Gravity and Gladness on Sunday Morning - Lesson 4a — John Piper

The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God Ministries is available at www .DesiringGod .org. Okay, lots to do. And it gets more practical now all the time as far as the functioning of Sunday morning, which is what I think people are most interested in and may find most help from.

What Unites Us in Worship

So we'll try to pace ourselves here and just do the best we can. So unit number four, What Unites Us in Worship, A Philosophy of Music and Worship at Bethlehem. And what you're going to see here in these 11 points is, I hope, what grows out of the dynamic that we've just seen biblically in the last three units.

So, I wrote these little phrases, God-centeredness, going hard after God, and so on, I think in 1992. I've expanded them for this course, but they really were written, let me just say, in a time of fairly high level stress at the church in which we were arguing with each other about lots of things, about the nature of worship and whether we should have a big organ, for example, and how fine things should be and how much folk there should be.

You see, that's number five, find and folk in worship thoughts, in worship. And what I tried to do to hold the church together is to write down a list of things that we all agreed on, even if we couldn't agree on whether to have an organ or couldn't agree on whether to sing this or that.

What did we agree on? And I would recommend every pastor or worship leader to do that for your church, to see, because if you can hold up in front of people when they all think we're being torn apart here by our various preferences and whatnot, if you can hold them and say, look what we really do cherish, it becomes very, very significant.

And so, that's where this came from. God-centeredness is a high priority at Bethlehem, a high priority on the vertical focus of our Sunday morning service. The ultimate aim is to so experience God that he is glorified in our affections.

A Godward Orientation Before the Service

So, we say things like, come on the lookout for God and leave on the lookout for people. And what I mean by that is, I really would like to discourage noise in the sanctuary before the service. I know some churches do exactly the opposite.

They call it the litany of friendship and they love the roar. And it is, I mean, if that's your self-conscious philosophical decision to have the congregation just a roar with conversations as people greet one another and talk to one another, creates a great feeling of friendliness.

But my sense is that let's do that at the end. Come on the lookout for God, leave on the lookout for people. It doesn't mean you can't greet anybody, but your greeting isn't going to be over last night's ball game or the headlines or whatever.

It's going to be God-ward. And you'll see as many people bowed in prayer in the pew five minutes before the service as you see people conversing in the aisles or outside. And so a God-wardness in the service, you can cultivate over years by encouraging your people to go hard after God.

And if you know, as you do, that they come not really primed to meet God, they're not all that fired up and ready to engage with God. You can teach them, take the five minutes, get here a little early, sit in the pew.

We'll do our best to keep it quiet. We'll provide some piano or organ or synthesizer or guitar or violin or something so that it just provides a peaceful God-ward orientation. And you can deal with God and ask him to come meet you in this service.

That's the main thing Prelude is for in my judgment. And I would love to encourage that among our people. And sometimes we teach on it more explicitly. Sometimes we let it go for a season. Remove the horizontal intrusions between vertical acts.

Removing Horizontal Intrusions from Worship

Now, here's what I mean by that. These are little tips for pastors and for worship leaders and for any of you who has an influence in how worship is done in your church. As I go around the country and watch worship happen corporately, it is amazing to me how unthought through the transitions usually are from act to act.

So, suppose you are singing, Lord, you are more beautiful than silver and so on. Precious than silver. You sing that a couple of times and then there's going to be a congregational pastoral prayer of some kind.

Somebody's going to lead out in prayer. You come to the end of that and the person walks up and says, now let's pray. You don't need to say that. You were just praying. Or didn't you know that? It gives the impression you didn't know that.

You didn't know what we were just doing. We are now praying. We are saying you are precious. You are beautiful. And then somebody says, now let's pray. Just don't say that. Just keep quiet. Keep quiet.

Think you've got your people here in the presence of God. Some of them are being touched by God. Some of them are flowering right here and abuses that they experienced all week long are being healed as they get near to God.

And you get up there in the way. Don't get in the way. You get with God, too. This is what makes me think many pastors aren't worshiping. They're just not doing it. They're thinking about, no, I'm supposed to pray in just a minute.

And what should I say? And so you come to the end more beautiful than diamonds. Nothing has the last line. I just compares to you. And if you have a good pianist, she won't just stop dead. She'll just go on and and let it trail off a little bit.

You come to the microphone and you say, yes, yes, Lord. You are more beautiful than you move into your praise. You hold it there. You hold Godwardness and verticality. If it's been rocked by the Spirit of God in a song, you don't stand up and say, now we're going to do another thing called prayer.

You don't do that. You try to just you try to get yourself and your horizontal stuff out of the way and just join in what was happening right there by continuing it on with the way you pray. That's what I mean by removing horizontal intrusions.

The reason we moved our welcome to the first of the service, which has some great disadvantages, but some bigger advantages, we think, is so that when the service begins now of actual moving Godward. And I'll tell you, I do try to do my welcome in a Godward way.

I try to think of language. I try to think of emphases. I try to say it so that even the welcome, though it's a almost totally horizontal event, is Godward in spirit and is saturated with the Scripture and so on.

There's a way, pastors, even to do that, to do your welcome in a Godward way, which takes a lot of thought. Sometimes I work on those 10 minutes for half an hour, say, to try to think through. Now, what should I say first?

How does the fighter verse figure in? So and so died. A birth happened. There's this big retreat coming. There's how can I get all that into a coherent, Godward, horizontal moment that's not going to completely get people unfit for this event called worship that's about to happen.

So work on that. But the reason for putting it at the front is so that we have about 30 minutes then with no horizontal intrusion. It's our effort anyway, so that once we start singing from there until the time I preach, it is uninterrupted Godward.

With nobody standing up, making any comments about what we're doing, nobody inviting anybody to do anything, although it is fitting and Chuck does this from time to time. If we want to have a season of, say, confession where we get on our knees or where we're just quiet, there is a way and a way that if you have a gift to do this coming out of an act of worship, you can simply say.

Now, let's bow before the Lord and just let him know that you love him or what the sins are you're dealing with and let's be quiet together. Now, just a word like that is probably not very distracting.

But you may not even need to do that if it's plain or if you have a piece of paper in front of you that tells you what's coming. So getting horizontal intrusions out of the way, choosing songs that make much of God and not man.

There's a huge number of good worship songs and good hymns, good anthems that are very, very Godward and Christward. Even the welcome is God is God is possible. I've said enough about that. Comments about, number one, God centeredness, number two.

Going Hard After God in Worship

Going hard after God, pursuing and expressing the deepest satisfaction in all that God is for us in Jesus follows from the essence of worship, a satisfaction in God, I think, expressing from the pulpit a long for God in Christ.

I think we pastors must model for our people why we're there. Namely, we are hungry to meet God, hungry to know God, hungry to see God, hungry to hear God. Encouraging prayer before the service and in the service.

Oh, to have people praying even as they are worshiping, praying for you as you preach. Whenever I get sick, they do that a lot for me. I have people, they hear me coughing before the service. They, oh, pastor's not going to make it through the sermon.

So they'll pray like crazy that my voice will hold up. Well, I need that every Sunday, that while I'm preaching, the Holy Spirit would be moving. And all the other times, just a constant flow. I can remember growing up, what a carnal, stupid guy I was.

I had the mentality that I was in this room to be acted upon by somebody. And not here to commune with God continually when nobody was acting on me. If there's a law, you don't say, oh, what's supposed to be happening here?

I wonder if they forgot something. Instead, you say, pray, I can talk to God. I can listen. I can meditate. I can commune with him. It's your business to take every tack active of corporate worship and turn it into a vehicle to express your affections upward and receive God's grace downward.

Teaching a Godward longing in all acts of worship. So we teach our people to go hard after God, long for him, yearn for him as a heart longs for the flowing streams. So my soul longs for thee, oh, God.

Expecting the Powerful Presence of God

Number three, expecting the powerful presence of God. We do not just direct ourselves toward him. We earnestly seek his drawing near, according to the promise of James 4, 8, draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

We believe that in worship, God draws near to us in power and makes himself known and felt for our good and for the salvation of unbelievers in the midst. I think sometimes we have the notion that God is way, way far away.

And since his eyesight is so good, he can see this tiny distant dot of worship down there happening and he can hear it because he's so good at hearing. But he's far away and we're doing these things and it'll cross the light years and it'll arrive there and he'll be pleased with it.

And there's some truth to that. But also a great and glorious truth is where two or three are gathered. There am I in the midst of them. And if you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. And the very presence of God by the Holy Spirit can sometimes palpably be felt in a congregation as the word of God is sounded or the people are singing with all their hearts to the Lord.

Or there's a still moment when nothing is happening except people's quiet communion with God, anticipating being ready for his moving among us. Now, now expect that, ask for that, look for that. The demeanor of those who stand before the face of God, will you look differently?

Will you stand differently? Will you sit differently? It is a little bit disconcerting to me to see some of the lounging that goes on in worship service, especially lounging of girls on guys. And I would just encourage you to shape up in that regard.

I don't know if any of you are guilty of that sort of thing. But if you're in the presence of God, I've told my boys, I mean, I really get on my kids case because teenagers are, you know, they're not into being what they ought to be.

They're into pushing the edges of ought. And so they tend to slouch down like, you see if you can make me interested in this. And I've even seen my own sons sit like that. And I've taken them aside in years gone by and said, what are you saying by your posture?

I'm not saying anything, what do you mean? Doesn't mean anything. It does mean something. It does mean something when you lie, half lie down during the preaching of the word of God or during singing. It means something.

What do you think it means? Just guess what people might read off of it. Make a guess. And I just try to help them see that your body says something, it's speaking something. And I love to see when I say, let's pray.

I love to see postures change. Not to have some kind of physical statement. I am now moving more focusedly into your presence or on you, focus on you. Probably is not as helpful. And you can hear what I'm doing here.

Now, I'm almost going back to what I rejected at the beginning. Because I'm getting at it from the inside out now. I'm saying place. I've got a whole section on architecture, but I don't know if we'll get to it.

And why we have the building we have with its sparse lean. We don't have crosses everywhere and statues everywhere. And windows with figures in them everywhere. Why is that? Why do you do it that way?

All that is significant, but it's only significant if it is coming from inside out and saying things biblically. Expecting the presence of God, and when he's there, we act in certain ways. Number four, Bible based and Bible saturated.

Bible-Based and Bible-Saturated Worship

The content of our singing and praying and welcoming and preaching and poetry will always conform to the truth of scripture. The content of God's word will be woven through all we do in worship and will be the ground of our appeal to authority.

Does that make sense? The content of God's word will be woven through all we do in worship. It's the ground of our appeal. That's the authority we have. Preaching, expository exaltation will thus be central.

So not just preaching, though, all the hymns are put through the seal of scripture. All the prayers should be saturated with scripture. The announcements, the beginning should have scripture shaping and permeating them.

Confession, everything is shot through with the Bible. Seeing and savoring God happens by means of his self-revelation, which he gives through his word. So if you want to see him and savor him, which is what happens in worship, then the word must permeate everything.

Check unfitting human intrusion and inventiveness by testing all by the word. When I'm trying to teach my family to pray at home, it's just amazing how quickly you can fall into ruts of phraseology that.

Have no spiritual content to them like. Well, they help things to go well at school today. That's a zero prayer as far as I'm concerned. Because that's not quite zero, it could be worse. But until you fill the word well up with some biblical content, I don't know what you mean.

Go well, does that mean get an A on the test or does it mean make you bold and witness? Does it mean keep you pure sexually or does it mean to make you popular? What does go well mean? Go well is so blah.

It's not a spiritual word. And so I love it when the people pray in small groups and in church, their words are just saturated with the biblical values. And you know that they're asking things that God wills that they ask instead of just general words.

Bless the missionaries. Well, if you fill that up a little bit, then it will be more God honoring and I think more heartfelt. God is honored when his word is prominent and pervasive, so Bible based and Bible saturated.

Head and Heart in Worship

Number five, head and heart. Worship that aims at kindling and carrying deep, strong, real emotions toward God, but does not manipulate people's emotions by failing to appeal to clear thinking about spiritual things based on shareable evidences outside ourselves.

Keeping these together, head and heart is the difference between emotion and emotionalism and between intellectual and intellectualism. So here's what I mean by that. If you target only the head, you'll be intellectualistic.

If you target only the emotions, you'll be emotionalistic. But if you target the emotions through the head, you will be truly emotional. And if you target the head for the sake of the emotions, you'll be truly intellectual.

So when you put the little word istic on the end of intellectual or emotional, what you're meaning is you're ripping apart what God has put together, and thus you are manipulating the emotions by doing an en run around the head.

Do it with music, do it with some tone of voice, do it with some look on your face, do it with whatever means you choose. You know how to work an audience, you know. You can get them to laugh and you can get them to cry and you can...

I mean, effective orators are dangerous preachers. And so to know how to work an audience, to get their emotions where you want them, is a dangerous thing, which is why preaching should be expository exaltation.

I do want emotions to flow in our church. I do want actions to change in the lives of our people. But I don't want to do an end run around truth, so that they are emotively driven to those affections or those acts, just because I can somehow pull the strings of their hearts.

Like, tell a story about a lost son. Never refer to the Bible. Just pulling one heart string after the other with some emotion laden illustration. That's very weak preaching. You can build a big church around it.

People think you're very powerful because you touch their hearts emotionally. But there's no truth being built in. No fiber. And that kind of preaching won't help them suffer. It won't help them die. It won't help them take risks.

It just makes them feel touched. Like, you know, like a song on the radio. And it doesn't have to be a Christian song. Just, you know, bridge over troubled waters or something. That, God, it makes you feel good.

There isn't any content that says anything. Just makes you feel good because the tune is so good. Maybe so. A sense of closeness to God that isn't rooted in truth is a fragile sense. So, God is more glorified when known and enjoyed, or enjoyed and known, rather than either alone.

Thinking and feeling can conflict. But in the long run, the tension produces deeper, more durable feeling and wiser thinking. I realize that in targeting the head, that is, in having a kind of preaching that is challenging intellectually, does sometimes work against the emotions temporarily.

Like if you use a hard concept that's difficult to grasp. I mean, deal with something like predestination, say, or election, or the providence of God in suffering. And the mind is being, oh man, how in the world can God be this way and that way?

At that moment, the emotions are not, you know, just praise you, praise you, because they're all confused. If we don't help people through some of those seasons to come out at the other end with deeper confidence in what they do believe about God, their emotions are going to be on sand with regard to the providence of God and suffering in the world and whether God chose them or they chose God, or how did all this work?

So I am willing to risk putting the emotions on hold for a season in order to get the head clarified in the hopes that greater, deeper, stronger emotions will be the product. And I've seen it happen over and over again, that if you can help people over a paradigm shift with regard to the sovereignty of God, then when you visit them in the hospital, when their child is there for six months in the intensive care unit for six months wondering if it's going to live, you see the fruit of that preaching.

I remember when I visit Dave and Laurie Rose week after week, this baby was, what, eight months in the hospital over there? And I wondered the first few times after I went, the baby had been there several weeks, and they weren't giving it very much hope.

I sat with Laurie Rose. How many kids? They have four, I think. And her motherly, profound confidence in the goodness and sovereignty of God rooted in all the things she'd seen of God over the years we spent together here was worth all the preaching you could ever want to do.

Because at that moment, to be sustained in love to God and dependence on God and joy in God didn't just happen because emotions were whipped up around here for eight or ten years, but rather because a vision of God who can handle this and his sovereign in and over and through it sustains those strong emotions.

Earnestness, Intensity, and Serious Joy

Number six, earnestness and intensity, avoiding a trite, flippant, superficial, frivolous atmosphere, but instead setting an example of reverence, passion and wonder. I think that people are really hungry for this, really hungry for this.

And I said last night, the TV is void of this entirely, which is why I think people created in the image of God get hungry for it if they don't become deadened to it. We here at Bethlehem are very serious about being happy in God.

And for many people, those two words cannot go together. Serious about being happy. We are blood earnest about joy. Jokes are rarely fitting. I've never told a joke in the pulpit in 20 years. Never. Not once.

But we laugh as a congregation. Levity makes true worship harder. There is a difference between natural life humor and contrived communication humor. Natural life humor is just what happens in the world.

And sometimes things that happen in the world are absolutely hilarious. And they happen in church, too. And people will... I was trying to get somebody to do the fighter verse two weeks ago. And I said, OK, there's a hand.

And they didn't have their hand up for that. And then somebody at the back was... They stood up to change seats. They'll say, OK, go ahead. And they weren't standing up to give the fighter verse. I'll say, OK.

It happened three times. It was a total bust that morning to try to get the fighter verse. And the story I love to tell is when I was comparing the dolphin with the jellyfish. And I was saying, you want to be a dolphin that cuts through the seas and has a goal and goes where you want to go and not a jellyfish just floating with the tide.

Nobody wants to be a jellyfish, do you? That little girl down here says, I do. Right out loud so everybody in the church could hear. Well, we roar with laughter, as we should have done. We're not so crusty that we think worship can't be connected to that kind of real life humor.

But to be taught homiletically that you got to break the ice of the congregation by starting with a joke, it's just universal. It seems like with some preachers is that you start with a joke. Or some silly little story.

And I think one of the reasons is that when you get people laughing, you know you've had an effect on them and it feels good to have an effect on people. Whereas if you just get right into the truth, you're not sure whether they're being affected or not.

And you'd like to know if they're being affected. And so tell them a little joke. And if they laugh, good, I'm having some effect here. I just think that's weak. I think that's weak. There's enough real life humor that comes out and jokes may have a place.

Otherwise, I don't know many jokes. I tend to forget them all. But I do know some and I like to share them. My dad, my dad loves jokes. Every time he came home from evangelistic crusades, we'd hear two things, the triumphs of God in the salvation of sinners and five new jokes that he learned on the road.

And it's just the way he was and still is.

Yeah. As far as I think that there's maybe the perception of even if you want to look at the Puritans and that the seriousness of their worship, that there is a perception that being happy and joy and all those types of things was really kind of void from that.

Yeah, and I think maybe there's a real understanding that people even now think that that's the way church is.

And so there's an emphasis to try to push it in the extreme. I think that's right. So what he's pointing out is that since the perception in the world and former church goers maybe is that church is boring, it's somber, it's lifeless and joyless.

And so many churches, in order to overcome that preconception, push it the other direction and try to liven it up and make people feel more happy with humor. My approach is just different than that. I think what you work at is intensity and earnestness.

And intensity and earnestness over grace is going to be very joyful. What's wrong in the churches that those people have in their heads is that probably the seriousness did become somber and not joyful.

There is serious joy and there is serious somberness. And serious somberness doesn't own up to the glory of joy. The Bible is just riddled with commands to be happy in God, rejoice in the Lord. And again, I will say rejoice.

Blessed are you when men persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice in that day. And Luke says leap for joy, leap for joy. So Chuck and I, as we talk about how our services work, we talk about the transitions and the flow and the move and that some Sundays there's going to be a real high energy, positive, hand clapping kind of joy.

And other Sundays there's going to be a quiet, peaceful, meditative, deep river running kind of joy. And these can't butt up against very easily each other in one service. Sometimes you can, but that's what we work at a lot is can you?

How do you do it? The question is, what do you do when a congregation laughs at a point where they really shouldn't laugh and it's kind of maybe a relief of tension or something? How do you respond to it?

Frankly, I struggle with that and handle it in different ways at different times. I think you try to discern the moment whether when you said something and you meant it to be serious and even an indictment and they hear it because they're not on your wavelength as something very different.

And there's this Twitter. Do you pause and comment on that or do you keep going without joining them? And that be the comment on that. And I've done it both ways. And I just try to discern at the moment.

I don't want to hurt people to the point where they'll, you know, they're going to get mad at me because I slipped up and left the wrong time. Sorry, you know, or I don't want to do that. But I don't want to pass over it as though that was something that was really funny.

It wasn't funny. Yeah. Just don't join them. You assume you won't. Don't join them. Just be focused. I don't I don't laugh a lot of time. Other people laugh when preachers are speaking. It wasn't funny to you.

Don't laugh. Well, what you think about, think graciously that maybe they're just nervous and needed to laugh in order so they wouldn't cry or in order so that they could give some vent to some deep tension that they're feeling and then pray for them.

I think that's probably the best thing. Do you think something's amiss here? Pray.

Greg, did you have your hand up? Yeah, I guess I just like you to comment for a second. Where do you think Charles Spurgeon as a model of paradigm of ministry would fit into this? I mean, he had a certain amount of jocularity.

I believe that's how he described himself. And when he was strange, Spurgeon, I look at him as a model of ministry in many ways.

And Spurgeon is the one from whom I got the distinction between levity and humor. Spurgeon has a great lecture to his students called humor in the pulpit or something like that or the place of humor. And he makes a distinction between levity, which is kind of the lighthearted, manipulative use of language is constantly saying flippant things and is good at punning and so is always making puns about situations at the most inopportune times.

On the one hand, and humor, which is what I've tried to call natural life humor. Spurgeon, I think, was good at that. I doubt that Spurgeon ever, ever joked in the pulpit. As I read his sermons, there's the only kind of humor you get is humor that is like Jesus humor, which was blood earnest humor.

Like it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get in the kingdom. They probably would. Camel through the eye of a. It was just kind of like it's not a it's not a slapstick kind of situation there.

You've got a big camel, you got a little teeny eye of a needle, a smile comes across your face and then they say, I think he's talking about us. Jesus told no jokes. He rarely ever laughed in the Bible.

Man of sorrow is acquainted with grief.

Quote last night about calling the Pope a liar. We all laughed. I have a feeling that when he wrote that, he probably knew the seriousness of what he was saying. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I wrote an essay. I gave a message on Luther a few years ago, and then I've just put it in a written form. And Luther has some very profound things to say about why he talked the way he talked. He used foul language at times, foul language, bathroom language, four letter words.

Luther was one violent verbal person. And when called on it, he had some pretty remarkable things to say about why he did it. Let me give you what I said in response to Craig about punning and flippancy and levity.

I'll give you an illustration of what I'm against and what I would like to discourage in the pulpit. I think some people like Spurgeon and others are so clever in their minds, they can always think of a funny twist on any sentence or any situation.

And if they don't keep a cap on it, every situation they're constantly making light of with a funny turn. And they are funny, you know, and punning is the most common form of that. I was in an ordination service for David Livingston.

This was what, 25 years ago or so. And the pastor, who was a very good preacher, and I loved him, still do. But he was given to this sort of thing now and then. And it was a holy moment. David was kneeling on the platform and pastors were beginning to gather around him.

And the pastor had called all the ordained people to come and lay their hands on David at this moment of ordination. It was very quiet in the service. Nothing was happening. And he had called them to come, all the pastors to come.

And he knew that there were some out there who hadn't started to come yet, and he wanted them to hurry up. And so he leaned over into the microphone and he said, now, come on, all you shepherds, don't be sheepish.

And there was this very uncomfortable Twitter, as people said, if we don't laugh, he'll feel terrible. If we do laugh, it's totally out of sync with this moment. And they didn't know what to do. It was a terrible thing to say.

Come on, all you shepherds, don't be sheepish. Get on up here. Just a little clever twist on shepherd and sheep. And I would say at that moment, stuff it. Don't say it. Sure, you're clever. That's neat.

But just this is a holy moment here. If you need them to hurry, say, we want to move forward. So let's make it as quickly as we can. Let's pray together. You don't get in the way of a holy moment with a pun.

I really believe there are pastors who are scared to death of seriousness for fear that it's going to start feeling unfriendly. What you said a little bit too somber, a little bit too puritanical here in this moment.

And so they lighten it. They immediately intrude something lightening to get it back up to a more. We just got rid of that moment of somberness. And I don't worry about that. I'm moving always in the other direction.

I want earnestness. I want intensity to me. What's at stake here? I fear heaven and hell are stupendous realities that deserve a certain demeanor. And I so fear that our people are incapable of the kind of intense emotions that belong to heaven and hell that I'm just not interested in lightening things up.

Authentic Communication in Worship

Seven. Authentic communication. This is the seventh mark of worship that we agree on. Authentic communication, the utter renunciation of all sham and deceit and hypocrisy and pretense and affectation and posturing, not the atmosphere of artistic or oratorical performance, but the atmosphere of a radically personal encounter with God.

This would mean manifest vulnerability of the participants that does not give the impression of hiding or flawlessness. I think one of the reasons many unchurched people don't like to go to church is because preacher preachers sound fake.

They just sound fake. They assume a kind of, oh, there's a certain tone of preaching. And I say, that's not real. You don't talk like that. What are you doing? What is that? This is it's like it's like this this posture or this persona comes over a man in the pulpit and he's he's doing this performance thing.

And he's got certain tones of voice and certain religious phrases that he uses and certain gestures and so on. And it just sounds phony. And I'm scared to death of that. I don't know whether I fall into that at times or not, but it is one of my highest fears.

I want to be authentic. So the biggest battle in preaching is not how you say a thing, but are you a certain way? Are you a certain person? Is the love you have for God real love? Is the fear real fear?

Is the shame real shame? Is the tension in the marriage real tension not going to be hit at all? Is your struggle with your own kids real and there and everybody knows about it? Are you trying to constantly bury everything that's bad about you so that everybody thinks you're the perfect preacher?

Yeah. Avoid tones or mannerisms that seem phony or stylized or affected. Standing in front of a mirror, practicing gestures has got to be one of the worst things in the world, I would think. I've never done it and I don't think much about my gestures.