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?

The reason is simple, I don’t have big faith.

There I said it.

While my life has often seemed like an episode that needed big faith, lots of people have lives that need bigger faith than I need. In thinking back, moving to Tucson 5 years ago was a moment of lunacy. We had family and friends try to talk us out of it. Church planting doesn’t work they said, especially in this economy. Adopting. Why spend that time and money on it? Plant more churches.

Those are just things I’ve heard in the last year.

But when I hear those, they reinforce the doubts I have, they don’t push me to have bigger faith.

Enter books like The Circle Maker or Sun Stand Still. I am always pushed by men and women who have big faith, pray crazy prayers. I think we see in Scripture that God is honored by big and small prayers. I think there is something to big prayers though that gets at the heart of God because it takes a dependency on him that small prayers don’t. Big prayers reveal his father’s heart because it reveals our heart as a son or daughter that is dependent on him.

In the course of this conversation then, I was told how much God loves small prayers, that it shows his care for the small details in life. This is true. I love how God cares about the lilies of the valley, the birds of the air. It shows how he is big enough for anything, but cares about the smallest details. I chuckled because that is my first inclination, but as I pointed out in this conversation, it reveals my lack of faith. Because that keeps me from taking a step where I have to trust for the impossible.

I told Katie this morning that she needs to stop reading whatever she’s reading and read this book. It was that good and challenging. There were a few things that jumped out to me from the book.

The first was the idea of drawing circles around prayer. Praying specific prayers. I’ve preached before on this idea and find that praying specific prayers stretches my faith and I see God move in powerful ways because of it. But I like the idea of circling something. For me, I’ve begun circling places I believe God wants us to plant Revolution Churches in Tucson. So this was a great reminder.

Another point was having a vision beyond your resources. I’ve already blogged on this idea, so I won’t belabor it, but suffice to say, if you can afford or pull off your prayers or dreams, they are too small. Another was the question Mark asked, “Is there a limit to God’s power?” All Christians would say no, yet we pray as if there is. We pray small prayers, believe possible things. This is the foundational question of prayer. Is there a limit to what God can do.

By far, the most life changing idea from this book was when he said, “Stop praying for something and start praying/praising through something.” God has already given us the promise of answered prayers and power in Scripture. Start praising God for what he will do. For me, I started to think about our adoptions and that God has already chosen children for our family, so instead of asking him to complete the adoption, I’ve begun thanking him for these children and praising through it. I believe God has put on my heart the prayer of planting a movement of churches around Tucson so that everyone is within a 10 mile drive of a Revolution Church and that 1 million people will enter the kingdom through Revolution (in my lifetime or beyond), so I’m beginning to pray as if that promise has already happened and giving God the glory for it.

While all of this is good, it is easy for this idea and the way Mark communicates it for someone to walk away and think of God as a vending machine. Pray this and you’ll get more than what you prayed for. Give this and God will give you 10 times what you gave. This is a tough line to walk when it comes to faith. Mark handles it well by bringing us back to the glory of God and how that needs to be the heart of our prayers and asking. He handled this well by comparing it to John the Baptist. One of Jesus’ closest friends, John is beheaded, while others are being healed, raised from the dead, walking after years of being lame and John does not get rescued. It’s a tough place to be, it is a dark place to be, but it is also a place that pushes our faith and asks if we truly believe in God and his sovereignty and his plan. The other reality is that sometimes God tells us no and doesn’t answer our prayers the way we want them. Sometimes he doesn’t bring healing like we hoped.

Here are a few other things that jumped out to me:

• Bold prayers honor God, and God honors bold prayers. God isn’t offended by your biggest dreams or boldest prayers. He is offended by anything less. If your prayers aren’t impossible to you, they are insulting to God. Why? Because they don’t require divine intervention.
• Prayers are prophecies. They are the best predictors of your spiritual future. Who you become is determined by how you pray. Ultimately, the transcript of your prayers becomes the script of your life.
• The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.
• “God does not answer vague prayers.”
• We usually focus on what we’re doing or where we’re going, but God’s primary concern is who we’re becoming in the process. We talk about “doing” the will of God, but the will of God has much more to do with “being” than “doing.”
• Faith is the willingness to look foolish.
• If you aren’t willing to be perplexed, you’ll never be amazed.
• Many of us pray as if our problems are bigger than God. Our biggest problem is our small view of God.
• God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him; God is great because nothing is too small for Him.
• All of us love miracles. We just don’t like being in a situation that necessitates one.
• Show me your vision, and I’ll show you your future.
• The degree of satisfaction is directly proportional to the degree of difficulty.

If you are looking for a book that will stretch your faith and prayer life, this is a great book to start with.

On Saturday I kicked off our brand new series called Weird on 1 & 2 Peter at Revolution.

One of the things I find fascinating about Peter’s life is that Jesus changed his name when Jesus called him to follow him (John 1:42). We are told in Scripture that when we are changed by the gospel, we are a new creation. We are given a new identity in Christ. A new name.

Throughout the gospels, Peter is one of the easiest people to relate to. He tries to be what Jesus wants him to be. He tries to stand up at the right time, and it is usually the wrong time. He tries to defend Jesus when he shouldn’t. He cowers when he should have power and bravery.

When Peter lives out of his old identity (before following Jesus) the gospel writers call him “Simon” to signify this. When he lives out of his new identity in Christ he is called “Peter.”

This got me thinking. If you were given a new name when becoming a follower of Jesus. How often would you be called by your new name or your old name?