When I had preached at Penn State I had over prioritized my preparation and ended up isolating myself from society and devoted entirely too much time to it - a mistake I sought to avoid this time around. However, I increasingly found it difficult to spend time working on it. Consequently, I found myself working on it right up until it was time to go to class - having not really speaking it aloud. I wasn't confident in the structure of it, I didn't feel very familiar with my points or flow, and I still hadn't chosen which illustrations I wanted to use.
I was second student to go in class - which meant I had plenty of time to sit and second guess everything I was about to say. After the first guy went we quickly discussed how it went. I was expecting to go any second now, but our professor started a tangent. For a half hour he explained how preaching is a skill that can only be developed through repetition and that it takes years to develop a personal style that everyone is comfortable with. Being seminary students, most of us have an understanding of Grace to the extent that we know that God won't love us based on how poorly or excellent we preform during our first preached sermon. However, our professor didn't stop talking. He continued to explain that over our seminary education we will only preach a handful of sermons and not only can we not let how well they go affect our understanding of being a delight to God, but it also doesn't necessarily reflect on how gifted/called we are to be preachers. That struck me. We might do so poorly in the few times we are assigned and academically required to preach that we're tempted to think that we were wrong about our very calling. As true as it is that we might all not be called to be preachers, our professor wanted us to know that how we preform in our classes is not really an indicator of it. If God wants us to preach he is going to work in our lives and be glorified even in our failures.
That is not explicitly what I was going to be preaching on, but one of my main points was that our hearts are dull to the truth that we are deeply loved by God. God considers his children to be his inheritance and he has clothed his children with his own righteousness to the extent that he sees us as a valuable treasure that he is well suited to inherit.
Basically, what I had been preparing to preach and what my professor was going to painstaking lengths to convince me of was that my identity is never at stake. I sat there during the half hour spiel and wanted to be nervous and anxious, but as I listened to him I simply couldn't be. I wanted to have objective reasons that I could point to as to why my sermon wouldn't go as well as it could and why I should be worried about it, but sitting there the truth of my sermon and my professor's talk really penetrated my heart.
I am loved!
The sermon really did go well! I have a long list of great constructive feedback of things that simply need to improve, but there was a remarkable amount of things to praise about it as well. I've added another section to this web page called "Original Work" and if you go to that link you can watch my sermon. I'm mostly embarrassed by it and a few people have been shocked to hear that I'm putting it online, but for all it's many flaws (my over 100 uses of "umm", my hand wringing, my trying to explain too many things, my speaking way too fast, my lack of clarity in my main points, etc) I think that in it God's word is proclaimed. If learning to preach is failing in the right direction, I'm glad I have this a record of where I am coming from - it's the bottom rung of my ladder and it stands as a testament to the work God will do in me. It's a half hour long and it's not all that well done, but if you've got the time and want to hear me exposit the Gospel from Ephesians 1, then give it a go!