: Preach from Your Soul

For part 4 I want to talk about preaching from your own journey. Pastors often talk about if you should preach from your devotional life or keep that separate. Personally I’m not sure the answer to this question matters. As a pastor, you need to have a personal devotional time with Jesus each day. You need to be in his word, allowing it to soak your soul and speak into your idols and sin patterns. You need the gospel. If you haven’t read Joe Thorn’s book Note to Self, this is a book worth checking out on preaching the gospel to yourself.

For me, my devotional life is directly linked to my sermon prep. Each week, before diving into the commentaries, I spend hours meditating and praying through the passage I’m preaching on. Books I’m planning to preach through I use for my devotional time.

Because I plan our sermon calendar 12 – 18 months in advance, by the time I get up to preach a sermon, I’ve been thinking about the passage for over a year. My preaching is simply an overflow of that. This is one of the reasons I’m able to preach with very few notes. When I get up to preach, I have my big idea, main things I want to say, but the rest of what I say comes out of my study, prayer and thinking on a passage and topic.

This helps me to preach not because it is the weekend and I’m supposed to preach but because I have something to say.

One of the things that many pastors fail to do when it comes to their preaching is to plan well. I have talked to many pastors on a Tuesday or Wednesday, even Thursday and they have no idea what they are preaching on this weekend. I remember meeting with one church planter who told me, “I told my wife this morning, I have to think about what I’m preaching on for the next 2 weeks because Josh is going to ask me today.”

I remember a mentor telling me that “someone pays the price for the sermon. Either the church pays the price for having to listen to a pastor who is poorly prepared and unsure of what they are saying, or, the pastor pays the price by being prayed up and prepared for the preaching the sermon.”

As a pastor, one of your main roles is preaching. It is one of the best ways you lead your church. In many ways, it is one of the engines of your church. Notice I said one of, not the engine. You need to place a higher priority on preaching, give more time to it.

For me, I think in terms of the calendar year. Each church is different, but our church has a definite lull from thanksgiving until January. We have a lot of singles and couples without kids so attendance drops over the holidays. Each summer, I think through the coming calendar year. I ask for ideas from our church about topics or books of the Bible they’d like to hear, see if there is a commonality. See what our leaders think. Try to get a handle on what I feel like God is calling us to on my own.

This past summer on my preaching break I felt like I needed to spend the time reading through 1 & 2 Peter each day. Not sure why at the time, but decided to do it. At the time, we were planning to spend all of 2012 in the book of Romans. We had a ton of stuff for it. After one week I told Katie that we would start 2012 in Peter. I can honestly say that after 2 weeks into these rich books, it is exactly where our church needs to be.

Now, what about planning. By planning 6 months in advance, I’m able to write a study guide. Mike is able to work through devotional questions and family devotional questions. I’m able to read something in a leadership book that has nothing to do with Peter and find a great quote. This doesn’t happen without planning. Study guides and devotionals take weeks and months to put together.

You also need to have a good file system for quotes, notes, articles, blogs, etc. I use evernote because I can easily sync stuff with google add-ons. Michael Hyatt has a ton of stuff on evernote, which is a treasure trove of information for leaders.

Bottom line, as a pastor, you need to plan your preaching. Your church deserves it. Don’t fly by the seat of your pants. Do the work, pray up, listen to the Holy Spirit and plan ahead.

We preach for life transformation, not knowledge transference.

I realize if you are a pastor, you would say this is why you preach. But often our sermons say the opposite. In listening to a lot of sermons online, it seems like the goal for pastors is to either show how smart they are or how smart they can make their churches.

In my opinion, one of the most crucial steps in sermon prep is editing, choosing what you will not share. This is difficult because there is often more a pastor would like to share than he has time for. I am one of those guys who loves theology. I love to talk about it, read about it. I could spend hours talking about the sovereignty of God. As interesting as that as is to me, when I preach, I have to show my church not only why that doctrine is true and beautiful, but how that impacts their life. Most pastors seem to stop at, “it’s true” and then move on.

Why does it matter that Jesus was God and human? Why does the Holy Spirit matter?

When preaching, you must always answer the “why does this matter” question.

This is one of the reasons I love preaching through books of the Bible. I’m able to build on each sermon each week. I can quickly refer to something as a reminder, show the context, which helps to answer why an author mentioned what he mentions and then make an application that has to do with life transformation.

All the doctrines I love are about life transformation, we just need to help our people see them.

Two books that have helped me immensely in this area is The Big Idea and Communicating for a Change. 

It is such an exciting time at Revolution Church right now. We had our highest non-holiday attendance this past weekend. We continue to see more and more people take a step of faith and being a relationship with Jesus. So much so, that we are having a baptism on February 11th. If you’d like more information or would like to get baptized, please email Ciara Hull. There will be a baptism class on February 4th after the second service for those who are interested in getting baptized.

We launched our 8th missional community this past weekend. I’m really excited about this MC because it helps us connect with those who live in the northwest side of the city of Tucson. If you’d like more information about this MC or how to join it, please email the leaders Danny and Lauren Watton.

This week we are continuing our brand new series Weird and looking at a topic all of us at some point wrestle with: How do you handle life when it doesn’t go as planned?

At some point in your life, your life will not go as you planned for it to go. It might be in your marriage, health, finances, career, a relationship with a child or a friend. You might find yourself doubting God in ways you never thought possible.

Maybe you even find yourself hanging by a thread right now, that if something doesn’t change in your life, you’re not sure what you will do.

This can very easily lead to a crisis of faith for us. We begin to question if God causes the pain and trials in our lives. Does he care about them? Does he know how much they hurt? If he could stop them, why doesn’t he? Peter hits these questions head on. If you’d like to read ahead, you can read 1 Peter 1:6 – 12 to see where we are headed this weekend.

So, do whatever you have to do to be at Revolution this week (and bring someone with you, you never know how a simple invite can make an eternal difference). An easy to invite someone is to send them an e-vite.

Two major things drive our preaching, how we develop our sermon calendar and how preaching plays out. The first, we preach through books of the Bible. To date, we’ve preached through 1 John, Song of Solomon, Jonah, Hebrews, Nehemiah, 2 Timothy, Philippians, James, Titus, Jude and right now I’m preaching through 1 & 2 Peter. We’re tentatively planning to do Habakkuk and Joshua after this current series. In between those series we’ve interspersed topical series on marriage, parenting, money, vision series, life purpose and a journey through the Old Testament. Even when we do that, we typically just take a passage and walk through it. I’m not much for bouncing around the Bible.

We do this for a few reasons. One, it gives the context. The bible was written by a person, to a person or group of people in a specific time and place. If you simply grab a verse, quote it, you miss this. When you miss the context, you often miss what makes this so powerful. I am reminded of this every time I preach through a book of the Bible. It happened this past Saturday in 1 Peter 1. Peter is talking about the resurrection of Jesus and the hope from that. That verse takes on a more powerful meaning when you understand what has happened in Peter’s life, denying Jesus and Jesus still redeeming him. Also, in the first 3 verses of 1 Peter, Peter talks about election and how God causes us to be saved (it really does say that). Why start with this? What is he trying to communicate to those who received his letters? Why hit that twice in the first 3 verses?

Two, we can’t skip things. I’ll be honest, every time I preach through a book of the Bible I hit a part I’d like to skip. When I preached through Hebrews, I learned why pastors don’t preach through Hebrews. Chapters 1 – 4, 11 and 12 are awesome. Chapters 5 – 10 are brutal. It was a hard 6 weeks getting through those chapters, making them relevant for our church. But I realized something when I got to chapter 11. It took on a more beautiful meaning because of 5 – 10 and all the talk about sacrifices, the old covenant, etc.

This is another reason pastors skip the Old Testament. When we did Nehemiah, it took us 22 weeks and 3 of those weeks were simply lists of names. When you do 1 Corinthians, you have to deal with homosexuality. Paul’s letters, you have to talk about election. These words, doctrines and concepts are in the Bible and you have to deal with them.

Three, it trains people how to study the Bible. When a pastor pulls a verse out of the Bible and quotes it, gets a concept from it, he doesn’t show any of the work he’s done during the week. Preaching is hard work. Most pastors spend 10 – 20 hours on one sermon. When you walk through a book of the Bible, talk about the context, train your church in that, they can see how to learn from Scripture by listening to your preaching. You show them how to work through a passage, how it all fits together. How men can lead family devotions.

There are some downsides. One, you can’t skip things. As I said above, you can’t skip stuff. This is good and bad as you will find things you will want to skip, for a number of reasons.

Two, you can get bogged down and spend too much time in a certain genre of the Bible. We try to do a good job of balancing the Old and New Testament, which can be difficult. It is easier to preach through a NT book. Often more applicable, hits more felt needs and easier to get to Jesus. At the same time, it is easy to work through a book slowly and not give your church a healthy diet of the Bible. I realize some books are longer than others, but you need to make sure you balance the Old and New Testament, different genres, different topics. We’ve had  long stretch of NT books, so after Peter we will do 2 OT books. We haven’t done a gospel yet, so we are planning to start 2013 off with either Mark or John.

I’ll share the other thing tomorrow.

About halfway through the book, right after chapter 12, the book changes. In many ways, it becomes boring. The writer finishes talking about the nation of Israel conquering the land and the nation moving into the land. Chapter 13 – 22 is a description of how God has divided up the land among the tribes.

While it is easy to read through these chapters halfheartedly, bored and wonder why you should care about how God divided up land almost 3,000 years ago. But if you do, you will miss what one commentator called, “The heart of the book of Joshua.”

Here’s what I mean. In the midst of the battles, we see God’s power. Joshua and the nation of Israel are shown that God is ruler of all things. He protects them, stops the sun, destroys the walls of Jericho, gives them the land he has promised to them. Chapters 13 – 22 are the fulfillment of that promise. In some ways, chapters 13 – 22 are just God showing off. He has already shown he is trustworthy, will protect and provide for them. Yet we see the detail to which this provision happens. The details in these chapters is unbelievable. If we miss that, we will miss how God is involved in the big details of our lives and the small ones. Ironically, we often forget how God cares about the big things and little things in life.

Do you struggle to trust with the big things or the little things? Do you struggle to believe that he cares about the big things or the little things? Depending on your answer, it will show the type of God you believe God is.

Little Talks

Six Weeks

Love Love Love

Also, don’t forget to pick up the new album from First Aid Kit tomorrow.

Tonight in my sermon we worked through some of the questions that can help you discern the idols of your heart. Each person has a default idol of their heart, what pushes them to make the decisions they do, both good and bad. Tim Chester points that each of us have an idol that is either for power, control, comfort or approval. They overlap and we might have all 4 at different times, but these 4 things push us to sin, succeed and live our lives.

The hope we have is that they will bring us the fulfillment we long for.

For example, when a man works a ton of hours to provide for his family, he is doing a good thing to provide for them. But he might be doing it so that his family will approve of him or that he will have the comfort he longs for.

Or, when one tries to control a situation through organizing every detail, keeping things in order. They might say they are organized or a detailed person, which might be true. It might also mean that it comes from a place of insecurity where they need to control everything instead of trusting in God.

Here are some questions we worked through tonight to discern what the idols of your heart are:

1. What do I worry about?
2. What do I use to comfort myself when life gets tough or things don’t go my way?
3. What, if I lost would make me think life wasn’t worth living?
4. What do I daydream about?
5. What makes me feel the most self-worth?
6. What do I lead with in conversations?
7. Early on, what do I want to make sure people know about me?
8. What prayer, unanswered would seriously make me consider walking away from God?
9. What do I really want and expect out of life?
10. What is my hope for the future? What will complete me?