The Pastor's Main Job

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Welcome to Not Only Water.
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This podcast is dedicated to providing practical advice for new pastors.
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In 1 Timothy 5, verse 23, Paul tells Timothy to drink not only water, but to use a little wine for his stomach's sake.
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This short piece of practical advice is the inspiration for this series.
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Get ready to dive into today's topic.
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Here's your host, Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Not Only Water, practical advice for new ministers.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am your host.
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Today is our second episode and we're going to be talking about the subject of the main job of a pastor.
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What is the main job of a pastor? And this specifically is the pastor who is the one who is responsible for the preaching ministry of the church.
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As I mentioned in the last program, there are, like in our church, there's a variety of pastors because we have elders in the church and all of us serve as pastors.
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But my job among the pastors is that it's my job each week to preach the scriptures and to give the Sunday morning messages.
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Now, the other pastors do preach if I'm away or if I'm sick or on other nights, such as Brother Andy and I share the Wednesday night duties.
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So he preaches on Wednesday nights and Brother Mike and him both share Sunday school and they both teach and preach in Sunday school.
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But the primary Lord's Day service, the Sunday morning service at Sovereign Grace Family Church, that's my responsibility.
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And so the person that I'm speaking to in today's podcast, my assumption is that would be your responsibility.
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If you're a pastor of a church and your role is the primary preaching and teaching on Sunday morning, then that's what today's show is about because the question is, what is your main job? And one of the things that I think is difficult and was very difficult for me when I was starting out in the ministry was I felt like everything was my job.
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I really did.
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And honestly, that lasted quite a while.
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It felt like everything was, whether it was a broken toilet or whether it was an unkept yard or whether it was a person who had gone to be in the hospital or whether it, you know, everything seemed to be my responsibility.
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And that wasn't necessarily the church's fault.
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That was the way I felt.
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And if you're the pastor, especially of a smaller congregation, that's often the way you're going to feel as well.
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You're going to feel like when you take off your preaching cap, you're going to put on a hard hat and be responsible for fixing the sheet rock, or you're going to put on an apron and be responsible for cooking for the fellowship meal.
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Excuse me, let me fix that.
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You're going to be responsible for cooking for the fellowship meal or whatever.
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And again, none of those things is beneath us as pastors.
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Certainly any one of us has, who has the ability to fix a toilet or whatever, we can do that.
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But I wanna talk today about what is the pastor's main job? What is a pastor's main responsibility? And I want to look at 2 Timothy 4, verse one, and then the first part of verse two.
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So 2 Timothy 4, verse one.
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The apostle Paul is completing his second letter to Timothy, and he's beginning with this final portion where he gives a charge to young Timothy.
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And anybody who's a preacher, you know this verse, but I wanna remind you of it so that I can talk about it.
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He says, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word.
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Notice what he says there.
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He says, preach the word.
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That is the primary responsibility of the pastor teacher.
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That is the primary responsibility of the one who has been called as the primary preaching pastor of the church.
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Your job is those three words, preach the word.
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And primarily what I wanna talk about today is that, because I again think that so many preachers think that their job is something else, whether they think their job is primarily counseling, or maybe they think that their job is primarily comforting, or they think that their job is primarily visiting, or they think that their job is primarily business oriented, such as doing the business of the church.
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There's all kinds of things that people think are the job of the pastor.
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But this passage tells us what the primary job is.
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And the primary job is that he preach the word.
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And I know that some people would disagree with that.
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In fact, some people treat the pastor role like the role of a CEO, and his primary job is to go to meetings and to interact with other people.
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And so he spends all of his week doing those things, and he doesn't spend the time preparing to preach the word.
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And when it comes time to preach the word, he's either relying on other people, which can sometimes get into the area of plagiarism, and we're gonna talk about that in a later episode, or he's relying on his own study, but his study is so anemic and so light that it's not able to feed the flock because he's not producing anything in his message.
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He's not digging down into the depth of the word, and therefore he's not mining out of the word the truths that are contained within, and therefore when he gets there on Sunday morning, rather than having a feast that he, like a chef, has taken the time to painstakingly put together and painstakingly cook and prepare like a chef preparing food, it's more like he's got a TV dinner that he threw in the microwave and allowed it to be cooked for 30 seconds, and he puts it in front of the people and says, take it or leave it.
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And that may be all they're getting, so they don't know that that's not the most nourishing thing for them, but it's not, and it's not what he is supposed to be doing.
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His role, his responsibility, his job, your job, if you are the preaching pastor of a church, your job is to preach the word.
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And so let's just for a moment talk about what that looks like.
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What does it look like to be the one whose responsibility to preach the word? Well, first of all, what that looks like is that means before you preach that word, that you have spent time in the text, and that you have spent time doing the necessary study of that text, so that when you step into the pulpit, you have the ability to exegete that text properly.
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Now, I'm gonna assume you know what exegesis is.
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Exegesis is to draw out of the text what's there rather than eisegesis, which is reading into the text what's not there.
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And oftentimes, a lot of bad preaching is based on eisegesis, where men will read into the text something that is not there.
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And so our job is to be exegetes.
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Our job is to go to the text and to draw from the text what is there.
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But we can't draw from the text what's there if we haven't studied the text, if we haven't spent our time in due diligence doing the work of mining the text, finding out what's in it, drawing out from it, and then when we come into the pulpit on Sunday morning, we're speaking from an overflow of what we have learned and applied to our own life from that text.
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That has to happen.
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That's the way that it has to go.
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And I'm gonna give you a little, try to give you, again, this is supposed to be practical tips, practical advice.
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One of the things I wanted to mention is a book that I read early on in my ministry.
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It's called Expository Preaching by Stephen Kreloff.
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Now, Stephen Kreloff is a friend.
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He is a fellow pastor from Tampa.
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And Stephen Kreloff is a wonderful example of an expository preacher.
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And when he wrote that little book, and it really is, it's more like a booklet, but when he wrote that little book, and I got a copy of it, I got a copy of it at the Founders.
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I was at the Founders Conference in, I think, Tampa, I think it was 2005, 2006, somewhere around in there.
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I got to meet Tom Askew, I got to meet Roy Hargrave, again, two wonderful pastors, and I got to meet Stephen Kreloff.
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And he was a wonderful pastor.
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Never heard of him before, but he was the pastor of that church in Tampa.
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And when he preached, it was a masterful exegesis of the text that he preached.
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And I said, I wanna know what this guy's all about.
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I wanna learn more about this guy, because this guy's a preacher.
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And I began to look into his life and his ministry, and he had a radio program, and he had this little book, and the book was called Expository Preaching.
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And I'll never forget what the book said.
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The basis of the book was very simple.
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The thesis of the book is this, preaching is not hard.
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Preaching is this, read the text, explain the text, apply the text.
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Hear that again.
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Preaching is this, read the text, explain the text, apply the text.
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That's what preaching is.
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And I remember thinking, that simplifies, because I had taken classes in seminary, I had taken homiletics, I had taken exegesis, I had taken classes on how to study the text and how to present the text.
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But oftentimes it was very difficult to consider what in the world am I supposed to, you know, I've gotta do this every week, and I've gotta get out there and preach every week, and I've gotta preach two or three times a week, and this is something, this is my life, this is my job, this is what God has called me, this is my vocation.
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When I say job, understand what I mean is not just some money-making thing.
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This is about, God has called me to do this thing, this specific vocation of pastoring, preaching.
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And so how do I do it? What am I supposed to do? And when I read Steve's little book, it was like, it was read the text, explain the text, apply the text.
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And I said, wow, there's such a beautiful simplicity to that that I don't think it could be stated any better or any simpler, that is the job.
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And it really became the model for how I prepare and preach the sermons that I preach.
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And again, this is something that you will get better at, but the starting point is that, is that it's gotta be centered around the text.
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Preach the word, right? We're not preaching like my old professor Jerry Powers used to say, we're not preaching the Saturday Evening Post, I don't know if that's even a thing anymore.
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We're not preaching blogs, we're not preaching articles, we're not preaching Ligonier, we're not preaching something off of the Facebook, even though any of those things might be illustrations, your purpose is to preach the word.
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That's the role, that's the goal, that's what you're supposed to do.
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And so we preach the word and we do that by three steps.
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We read the text, we explain the text, that's the exegesis of the text, drawing out what does it mean? And then how does it work? That's the application.
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How does this work in the life of the person that is sitting in front of you? Now, I wanna recommend another book.
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This book is one that I use, I teach in the Sovereign Grace Academy, which is here at Sovereign Grace Family Church.
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We have Sovereign Grace Academy, and in the academy, we do a hermeneutics course.
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Hermeneutics is the art and science of biblical interpretation.
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And our hermeneutics class uses a book by Dr.
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Howard Hendricks called Living by the Book.
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Living by the Book is a very popular level, very easy to read introduction to studying the Bible.
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And so if you're a young minister, maybe you haven't been to seminary yet, maybe you're already in a church where you're ministering and you're serving, I would say, if you've never read Living by the Book, get a copy of it, read it, and apply the principles, because the principles that Dr.
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Hendricks uses in that book are the same principles that I would give you for how to prepare a sermon, in that when I say read the text, explain the text, apply the text, well, Dr.
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Hendricks would say that our job in studying the Bible, Bible study, is three parts, the same thing, he would say the first would be our investigation of the text, and that is where we are going to the text to see what does it say.
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So the first thing we want to do is simply read the text and say, what does it say? What is it saying? So it begins with that investigation.
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And then it becomes interpretation, what does it mean? Okay, we know what it says, and honestly, I think that in Dr.
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Hendricks' books, I think that's the best part, is the first part, because the part that is often overlooked is the what does it say.
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People often jump right to what does it mean, they jump to interpretation instead of the first part, which is the investigation, or what he calls observation, he says, observe before you interpret.
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And he even uses the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, because Sherlock Holmes made a good point, he said, many people see, but they don't observe.
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So he says, observe the text, investigate the text.
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First, look at it, and then interpret it.
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First, what does it say, and then determine what it means, because as he said, it can't mean what it doesn't say.
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So you have to begin with observation, that investigation process.
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Then you go to the second part, which is interpretation, what does it mean? And then the third part is application, how does it work? So again, that would be my piece of advice for you, if you want a book to read on this subject, get Living by the Book by Dr.
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Howard Hendricks.
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Now, there are some parts of it that he talks about that I might not agree with.
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He talks about some ministers who do things like, do some like interpretive acting out of dramas and things like that in church.
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And personally, I don't think that that's necessarily helpful or really the right thing for church, but that's my opinion, and that's an area where he and I might disagree.
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So what I'm saying is, if you do read that book, know that I don't endorse every single thing in that book, but the things that I do endorse are this, observation, interpretation, and application are how you do good hermeneutics.
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And out of that, and all of those things come with that, like the interpretation, he's gonna teach you how to look at context and understanding immediate context, broader context, and then of course, the metanarrative of scripture, which is the larger story context.
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And so all of those things are so important.
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So again, observation, interpretation, application.
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Now, comparing that to what Dr.
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Kreloff, Steve Kreloff said, our goal as pastors, our responsibility is to read the text, apply, or excuse me, read the text, explain the text, apply the text.
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Well, you gotta observe, that's the reading, interpret, that's the explaining, and then the application is the third part.
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So if you learn those things that Dr.
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Hendricks tells us, if you study those things, then you will become better at doing your job.
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Your job, again, is to preach the word.
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And if you want to preach the word well, it begins with observation, interpretation, and application.
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You do that in your study.
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You don't wait to do that until Sunday morning, right before you go to preach.
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You don't open up the Bible.
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And it doesn't happen by osmosis.
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I heard a guy one time who said, the way that I study my Bible is I lay down on the floor, prostrate before God, and I put my Bible over my face, and I lay my face down on my Bible, and God just tells me what he wants me to say.
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And I said, that's not the way to do it.
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That's not biblical study.
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That's not how we prepare to preach a sermon.
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Preparation for a sermon begins in the study.
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And something John MacArthur said years and years ago, he said, many men who are ministers, who are pastors, spend too much of their time with their knees out from underneath their desk, because they're out doing something else.
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They're out doing visits.
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They're out meeting with people.
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They're doing counseling.
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And all of those things can be good, but they can't take away from what's most important.
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Your most important job, if you are the primary preaching pastor in a church, is to preach the word.
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And we're gonna see in a later episode that that's actually the way that God disciples the church through his word.
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Discipleship, oftentimes people think of discipleship as Sunday school or something that happens individually between people, and all those things are helpful.
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But the primary discipleship within the church happens when the people of God gather around the word, and the man of God stands up and proclaims that word to the people.
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That's where discipleship begins.
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And your sermon should have within it the word which is going to be used by God to disciple the people.
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I hope that this has been helpful for you today.
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This ends our second episode of Not Only Water, and I hope that it is a blessing to you.
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Now, if this is a blessing to you, I wanna ask you for a few things.
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One, please like and subscribe to this channel.
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Please drop a comment letting me know that this was helpful.
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Also, if you did like it, share it with someone else, maybe another pastor, maybe someone else who's new to the ministry, and hopefully it'll be a blessing to them as well.
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Thank you for listening to Not Only Water.
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My name is Keith Foskey.
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May God bless you.