Proclaimer Blog
Praying the sermon in and preaching on the first day of the week
We all know that prayer is a key component of the preachers' life – reflecting his personal walk with Christ and also the ministry that God has given him. So praying over a passage or sermon as part of the preparation is a key component of sermon work. We neglect it at our peril. Now, we all know that – even if we are not the practitioners of it that we would always like to be.
But what about praying after the sermon? I wonder if too soon the sermon becomes old news to us. Monday comes around and we're already thinking about the next passage, the next text, the next message. So, here's something I've been trying to do recently with varied success, it must be said. I've been trying to do what I encourage congregations to do – that's to pray the sermon in.
- Post preaching, I've tried to be more disciplined in bringing the sermon and its effect in my people, to my Almighty Father. I don't want to get so caught up with the next week's business that this is neglected. Strangely, one thing that has really helped me with this is thinking about Sunday as the first day of a new week rather than the last day of the old week. I think that many of us preachers are hard wired to think of Sunday as the culmination of the week's effort – everything works up to this point. It's easy to get sucked into thinking that Sunday ends the week and Monday starts the new one. But if we train ourselves to think differently about the weekly pattern we see Sunday as the beginning of the week and then it feels more natural to be praying through that week for what has gone before.
- I've also tried to continue preaching the sermon to myself in the coming week. Many of us (somewhat tritely?) observe during the sermon "of course, I've preached this to myself this week" (last week, that should be?!!) but now I'm trying to train myself to pray in the Sunday sermon into my own heart. I've written down the key application and used it in my prayer times, running through it again and again and applying it to the situations I face throughout the week.
Why not give it a go? And why not see how thinking differently about the week can help your preaching?