The Spirit God Actually Gave You

On a recent episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, Tyler McKenzie made a confession I suspect most of us preachers could make: comparison nearly stole his love for preaching.

Tyler grew up an athlete, and at first the competitive instinct served him well. He studied great preachers the way a young ballplayer studies Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing — Francis Chan’s passion, Andy Stanley’s conversational ease, Tim Keller’s gift for engaging skeptics. Tyler defends that kind of emulation, and so do I. There is no craft on earth where we wouldn’t tell a rookie to study the greats.

But somewhere along the way, emulation curdled into competition. “I want to be the best preacher of my generation,” he caught himself thinking. “The best preacher in my city.” And the joy began to leak out. He couldn’t walk off stage and savor being used by God. Instead, he cataloged the seven things to fix before the next service. He couldn’t listen to another man’s sermon without keeping score. Pride when he won. Envy when he lost. The man who became a preacher because he loved sermons, the guy who found deep connection to God through sermon preparation, could no longer enjoy delivering one.

Then Tyler told me about the decision that began to break those chains, and it surprised me. He started carrying a manuscript.

For his first seven or eight years, Tyler was a no-notes preacher. Eventually he admitted he wasn’t doing it because it made his preaching better. He was doing it because he liked what people said about it: “He just goes up there with his Bible and throws it down.” The missing café table most preachers set their notes on became a trophy. So, he humbled himself, wrote a manuscript, and carried it on stage — a small, visible act of surrender declaring this is not about what people think of me. This is about preaching the Word of God. Period.

It also gave him back three hours a week. Humility, it turns out, is efficient.

Teddy Roosevelt usually gets credit for saying “comparison is the thief of joy.” Whoever said it first, every preacher eventually proves it true. Here’s the question I’ve been chewing on since we put the episode in the can: What’s my no-notes? What’s the thing I do in the pulpit not because it serves the Word, but because it serves my reputation?

Find it. Name it. Lay it down.

The joy you get back is worth far more than the applause.

All week long that old Joni Mitchell tune, Both Sides Now has been stuck in my head. This week on the Better Preaching Podcast Nate Ross provided a moment that has made me think: I really don’t know preaching at all.

Nate was two and a half years into leading Northside Christian Church — the church where his father had been lead pastor. The numbers were exactly what any of us would want: twenty percent growth, a twenty-eight-million-dollar campaign successfully raised. And he was miserable.

So he did what most of us do. He pulled levers. He got his preaching calendar a full year out. He built a teaching team with names like Mike Breaux and Efrem Smith on it. Every lever worked. None of them touched the problem. “Everything looks unbelievable,” he told me, “but something is not right in your soul.”

I’ve sat in that chair. Most leaders I know have.

What finally broke it open for Nate wasn’t a better system. It was a question. A counselor asked him to set aside the business model and the branding and answer one thing: what is the Lord doing in your heart? And Nate’s honest answer — “I’d rather help leaders lead their thing than lead my thing” — came out wrapped in shame, because in ministry we’ve absorbed the idea that stepping out of the pulpit is a demotion.

Here’s the framework Nate gave us, and I think it’s worth writing on the inside of your study door. Awareness. Access. Action. Most of us live at the third step and never visit the first two. We take action, take action, take action until the wheels come off and all we’re left with is the awareness that something is badly wrong, with no capacity left to do anything about it.

Nate finds the pattern in Revelation 2. Jesus told the church in Ephesus to “remember” the height from which they’d fallen. Then repent. Then do the things you did at first. Awareness, then access, then action. We keep trying to run the sequence backward.

And underneath all of it is the hardest word in the conversation: undone. Nate describes the deep waters of Proverbs 20:5 the way a diver would: dark, cold, high pressure, nothing you’d enter casually. But he insists that’s where Jesus starts with us. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the undone. Judas left because he wouldn’t be undone. Peter kept reaching for a sword because he wouldn’t be undone. We all keep a lever within arm’s reach.

Here’s the earworm that displaced Joni Mitchell rattling around in my head: the best thing you can give your church, and your family, is the healthiest version of you. Not the most impressive version. Not the version that can keep pace with whoever preached that same text better than you did on Sunday.

But that means sitting in a powerless position long enough to let Jesus hold the power.