The emotional and mental combustion that occurs after preaching is tough to explain. There is the overwhelming captivation by the truth of the passage and the hovering reminder of your own weakness. There is the reminder of God’s faithfulness to use you and your realization of your own sin that gets in the way.
Then there is that issue of human falleness called clarity.
After preaching yesterday my wife gave me a kind look and aimed to encourage me, but I knew the truth. I told her, “I wish I could dump some Visine on that sermon.”
My point: I feel like I wasn’t being very clear.
Clarity is something we pray for, we aim for, and we work hard for. Without it we are really wasting our time. After all, if we can’t get the words from our mouths to the people’s ears in a clear, orderly, intelligible manner, then, they are not being served very well by us.
How do you respond when you feel like you have left a few runners on base?
You pray. You feel the sting of not preaching as well as you should have. You feel the discontent of a sermon that was not crafted and delivered as well as it should have been. You get back on the horse and get back to work. In other words, you stop thinking about yourself and get back to the business of the kingdom of Christ. There is little time to feel sorry for yourself when lives depend on the word preached. So let the rock in your shoe cause you to run harder this week for the glory of Christ. That is what I’m telling myself anyway.