I am a pastor at 
I am sitting here doing some study / preliminary work on my sermon for this weekend. We’ve starting the book of Ephesians and I’m taking in Ephesians 1:3-10. Its a quite a full passage and I’m looking forward to the challenge of preaching on it.
But for some reason, my mind is going to the idea that pastors need to be doing their own personal reading (call it devotions if you want) outside of the text they are preaching for the week.
I get the concept behind that.
But now I’m wondering, is this because we’re trained to approach the text that we are preaching in a way that doesn’t effect or transform our lives?
We encourage those who are part of The Well to sit with this text during the week and let it be part of their regular reading. But, as the pastor, that’s not good enough? I need to read beyond that?
When I study a text for a week that I am preaching I am doing background work and (some) language work. But, I am also sitting with the text all week long, keeping it in on the front of my brain all week long and letting it become infused in my daily life. Sounds pretty devotional to me.
The question for me is, am I doing this with the text when I am not preaching?
That’s another story altogether.
I guess my point is, as pastors, we better be taking in the text we are preaching in a way that it can transform our own lives, or we’re probably better off not preaching it at all.
And when we’re not preaching, we’d better be doing it too…
Now I am preaching at myself…
Chris Marlow said...
1I never bought into the “double-devotion” philosophy. It’s not like i’m a professional 1 minute and a disciple the next. Makes no sense to me.
09/22/08 5:26 PM | Comment Link
Pat said...
2When I was regularly preaching, I often found myself reading Scripture and thinking about how I could preach it, or what it would mean to my community and individuals within it, but thinking more in terms of “the other” than “myself”.
So I set myself a goal. I would always be embedding myself in at least two places in Scripture: One that the community was ingesting, and another that was just mine. I needed both, and frankly I’m not sure that any Christian can be well formed by trying to live into only one passage of Scripture a week.
Usually that means to me that the Psalms are mine. They often don’t preach well anyway, except the impreccatory psalms, and I connect well with them.
For my own time (and I hate the word “devotional” as it conjures up simplistic little books I read while on the toilet ;-)), I don’t have the same need for historical exegesis, geographic study, first century cultural criticism, etc. I do more lectio divina by myself than systematic study, I guess.
09/22/08 7:01 PM | Comment Link
Todd said...
3Pat, great call on the psalms. eugene peterson has almost convinced me of the same thing. i would say i was convinced fully if i were actually doing that as much as i wanted to! but yeah, the psalms are great that way.
09/24/08 9:02 AM | Comment Link
tghali said...
4I guess it’s because I am so holy but I never had a problem with separate devotions or meditating all week on a particular text.
My comment is comparing apples and oranges, so know that I understand that. I used to preach about once a month and completely understand the idea behind of what you are saying.
As a youth pastor for 8 years, I generally stick with one main text and possibly a supporting text or two (and that many has the potential to become distracting to my audience). This week I’ve been mediating on I Cor. 12 (the body of Christ). Reading it various translations, checking out the commentaries, and just thinking about it.
My problem is that I need something else to offset thinking about a particular passage because (God forgive me for my deficiencies) I get bored thinking about one thing only.
I’m writing tongue-in-cheek here but what I really want to say is many times when we create any time of rule or standard concerning things like “devotions” and “quiet times”, we either fall into legalism or lead others into it.
09/26/08 3:52 PM | Comment Link