Proclaimer Blog
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers #9
Chapter 9. The Preparation of the Preacher
This is a remarkably rich chapter. In it he’s talking not about how the preacher should prepare his sermon, but about how he should prepare himself. Here are the key points:
Maintain general discipline. Don’t fritter away time, as you may do with no human boss watching over you. Set aside sermon-prep time, and make yourself unavailable to anything else for it. But don’t be guided by someone else’s hard and fast rules. We all have different constitutions and work better at different times of the day.
Pray. MLJ is honest here about his own difficulties with starting to pray in the mornings. A key piece of advice is: respond to every inner impulse to pray. It’ll never be a distraction.
Read Scripture systematically, including once through each year. Take notes as you do, which can become sermon skeletons.
Read devotionally, choosing what’s needed for your mood, just as Sibbes helped MLJ in a low period.
Read in a balanced way across different areas, including theology and church history. (MLJ’s own practice of spending the mornings of the family holiday reading theology undisturbed might not be popular with all wives and offspring.) Read not to glean information, but to stimulate your own original thinking.
Listen to music, if it enlivens you.
Reflections
I found his honesty about his own struggles with prayer encouraging in my own struggles, which made his challenges not to slacken in prayer all the more powerful. The advice to yield to every inner stimulus to pray, even in the midst of pressured work-time, is very wise. We don’t pause to pray because we fear it’ll be a distraction or a time-waster; MLJ assures us that it never will.
His view of the aim of reading is helpful, too. He’s got in mind that I should do all I can so that when I sit down to prepare a sermon my mind is fresh and stimulated. (And he got me a step closer to a theological justification for listening to a little Bob Dylan every morning.)