Preacher: Do You Feel Inadequate?

Good news for those of us who are preachers and who feel inadequate. You’re in good company. In fact, if you don’t feel this way, you probably shouldn’t be preaching.

Realizing what is involved in preaching, it is inevitable that a man should feel unworthy, and inadequate…

I am emphasizing all this because, for some strange reason, it is an aspect of the matter that is scarcely ever mentioned in our age and generation…It seems to be the case that the greater the preacher the more hesitant he has generally been to preach…My argument is, therefore, that a man who feels that he is competent, and that he can do this easily, and so rushes to preach without any sense of fear or trembling, or any hesitation whatsoever, is a man who is proclaiming that he has never been “called” to be a preacher. The man who is called by God is a man who realizes what he is called to do, and he so realizes the awfulness of the task that he shrinks from it. Nothing but this overwhelming sense of being called, and of compulsion, should ever lead anyone to preach. (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching & Preachers

)

It’s a good message for Monday morning.