Should I Become a Preacher?
00:00:00.000 | Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:00:06.960 | This podcast launched nine years ago yesterday on
00:00:11.140 | John Piper's 67th birthday.
00:00:13.420 | Amazing.
00:00:14.220 | I'm so grateful to God for his sustaining grace over these nine years.
00:00:18.600 | Uh, someone recently alerted me to the fact that I have now been the host of
00:00:23.740 | this podcast for exactly 20% of my life.
00:00:28.220 | Amazing.
00:00:30.120 | The years have flown by.
00:00:31.300 | Pastor John is no longer 67.
00:00:33.320 | He's now 76 as of yesterday and still at it.
00:00:37.520 | Uh, to celebrate his birthday, we look back on his life today through the lens of
00:00:42.640 | a question when we get a lot, should I become a preacher?
00:00:47.840 | It's a question we get from many men who are thinking about vocation, calling,
00:00:52.080 | and whether ministry is the path laid out for them and in making such a big
00:00:56.400 | decision, many factors must be weighed in.
00:00:58.360 | Of course, a true in Pastor John's case as well.
00:01:01.320 | He shared the story of his path into the pulpit in a new series of preaching
00:01:05.700 | videos we released on YouTube.
00:01:07.320 | Uh, those videos were filmed back when Pastor John was 71 years old.
00:01:12.180 | The videos though are now online and you can find them all on YouTube.
00:01:16.460 | Just go there and search for the preaching class.
00:01:19.320 | Uh, you'll find a playlist comprised of 31 videos.
00:01:22.860 | But today I want to feature the audio from one of the early episodes in that
00:01:26.760 | series, a lecture, lecture number one titled the making of a preacher.
00:01:31.400 | It gets at this question.
00:01:32.920 | Should I become a preacher?
00:01:34.960 | Here's Pastor John's story.
00:01:36.680 | The longer I live and I'm age 71 right now, the longer I live and think about
00:01:52.400 | ministry, the more I believe in the power and the preciousness and the necessity of
00:01:59.480 | preaching in the life of the church.
00:02:02.160 | Some of you are watching this maybe age 40, 50 as a businessman, wondering if you
00:02:12.800 | should become a preacher.
00:02:14.000 | Others of you might be 15 years old, others in school, in college or seminary.
00:02:20.320 | And what I thought might be helpful to do immediately in this series on preaching is
00:02:27.240 | to tell my story.
00:02:29.520 | You might call it the making of a preacher because it's a story of quite significant
00:02:37.960 | improbabilities and you may feel that way about yourself.
00:02:41.640 | And so let me give you the short version of the things in my background that stand
00:02:48.720 | out to me as difficult and obstacles to preaching and yet which turned out to be, I
00:02:56.320 | think, the very forge in which God fired and made a preacher.
00:03:03.920 | So let's start at seventh grade.
00:03:08.080 | Right around seventh grade, I discovered the fact that I couldn't speak in front of a
00:03:18.080 | group without freezing.
00:03:20.520 | Now, this is not your ordinary butterflies that everybody jokes about.
00:03:27.600 | It's not your funny knocking of the knees and, oh, you'll get over it.
00:03:32.200 | This was a paralysis.
00:03:35.080 | This was really deep.
00:03:37.640 | I, to this day, do not understand what it was, where it came from, why it was there in
00:03:44.200 | its entirety anyway.
00:03:45.720 | The full explanation, I think I know part of why God did it.
00:03:49.600 | But there I am now entering junior and high school, junior high and high school, and
00:03:57.120 | terrified in a paralyzing kind of way of any kind of public speaking, like in front of
00:04:05.280 | six people at church or a class at school.
00:04:09.400 | So, for example, ninth grade science class, we all had to read a one paragraph.
00:04:17.120 | You're talking one paragraph description of our project.
00:04:22.560 | And she, the teacher, was just going down the row.
00:04:25.800 | We'd walk up to the front, read the paragraph so the class knew what you were working on.
00:04:30.120 | And as it was coming down my row toward me, I looked down.
00:04:34.800 | I could see, I could see my heart beating through my shirt here.
00:04:40.720 | And when it got to the person just behind me as he was going up to speak, I stood up
00:04:46.960 | and walked out of the class and went to the bathroom and cried.
00:04:50.440 | I wasn't going to do it.
00:04:52.160 | I couldn't do it.
00:04:53.200 | And I told her afterwards I couldn't do it.
00:04:56.680 | Tenth grade, Mr. Vermillion was my civics teacher, and he announced on the first day
00:05:05.600 | of class that there would be an oral book report that everybody had to give.
00:05:10.960 | And my heart absolutely sank.
00:05:14.160 | I felt my throat and my shoulders freezing up.
00:05:17.880 | So I walked up to him afterwards and I said, Mr. Vermillion, I can't do that.
00:05:24.280 | And he said, well, Johnny, you can't get better than a C in this class if you don't do it.
00:05:30.720 | And I said, that's fine.
00:05:31.920 | I'll take a C. And I got a C because I wasn't going to do it.
00:05:36.240 | I couldn't do it.
00:05:37.120 | I never ran for any class office, you know, president of the class, vice president, secretary,
00:05:43.080 | anything like that, because I knew you had to give speeches.
00:05:46.160 | When I was in the 10th grade, my mother, now this was before any Christian psychology at all.
00:05:51.720 | We're talking what, 1961 or two.
00:05:55.040 | She took me to a psychologist because it was so painful and difficult and felt like it was just a
00:06:03.040 | pall over everything in my life.
00:06:05.160 | And the psychologist had me look at these, today I think I'd call them Rorschach charts, and just say what I saw.
00:06:12.280 | And after an hour of this, I could tell that this psychologist was suggesting my mother was the problem.
00:06:21.000 | Well, you could believe this is not making me happy because there was one person in the universe under God who
00:06:29.520 | understood me, loved me, was patient with me, helped me work through this.
00:06:33.760 | And it was my mother.
00:06:34.600 | And there was no way I was going to blame her.
00:06:38.080 | So we never went back to that.
00:06:40.320 | So I come to the end of high school, having skipped every possible way of speaking in front of a group and at
00:06:46.960 | church and headed off to college with the most dreadful fear and trembling because I knew at Wheaton
00:06:54.160 | College, there was a required speech class.
00:06:57.880 | In 1966, between my sophomore and junior year, Evan Welch, the chaplain, came up to me during summer school
00:07:16.640 | when I was taking chemistry to catch up with a pre-med plan.
00:07:21.160 | And I was all excited that maybe God was making clear my life plan to be a medical doctor.
00:07:27.600 | And I was going to catch up with my science prerequisites and take chemistry.
00:07:31.720 | And he said, "Would you pray in chapel tomorrow?"
00:07:42.120 | And I found myself saying, "How long does it have to be?"
00:07:46.920 | Now, there's about 500 people come to summer school chapel, as I recall.
00:07:50.960 | And he said, "30 seconds, a minute."
00:07:56.080 | And I do not know how or why it happened, but I said, "Yes."
00:08:06.880 | Then I remember walking out on front campus alone and dealing with God.
00:08:12.640 | I haven't made many vows in my life, but I made one.
00:08:17.080 | And I said this, "Father, if you would just get me through this, just get me through it so that I don't
00:08:27.240 | freeze and my voice doesn't stop, I will never turn down a speaking opportunity for you again out of fear."
00:08:38.760 | That was a really scary vow.
00:08:42.960 | He did get me through.
00:08:46.800 | I think I've kept the vow and something broke.
00:08:55.440 | I went to seminary.
00:08:57.280 | Well, let me give you one more piece at college.
00:09:01.240 | That fall, I got mono and spent three weeks in the infirmary.
00:09:09.000 | And during those three weeks, I was listening to Harold John Ockengay preach in the chapel a couple hundred yards away.
00:09:17.560 | And everything in me wanted to handle the Bible like that.
00:09:24.640 | And after three weeks, I knew I couldn't catch up in organic chemistry.
00:09:28.840 | And God basically said in his way, "I don't want you to do medical anyway.
00:09:37.600 | You should go to seminary and know my word."
00:09:40.120 | That's what I did.
00:09:41.720 | Married Noel, went off to seminary, spent three years loving, studying the Bible, knew that my call was to the word.
00:09:49.640 | I didn't know what I'd do with it.
00:09:51.000 | Didn't know if I could ever preach.
00:09:54.000 | I won the Clarence Roddy Preaching Award my senior year.
00:09:59.920 | You can listen to this 18-minute sermon at the Desiree God website.
00:10:05.080 | I listened to part of it.
00:10:06.080 | Can't believe it.
00:10:07.040 | I was 28 years old.
00:10:08.960 | No, no, 25 years old, I suppose, when I gave it.
00:10:11.480 | And I used "Big Bad John," which was a song popular in those days, to illustrate Ephesians 1.6.
00:10:20.200 | And I was just amazed.
00:10:22.720 | I was absolutely amazed that I was standing in front of several hundred seminary students and faculty preaching this senior sermon.
00:10:32.200 | I went off to graduate school because I didn't know what else to do.
00:10:36.480 | I didn't feel any particular call to any avenue of ministry.
00:10:40.600 | And six years into teaching, which I loved, something rumbled inside me I could not resist.
00:10:50.200 | I was being pushed by a kind of disillusionment with the romance of academia.
00:10:55.360 | And I was being pulled by every sermon I heard because I said, if it was a good sermon, I'd love to do that.
00:11:02.880 | And if it was a bad sermon, I'd say, we got to do better than that.
00:11:06.840 | And on October 14, 1979, late at night, writing in my journal, I could resist this desire no longer.
00:11:17.920 | And I said to Noelle in the morning, what would you think if I resigned my teaching and looked for a church?
00:11:23.120 | And she said, I could see that coming.
00:11:25.000 | And that's what I did for the next 33 years, I preached.
00:11:30.040 | So as I look back over that story that brings me today, it's not the kind of story I would have planned.
00:11:41.920 | I wouldn't want to live my teenage years over again at all.
00:11:45.520 | They were not very happy years, at least not at one level.
00:11:50.680 | And as I look back, all I can say is that all the sorrows as well as the happiness, God was making a preacher.
00:11:58.640 | Not at all the way you would expect him to make a preacher.
00:12:02.760 | And so for you, the implication is you have no idea.
00:12:06.600 | You have no idea what he's doing in your life.
00:12:11.880 | And so trust him and then walk through the open doors where you feel called.
00:12:17.800 | Amen. That was the audio taken from Lecture #1, The Making of a Preacher.
00:12:23.120 | One video among 30 others and a playlist you can find right now for free on YouTube.
00:12:29.160 | Search for The Preaching Class.
00:12:31.240 | It's a feast for the preacher or for the aspiring preacher.
00:12:34.840 | Check it out.
00:12:35.360 | Thanks for joining us today.
00:12:37.680 | You can ask a question of your own.
00:12:39.200 | Search our growing archive or subscribe to the podcast all at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:12:46.520 | I am your host, Tony Reinke.
00:12:49.360 | We'll see you back here on Friday.
00:12:51.080 | We're going to talk to a listener who lives in Nairobi, Kenya, who is suffering with multiple personal disabilities that is intruding on his life, making his life unfruitful.
00:13:02.320 | And he wants to know how to go forward.
00:13:04.080 | Really good, important question that we need to address.
00:13:06.920 | We will next time on Friday.
00:13:08.280 | We'll see you then.
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