Episode 50: Repreaching Sermons

To the Ruled Church podcast.

Christ the King and the Local Church

This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas? You see that one in Pechote, Mexico?

Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king.

You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Hey, we're actually doing a podcast together.

It's episode 50, and we're both here. I don't remember the date we started, but we've been doing this for a year, really, when this comes out, I think we started like the 1st of August.

I think so, yeah.

So by the time this comes out, this'll come out like mid-August. We're over a year in straight.

Yeah.

Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. Podcast, podcast, I'm your co-host, Allen Nelson with me as my, in live, in person, for the first, well, you guys are listening live, but for the first time all summer, pretty much.

Eddie Ragsdale. Say hello, Eddie.

Hello, everyone. Man, it was good to see you last week. We both just got back from a conference this last weekend at Lee Creek Baptist Church, and hosted by our brother, Harold Smith, and Joseph Allen, who's the pastor there, and really had a great weekend.

That's one of the highlights of the year for me, is getting to gather with all of you brothers, and hear great preaching, and I'll tell ya, don't take this the wrong way, because you weren't preaching this year, Quatro, but I thought the sermons from first to last were as good as they've ever been at Preachers of Grace this year.

The whole thing was good. It was an encouraging time. The fellowship, lots of folks this year. I know the church really worked hard, because I could tell they were never slowing down serving us and stuff, because they could never take a break, because there were just so many people this year.

Yeah, yeah.

So give me an update, a little bit, I mean, some of the stuff's come out. The episode today that came out was you and Gunnar talking about the trip to Fayetteville. How's your summer been going?

Well, we've been busy. My son and I have been working at a camp, running a horse program. So I've been doing that of a morning, and then still basically doing everything that I normally do with church and everything.

So it's been almost like two full-time jobs for the last six or seven weeks. But we got all that wrapped up last week. And so I told my wife yesterday, I said, this week, I feel like I'm ahead for the first time.

I felt behind for the last two months, always behind. And I know, Quatro, you'll be able to probably identify with this too, a little bit, most pastors will. But while I've been in this busy season, it was always like, oh no, Sunday is coming.

And I told my wife, I said, for the first time in several weeks, it was Tuesday yesterday, and I told her, I said, I'm excited for Sunday to get here. I want it to get here. I'm ready to preach because I feel ahead of the game.

I think summertime, sometimes for pastors, seems even busier. We went to Mexico earlier. We've had some other things going on. I've got, next week, I'll actually be at church camp. I'm looking forward to August.

August will be kind of a slowdown. Then we turn around in September. I'm going back to Mexico, and I'll also be going to G3 to help Grace Bible Theological Seminary and help run that booth. So it's been crazy, but that's ministry season.

And then we turn around in October. Stephanie is due then, so that's, it never slows down sometimes. Seasons go up and down.

Re-preaching Sermons Without Laziness

But I think it's kind of leads.

Into what we're going to talk about today. What we want to talk about is re-preaching old sermons and or looking at books, tackling books again that you've tackled before as a pastor. So when you're in a busy season, like when is it okay to look back at something you've preached before?

When is it time to revisit a book? So that's our topic today. So let's get into that. So Eddie, have you ever re-preached old sermons?

Well, I have re-preached old sermons a few times. I think it kind of depends on what kind of a preacher you are. If a person, and I know, Quatro, you preach for more of a manuscript than I do. So probably I'm assuming that if you pull out a sermon from two years ago to use, maybe you got called on to preach at a conference or something, there may be more content that would be the same for you just because you've got more on the page.

I preach from a pretty succinct outline. And so my illustrations are almost always gonna be pretty contemporary to what I'm experiencing right then because they're probably not even on the page.

You know, that's an encouragement on the front end to put that stuff down, even if you don't preach from a manuscript.

That's true, yes.

To write out a manuscript because later on, you put all that work, you put all that study in, it could be beneficial later on. And I have some thoughts on it, but go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah, but when we were talking before we started recording about this topic, so there's the issue of re-preaching sermons, which I think, honestly, I think it's something that we should do if we have opportunities, especially to preach to different audiences because you're probably gonna deliver it better if you've preached it a time or two.

But I think there's also the issue of just when do we go back over maybe a book that we've already preached through and we teach it even in another setting. So maybe we preach through a book on a Sunday morning and now we're talking about, would we wanna do a Sunday school class walking through that same book?

Or would we wanna do a Wednesday night study that's gonna be a little different than the way you preach through it on Sunday morning when you're doing it more interactive on say a Wednesday night or a Sunday school, you know what I'm saying, in a different format, maybe studying it more as a group.

Yeah, I think that a couple of things I wanna say. First, I do wanna make a note about re-preaching sermons. I think it's fine, I think it can be helpful. I think it can also be done out of laziness and that it would be something we wanna caution against.

You know, if you're busy in the summer and you pull out a couple of older sermons that you've done a few years ago and you wanna dust them off, as it were, look over, this year, this year, I did, I've done this a couple of times this year.

So when I first got here in 2016, I preached a sermon, Good News for Dry Bones from Ezekiel 37. Well, on our trip to Mexico, I happened to come across it. I re-listened to it. I was like, whoa, my voice was higher pitch, but I was like, you know what?

Seven years later, I'd like to re-preach this sermon and kind of with some updates. And so that's what I did. Also in Mexico, I preached a sermon on 2 Kings 2 and the she bears and Elisha. And when I came back from Mexico, I preached it to our congregation as well.

So those are a couple of things recently that have happened, but it wasn't done out of laziness. It was just done out of a couple of things. One, being busy, but also wanting to share these things with the congregation.

I thought they were helpful. But so if you're just doing it because your week has been misprioritized or something like that, well, that's problematic.

Yes, yes.

And then the other thing I wanna say is right now, we're going through the Sermon on the Mount on Sunday nights. That's something I went through eight years ago at Emmanuel.

Yeah, I remember.

And so I'm able to go back and really use those outlines and adapt them and work through them. And it's a Sunday night thing. And so it's a little bit, it saves me some time, but I put a lot of time on the front end, and I'm able to go back and kind of figure out where I was, my thought process.

For the most part, there's been a few things, but for the most part, I'm like, okay, I think this has been helpful. Sometimes, we all grow. Hopefully you're growing up. I think it was Wesley or something that said he threw out a sermon every seven years or something like that.

And I'm like, not Wesley Brown, John Wesley. And I say, you know what, I don't know.

I think it's

About the Whitfield scholar.

Right, right.

That's kind of arbitrary. If you want to do that, you know, whatever, that's fine. But I think that doing the work on the front end, taking good notes, even writing out a manuscript, even if you don't use it, could be really helpful, you know, down the road.

Go ahead.

Well, I was just going to add, I totally agree. It doesn't want to be a crutch. We don't want it to be a crutch so that we can be lazy. We want to guard against that. I think that is especially true in the ministry just because you don't have a boss looking over your shoulder.

Hey, how many hours were you in the office this week? Are you even doing anything? That we want to be careful that we don't allow ourselves to become lazy in our preparation. But I would also say, you know, if you get called on last minute, maybe somebody else is supposed to preach and you get the call, hey, he's sick, and now you've got to preach.

That might be a time when, hey, you're going to actually do the best thing for your people by preaching something that you have studied and prepared at another time and preached at another time, because at least you studied and prepared it while I'm just going to flip my Bible open and spontaneously speak from a text that I haven't had time to study.

So it can go either way, but we want to say it's not an excuse to be lazy when we're reusing material. And I would actually say, even when we're reusing material, we need to take the time to read through the text several times, pray through the text so that we're prepared to present it.

Fresh.

Yeah, and even as we're saying, like we're saying it's permissible, we're saying it can even be good, but really it's more rare in the course of a year. You know, I mean, it's really rare. Sadly, a lot of guys, I've heard this old adage, you know, don't stay at a church more than just a few years because that's all the sermons they have.

And then they go to, you know, and then they go to another church, preach those same sermons again. And for the most part, that's not good, that's lazy. Like we're called to a high caliber of study. And so there's not a problem in and of itself of re-preaching old sermons, as long as we're not being lazy, we're counting our calling and duty before us as high, worthy, we're giving due diligence.

Revisiting Sermon Series in a New Context

But then the other question that we kind of talking about is, okay, so when do you take a sermon series and you maybe look at it at a different context? And I think that's good. But for me, I mean, the first thing I wanna say is it's probably gonna be separated by a few years.

You know, I mean, like we're looking through Ephesians right now, a couple of things I wanna say about that. We're going so slow through the book of Ephesians. We may look at Ephesians again in a couple of years in Sunday school, but very seriously doubt that we would go through it at the pace that we're going through on Sunday mornings.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

But a lot of the research, a lot of the study, a lot of the time spent is gonna bleed over, but I'd very seriously doubt I'd go through it. You know, the same way, a couple of reasons for that. One thing I wanna say is this, we wanna be careful in prizing expositional preaching, of which I'm a fan, which I think the mainstay of our preaching ought to be expositional preaching through books of the Bible.

One negative of expositional preaching, and particularly, you know, you wanna do due diligence with the book, is not getting the full counsel.

Right, that's what I was thinking too.

So if you wanna do Ephesians, for example, and then you turn around and do Ephesians in Sunday school, well, that's a lot of time spent in Ephesians, you know, which there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying there'll be times, maybe do Ephesians on Sunday morning, and maybe you'd like to turn around and do Genesis, you know, in Sunday school.

But the reality is, with ministry, you only have so much time. And so it's like, maybe in a couple of years, if we were to revisit Ephesians in Sunday school, that would free up more time for more in-depth study, you know, as long as we're not being lazy with it, and we're balancing our time well, I definitely think it's okay.

I don't have a time period though, but I wouldn't turn around. I certainly wouldn't preach Ephesians on Sunday morning, and then turn around and the very next thing, also be doing it in Sunday school.

That would be a lot.

Right.

Well, and I think the interesting thing you were bringing up about preaching the whole counsel of God, you know, as a pastor, I often look at it, and this may be wrong, but I've heard comedians, I listened to some podcasts by some comedians, and I've heard them kind of talk about burning material.

You know, sometimes comedians can think, well, if I put this out on YouTube, then it's out there and I can't use it. Well, you can use it, because people want to hear the jokes again. But as pastors, I think sometimes we can almost have a mindset like, oh man, once I preach through this, you know, maybe we're looking at a John MacArthur and we're thinking he preached through the whole Bible.

He preached through the whole Bible. That took him, you know, 50 years. But if I'm going to get through the whole Bible, I can't be re-preaching stuff that I've already preached. It's going to take every week to get through the whole thing.

However, this is the issue where we're at in our church. Our church has changed so much in the last few years that honestly, the majority of our church today didn't hear when we went through some of the books we went through the first three years I was here.

They weren't, those people weren't here. So going through it again would be new to them. And I don't even mean me pulling out the old sermon so much as even just walking through the book again, doing all the study again, like not as a way to shorten it up to just, I'm really thinking about not so much the advantage to my preparation as I'm thinking about, is this something they need to hear?

I've already preached it before, but they need to hear it.

And I need to say this. And so if you get your feelings hurt easy as a preacher, you might want to mute for the next couple of minutes, but I'm just going to go ahead and say this. If you were to preach the same exact sermon for three weeks in a row, most people in your congregation, what I'm saying is you're not such a good communicator that everybody's going to get it the first time anyway.

Yeah.

I'm not, understand, I'm not advocating doing that. I'm just saying that we prize our preaching better sometimes than people actually are absorbing it. And so if you were even to ask on Sunday night, could you regurgitate the three points from this morning or whatever?

There's a lot of people that couldn't. And part of that might be on them. Part of that's on you. And then part of that is just a reality that we live in a fallen world with fallen brains and all that.

All I'm saying is we think, man, if I were to re-preach this, everybody remember the whole thing. And it's like, well, no, because even the ones that were there, they're going to benefit from it. And listen, here's the deal.

We're talking about the word of God, right?

Yeah.

So again, we're not advocating laziness. We're not advocating just doing it just because you wanted to focus extra time on whatever. We're talking about in those seasons when you re-preach something, it can still be good, and your people can benefit from it.

So here's the real life scenario we're looking at here at Marshall. We just finished the last question in the Baptist Catechism last Wednesday night. We've been going through the Baptist Catechism. We're done.

We just finished ours.

Yeah, good.

And so we're kind of glad to be done. We were a little tired of it. I'll just be honest. And so what we want to do next is we want to do a more inductive type study on Wednesday nights. That's what we're going to do this fall.

So now we got to pick a book. And so I'm looking for books and I'm thinking about going back over a book because I want to do something shorter. I want to do an epistle. I think that'll be easier for us kind of getting into this kind of study.

Well, I've preached through several of those. I'm preaching through Philippians right now. So we're looking at something like Titus, 2 Timothy, 1 Peter, something like that probably. Well, I've preached through some of those at Marshall already a few years ago.

But I'm thinking it probably would be beneficial for us to work through them because it's not exactly the same as me preaching it if we're studying it inductively. And the different context goes along with the fact that there's been some time, there's been some new people come and all those kinds of things.

So I like for us practically right now, it's a matter of, do we have to pick a book that we haven't touched since I've been the pastor here? Or are we looking at, no, it's time to come back to something that we've been studying?

Expositional Preaching and the Whole Counsel of God

Yeah, I think there can be pros and cons to both. I think the pros to revisiting is it's something you're already familiar with. It, you enter in with a level of expertise, a little bit level of expertise.

Now, as a pastor, especially when it comes to epistles, you should have, I'm not talking about you, Eddie, I'm just talking about our listeners. Like you should have a brief familiarity with the epistles.

You know, like if you feel like, what's this epistle about? You should know because you're a regular Bible reader. That's right. But as you've taught through one, you enter into that with a little level of expertise.

Two, you've grown. And the last time you taught it, say two years ago or whatever, you're a different pastor than you were two years ago. You've grown, you're closer to Christ. You love the Bible more.

All these things have happened. Another thing is it helps you, okay, with your preps. So for me, now Jacob takes some of this now, but on a typical week, I can have Wednesday night, Sunday school, Sunday morning, Sunday night.

Okay. Now do the math and do the John MacArthur method and study 40 hours for each one of them.

Right?

Right.

And you have all those children.

Yeah.

And I've got children. Just this week, just last night, I spent about three hours after work, so to speak, visiting some people, two different families, you know, and all this stuff just kind of happens in any typical week.

And so again, it's not laziness, but it's good to say, okay, I have one prep, say you're going to go through Titus, have one prep that I've done a lot of the front end work. Now I'm not just going to ignore it and just like try to teach it on the whim, like from a few years ago, but I've got a lot of the front end work done.

I'm revisiting it. I'm adding things that I missed the first time, or I'm able to where I, maybe I preached it and I was only able to spend so much time on this point and just move on. Well, now we can discuss it, you know?

And so definitely think that, definitely think we should tap into those things when it seems practicable in a given ministry season.

Yeah.

And I think we also have to realize there's an advantage to having a variety of the different genres of scripture that we're going to so that we're not always, like a person could say, well, I don't re-preach anything, but you could spend 10 years going through Paul's epistles and you re-preached a lot of stuff, even though you technically didn't preach the same passage, but you did preach the same thing in Colossians that you preached in Ephesians because Paul said the same thing.

Yeah.

You did preach the same thing in Romans that you preached in Ephesians because Paul said the same thing, right? And, or you had Galatians 4 and you have Romans 8. Well, Paul says the same thing, you know, in those passages and you say, well, I didn't preach the same thing.

Well, you did because you stayed in this one genre, this one place in the Bible and you didn't go to the gospels. You didn't go to Genesis. You didn't go to the prophets. You didn't, you're not giving your church a well-balanced diet of God's word if you just said, hey, I'm gonna preach all of Paul's epistles only for the next 10 years or I'm gonna preach just the gospels or something.

And I wanna say this too, and actually I wanted to mention this earlier when we're talking about preaching the whole council, good expository preaching, let's say you're preaching through Matthew, you are going inevitably, you have to address the whole council.

Even though you're just preaching through Matthew, a good expositional preaching, like we have this idea and there's different flavors out there of expositional preaching. There are some flavors of expositional preaching that only want to deal with that particular book.

They don't want to deal with cross references and they don't want to deal. And I understand that to an extent. And I will say, if you're preaching from Matthew 5, preach Matthew 5. I don't wanna hear all these different verses, like just preach the text.

However, there will be times inevitably you'll have to be going to other passages and you should go to other passages.

Jesus is referencing the law, so you gotta look at it.

That's right. And sometimes, not everybody does this, but sometimes I'll take a sermon and I may leave Matthew. It's still kind of within the context of going through Matthew, but we'll go back and say, okay, well, let's look at this.

And I think that everybody's got their own kind of expertise and convictions and those sorts of things. But I think it's helpful when preaching through books of the Bible to do that kind of stuff sometimes, because that allows you to preach through the book of the Bible and to get the whole counsel.

So, yeah. I mean, I think overall what we're saying is it's okay to re-preach sermons as long as you're not being lazy. And it'll take some wisdom, although that shouldn't be the mainstay. I mean, it's still pretty rare in the course of a year.

You know, and I know this is getting a little bit outside of pastoral ministry, but years ago, this has been 20 years ago, I can remember taking kids to church camp. And this is not a rant about church camp, but I think it was the third time I'd been to church camp with this same speaker.

And I was like, I think they could have just had me come and repeat those, because I've heard those sermons.

Yeah.

Like I know those stories.

Yeah.

They were the same five sermons.

Yeah.

It just had them memorized. They were the same five sermons. And I do think, you know, it's different for pastors, of course, because we're not preaching to different congregations. But at the same time, our goal is not just to be presenters.

It is to be students of the word.

And I would even say

And if all we're becoming is, man, I've got a top five sermons or a top 12 sermons to pick from, and I can really do those well, but we're not even getting deeper into the scriptures, that's gonna be bad for our hearers, because it's bad for us.

You know, Paul tells Timothy that it's gonna be good for him and his hearers.

Yeah.

There at the end of 1 Timothy chapter three, so, or four, 1 Timothy chapter four. So we wanna be, we wanna do what is not only good for us, but good for our hearers.

And I would say like, even if you're itinerant preacher, evangelist, camp speaker, like obviously you're gonna preach some messages more than once, and that's okay. But if you find yourself never preparing fresh sermons, that's a problem.

And I'm gonna say this, the way that you cultivate new sermons is actually not thinking about sermons. The way that you cultivate new sermons is to spend time with God.

Amen, that's right.

And if you just sit now, like, that's what happened. I preached recently from Zechariah four, and the reason that I preached from that is that had kind of come up just in some Bible reading and study.

I wasn't even thinking about sermon. I was just studying, and it was like, the text was so rich, and it was like, I felt a fire in my bones, as it were, like, I wanna preach this. Well, that's how, as a evangelist, itinerant, camp, those sorts of things, you ought to be so wrapped up in the word of God that like, there's a freshness, you know?

And it's a problem, if you're not fresh, then why would you expect a freshness to happen, like, we're not presenters, right? Like you said, like, we have a sacred duty to proclaim the word of God. And the same I would say to pastors, as exhibitional preaching, obviously, it's different.

We know where we're gonna preach, we're in the book and all that, but it's like, the source material for your, the overflow of your preaching ought to be time in the word of God. We talked about this when we talked about Whitefield.

Whitefield spent so much time, especially early on, in the word of God that that carried him through in many seasons, such a well to draw from because his mind and heart was so saturated in the scriptures.

And our experiences can have something to do with that too. You know, Gunnar and I went to the pride parade and done evangelism there. And then the day before that, me and my family and a brother in our church had went to the new Mormon temple in Bentonville, Arkansas and toured that and got to have some conversations with some Mormons there, just trying to engage, you know, apologetically with them while we were there.

And so coming out of that weekend where I had those two experiences, first Peter 3 .15 was just on my heart in a fresh way. And so the last two weeks at our church, we stepped out of Philippians and I preached a couple of sermons from first Peter chapter three, just because that was so fresh on my heart because of what those experiences that I felt like I need to preach this right now.

Amen.

And that's a good word, like in expositional preaching, like again, we're proponents of it. We think it should be the mainstay. But if you're holding that so tight, if you're holding that so tight that you spent time with the Lord this week, a passage just jumped out to you, it's just like a fire, but you're like, well, I can't do this because I'm going through Philippians, you know.

That's honestly, that's a problem.

Yeah, yeah, we can make an idol out of that.

You can actually make an idol of expositional preaching.

Well, and let's say this too, let's just define real quick. I still would say, I think sometimes people hear expositional and they think that only means verse by verse. I would say I did expositional preaching from first Peter chapter three.

They were expositional sermons. They just weren't, I wasn't preaching the whole book of first Peter.

Yeah, but you broke out of your series, you know.

I broke out of my series, but I think it's important for people to realize we should always be expositing the text, even if it's a one-off sermon. So even like we heard a couple of good topical sermons this weekend, but even in those places where we heard brothers purposely speaking topically because we were at a conference, they were still expositing texts.

They were still talking about what was in the Bible verses. And so we still wanna say, it's not just expository because you are technically preaching the next verse. Because I would say there's a lot of people who they go verse by verse, but verse by verse just gives them topic by topic because they just pick a topic out of the verse and then preach on that.

They don't really preach on what's in the verse. So we always wanna be expositing what's in God's word. But yeah, we shouldn't feel shackled. Like I've started in Ephesians, so that's the only thing I can preach for the next five years.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I've happened a couple of times this year, it's happened. We paused Ephesians and preached through 10 distinctives of our church just because of things going on. We stopped Ephesians in July just because of busyness and those sorts of things.

But it's okay. Your responsibility is to shepherd the flock, to feed the flock, the word of God. Again, expository preaching, I think, is the way to preach. It's the mainstay of our preaching, but it's not all that we do in preaching.

And if we're holding it so tightly that we can never, even on these days of the year that we fight about or whatever, it's like, it's okay. Some years I've addressed godly moms and godly dads in Mother's Day and Father's Day.

Some years I just haven't. Some years, well, I mean, I've just stayed with the text. Some years I've pulled away and said, hey, let's look at this passage. And it's just, it really is, there's a lot more fighting about it than should be.

Our responsibility is to feed the flock. We've kind of straight off subject and we'll kind of land the plane here. But the point is, I think you should do due diligence and preparation upfront that later on in your ministry you could use.

So for example, next week at church camp, I'm gonna preach Jonah. And that's coming from my preaching through Jonah here. I think it can be helpful. I think that it's okay at times to revisit things you've done and to use those to learn from it, to grow and to bring glory to God.

And even the new person that you are now, you're not the same preacher. It won't, and it won't ultimately be. I don't know that I've ever, technically preached the same sermon twice. It's like stepping in the same river twice, as they say.

There's always gonna be a little bit of difference. But anyway, brother, you have any kind of final thoughts?

The last thing I'll say is I do think there are opportunities for material that we've used to be presented in another way that's beneficial. I'm not an author, but I was listening to something the other day and it was just talking about how that, several sermons that a certain preacher had done over the years became this book or that book.

I know like for you, it was your sermons through Isaiah and Revelation four became before the throne. And so it doesn't just have to be, well, I preached through this, now that goes on the shelf. Well, maybe you've preached through it, but maybe you write some blog articles off of those sermons a year later.

That'd probably be helpful. Maybe you write a book like you did if you have that kind of skill. But we shouldn't say, well, I guess I've done Jonah, Jonah goes on the shelf, never to darken the door of Jonah again.

Well, no, you got the whole Bible, let's use it.

Yeah, amen. Yeah, that's good. If you're called upon a teacher, this or that, maybe at this place, a new place where you're, they call you and say, hey, could you come teach us any about Jonah? You pull that stuff, you refresh and you're ready.

So yeah, I think there is a way to do it wrongly. There's a way to be lazy and there's a way that you will have to, you will stand before Christ to give an account, he knows. But as a general rule, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with revisiting sermons and revisiting series.