Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. This podcast launched nine years ago yesterday on John Piper's 67th birthday. Amazing. I'm so grateful to God for his sustaining grace over these nine years. Uh, someone recently alerted me to the fact that I have now been the host of this podcast for exactly 20% of my life.

Amazing. The years have flown by. Pastor John is no longer 67. He's now 76 as of yesterday and still at it. Uh, to celebrate his birthday, we look back on his life today through the lens of a question when we get a lot, should I become a preacher? It's a question we get from many men who are thinking about vocation, calling, and whether ministry is the path laid out for them and in making such a big decision, many factors must be weighed in.

Of course, a true in Pastor John's case as well. He shared the story of his path into the pulpit in a new series of preaching videos we released on YouTube. Uh, those videos were filmed back when Pastor John was 71 years old. The videos though are now online and you can find them all on YouTube.

Just go there and search for the preaching class. Uh, you'll find a playlist comprised of 31 videos. But today I want to feature the audio from one of the early episodes in that series, a lecture, lecture number one titled the making of a preacher. It gets at this question.

Should I become a preacher? Here's Pastor John's story. The longer I live and I'm age 71 right now, the longer I live and think about ministry, the more I believe in the power and the preciousness and the necessity of preaching in the life of the church. Some of you are watching this maybe age 40, 50 as a businessman, wondering if you should become a preacher.

Others of you might be 15 years old, others in school, in college or seminary. And what I thought might be helpful to do immediately in this series on preaching is to tell my story. You might call it the making of a preacher because it's a story of quite significant improbabilities and you may feel that way about yourself.

And so let me give you the short version of the things in my background that stand out to me as difficult and obstacles to preaching and yet which turned out to be, I think, the very forge in which God fired and made a preacher. So let's start at seventh grade.

Right around seventh grade, I discovered the fact that I couldn't speak in front of a group without freezing. Now, this is not your ordinary butterflies that everybody jokes about. It's not your funny knocking of the knees and, oh, you'll get over it. This was a paralysis. This was really deep.

I, to this day, do not understand what it was, where it came from, why it was there in its entirety anyway. The full explanation, I think I know part of why God did it. But there I am now entering junior and high school, junior high and high school, and terrified in a paralyzing kind of way of any kind of public speaking, like in front of six people at church or a class at school.

So, for example, ninth grade science class, we all had to read a one paragraph. You're talking one paragraph description of our project. And she, the teacher, was just going down the row. We'd walk up to the front, read the paragraph so the class knew what you were working on.

And as it was coming down my row toward me, I looked down. I could see, I could see my heart beating through my shirt here. And when it got to the person just behind me as he was going up to speak, I stood up and walked out of the class and went to the bathroom and cried.

I wasn't going to do it. I couldn't do it. And I told her afterwards I couldn't do it. Tenth grade, Mr. Vermillion was my civics teacher, and he announced on the first day of class that there would be an oral book report that everybody had to give. And my heart absolutely sank.

I felt my throat and my shoulders freezing up. So I walked up to him afterwards and I said, Mr. Vermillion, I can't do that. And he said, well, Johnny, you can't get better than a C in this class if you don't do it. And I said, that's fine. I'll take a C.

And I got a C because I wasn't going to do it. I couldn't do it. I never ran for any class office, you know, president of the class, vice president, secretary, anything like that, because I knew you had to give speeches. When I was in the 10th grade, my mother, now this was before any Christian psychology at all.

We're talking what, 1961 or two. She took me to a psychologist because it was so painful and difficult and felt like it was just a pall over everything in my life. And the psychologist had me look at these, today I think I'd call them Rorschach charts, and just say what I saw.

And after an hour of this, I could tell that this psychologist was suggesting my mother was the problem. Well, you could believe this is not making me happy because there was one person in the universe under God who understood me, loved me, was patient with me, helped me work through this.

And it was my mother. And there was no way I was going to blame her. So we never went back to that. So I come to the end of high school, having skipped every possible way of speaking in front of a group and at church and headed off to college with the most dreadful fear and trembling because I knew at Wheaton College, there was a required speech class.

In 1966, between my sophomore and junior year, Evan Welch, the chaplain, came up to me during summer school when I was taking chemistry to catch up with a pre-med plan. And I was all excited that maybe God was making clear my life plan to be a medical doctor. And I was going to catch up with my science prerequisites and take chemistry.

And he said, "Would you pray in chapel tomorrow?" And I found myself saying, "How long does it have to be?" Now, there's about 500 people come to summer school chapel, as I recall. And he said, "30 seconds, a minute." And I do not know how or why it happened, but I said, "Yes." Then I remember walking out on front campus alone and dealing with God.

I haven't made many vows in my life, but I made one. And I said this, "Father, if you would just get me through this, just get me through it so that I don't freeze and my voice doesn't stop, I will never turn down a speaking opportunity for you again out of fear." That was a really scary vow.

He did get me through. I think I've kept the vow and something broke. I went to seminary. Well, let me give you one more piece at college. That fall, I got mono and spent three weeks in the infirmary. And during those three weeks, I was listening to Harold John Ockengay preach in the chapel a couple hundred yards away.

And everything in me wanted to handle the Bible like that. And after three weeks, I knew I couldn't catch up in organic chemistry. And God basically said in his way, "I don't want you to do medical anyway. You should go to seminary and know my word." That's what I did.

Married Noel, went off to seminary, spent three years loving, studying the Bible, knew that my call was to the word. I didn't know what I'd do with it. Didn't know if I could ever preach. I won the Clarence Roddy Preaching Award my senior year. You can listen to this 18-minute sermon at the Desiree God website.

I listened to part of it. Can't believe it. I was 28 years old. No, no, 25 years old, I suppose, when I gave it. And I used "Big Bad John," which was a song popular in those days, to illustrate Ephesians 1.6. And I was just amazed. I was absolutely amazed that I was standing in front of several hundred seminary students and faculty preaching this senior sermon.

I went off to graduate school because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't feel any particular call to any avenue of ministry. And six years into teaching, which I loved, something rumbled inside me I could not resist. I was being pushed by a kind of disillusionment with the romance of academia.

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. And if it was a bad sermon, I'd say, we got to do better than that. And on October 14, 1979, late at night, writing in my journal, I could resist this desire no longer.

And I said to Noelle in the morning, what would you think if I resigned my teaching and looked for a church? And she said, I could see that coming. And that's what I did for the next 33 years, I preached. So as I look back over that story that brings me today, it's not the kind of story I would have planned.

I wouldn't want to live my teenage years over again at all. They were not very happy years, at least not at one level. And as I look back, all I can say is that all the sorrows as well as the happiness, God was making a preacher. Not at all the way you would expect him to make a preacher.

And so for you, the implication is you have no idea. You have no idea what he's doing in your life. And so trust him and then walk through the open doors where you feel called. Amen. That was the audio taken from Lecture #1, The Making of a Preacher. One video among 30 others and a playlist you can find right now for free on YouTube.

Search for The Preaching Class. It's a feast for the preacher or for the aspiring preacher. Check it out. Thanks for joining us today. You can ask a question of your own. Search our growing archive or subscribe to the podcast all at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. I am your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Friday.

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. And he wants to know how to go forward. Really good, important question that we need to address. We will next time on Friday.

We'll see you then.