Lecture 1: The Making of a Preacher

[Music] the longer i live when i'm age 71 right now the longer i live and think about ministry the more i believe in the power and the preciousness and the necessity of preaching in the life of the church some of you are watching this maybe age 40 50 as a business man wondering if you should become a preacher others of you might be 15 years old others in school in college or seminary and what i thought might be helpful to do immediately in this series on preaching is to tell my story you might call it the making of a preacher because it's it's a story of of quite significant improbabilities and you may feel that way about yourself and so let me give you the short version of the things in my background that stand out to me as difficult and obstacles to preaching and yet which turned out to be i think the very forge in which god fired and made a preacher so let's start at seventh grade right around seventh grade i discovered the fact that i couldn't speak in front of a group without freezing now this is not your ordinary butterflies that everybody jokes about it's not your funny knocking of the knees and oh you'll get over it this was a paralysis this was really deep i to this day do not understand what it was where it came from why it was there in its entirety anyway the full explanation i think i know part of why god did it but there i am now entering junior and high school junior high and high school and terrified in a paralyzing kind of way of any kind of public speaking like in front of six people at church or a class at school so for example ninth grade science class we all had to read a one paragraph you're talking one paragraph uh description of our project and she the teacher was just going down the row we'd walk up to the front read the paragraph so the class knew what you were working on and as it was coming down my row toward me i looked down i could see i could see my heart beating through my shirt here and when it got to the person just behind me as he was going up to speak i stood up and walked out of the class and went to the bathroom and cried i wasn't going to do it i couldn't do it and i told her afterwards i couldn't do it 10th grade mr vermillion was my civics teacher and he announced on the first day of class that there would be an oral book report that everybody had to give and my heart absolutely sank i felt my throat and my shoulders freezing up so i walked up to him afterwards and i said mr vermilion i can't do that and he said well johnny uh you can't get better than c in this class if you don't do it and i said that's fine i'll take a c and i got to see because i wasn't going to do it i couldn't do it i never ran for any class office you know president of the class vice president secretary anything like that because i knew you had to give speeches when i was in the 10th grade my mother now this was before any christian psychology at all we're talking what 1961 or two she took me to a psychologist because it was so painful and difficult and felt like it was just appall over everything in my life and the psychologist had me look at these today i think i'd call them rorschach church and just say what i saw and after an hour of this i could tell that this psychologist was suggesting my mother was the problem well you could believe this is not making me happy because there was one person in the universe under god who understood me loved me was patient with me helped me work through this and it was my mother and there was no way i was going to blame her so we never went back to that so i come to the end of high school having skipped every possible way of speaking in front of a group and a church and headed off to college with the most dreadful fear and trembling because i knew at wheaton college there was a required speech class in 1966 between my sophomore and junior year evan welch the chaplain came up to me during summer school when i was taking chemistry to catch up with a pre-med plan and i was all excited that maybe god was making clear my life plan to be a medical doctor and i was going to catch up with my science prerequisites and take chemistry and he said would you pray in chapel tomorrow and i found myself saying how long does it have to be now there's about 500 people come to summer school chapel as i recall and he said 30 seconds a minute and i do not know how or why it happened but i said yes then i remember walking out on front campus alone and dealing with god i haven't made many vows in my life but i made one and i said this father if you would just get me through this just get me through it so that i don't freeze and my voice doesn't stop i will never turn down a speaking opportunity for you again out of fear that was a really scary vow he did get me through i think i've kept the vow and something broke i went to seminary well let me let me give you one more piece at college that fall i got mono and spent three weeks in the infirmary and during those three weeks i was listening to harold john achenge preach in the chapel a couple hundred yards away and everything in me wanted to handle the bible like that and after three weeks i knew i couldn't catch up in organic chemistry and god basically said in his way i don't want you to do medical anyway you should go to seminary and know my word that's what i did married noel went off to seminary spent three years loving studying the bible knew that my call was to the word i didn't know what i'd do with it didn't know if i could ever preach [Music] i won the clarence roddy preaching award my senior year you can you can listen to this 18 minute sermon at the desire god website i listened to part of it can't believe it what was that 28 years old no no 25 years old i suppose when i gave it um and i used big bad john which was a song popular in those days to illustrate ephesians 1 6. and i was just amazed i was absolutely amazed that i was standing in front of several hundred seminary students and faculty preaching this senior sermon i went off to graduate school because i didn't know what else to do i didn't feel any particular call to any avenue of ministry and six years into teaching which i loved something rumbled inside me i could not resist i was being pushed by a kind of disillusionment with the romance of academia and i was being pulled by every sermon i heard because i said if it was a good sermon i'd love to do that and if it was a bad sermon i'd say we got to do better than that and on october 14 1979 late at night writing in my journal i could resist this desire no longer and i said to noel in the morning what would you think if i resigned my teaching and looked for a church and she said i could see that coming and that's what i did for the next 33 years i preached so as i look back over that story that brings me today um it's not the kind of story i would have planned i wouldn't want to live my teenage years over again at all they were not very happy years at least not at one level and as i look back all i can say is that all the sorrows as well as the happiness god was making a preacher not at all the way you would expect him to make a preacher and so for you the implication is you have no idea you have no idea what he's doing in your life and so trust him and then walk through the open doors where you feel called you

Channel: Desiring God

Views: 21,045

Rating: 4.9593906 out of 5

Keywords: Desiring God, John Piper, God, Jesus Christ, Christianity, Christian Hedonism

Id: qOHv2LXjV_M

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021