If you like mysteries, you likely don’t like ones that are predictable and easy to figure out. When I was growing up, we used to play a game. While watching television, we’d guess what was going to happen next. Broadcast television had become so familiar, with all the scriptwriters reworking the same tired formulas, that it was more like a footrace to see who could provide the answer first. Even for children, it didn’t take much mental effort. It was hardly a challenge. As people grow older, they appreciate complexity a bit more. Instead of the brashness of primary colours, the tones of mixed paint become more pleasing and the textures achieved by various brushes, the thickness of the pigment and the sharpness of its edges, achieved by various utensils used to put paint on the canvas, become more interesting.

When complexity and challenge are woven into the problems of life, the joy of trying to figure out a mystery or solve a puzzle dissolves into pain, frustration, anxiety, anger, and more trouble than people want.

This is how people often come to some difficult and perplexing situation and end up asking, “God, why this? Why me?” At that time, it’s like they don’t want to be adults any longer. They just want the simple answers, the quick ones, and sometimes it would be nice to have someone older just solve the whole thing and give them the answer.

They are frustrated because they can’t figure it out this time, but they’d really like to. They don’t want unusual tones and textures, turns in or thickening of the plot, or anything like that. They want the problem to go away. During one of those times in my life, I met with my pastor. This was a man whose messages each Sunday were like fine pieces of thoughtful literature. He was a master. His messages bore the marks of study, of wide reading, and deep thought.

When I went to preaching myself, his advice was simply “Study it through, pray it in, and preach it out.”

Study it through? What does it take to do that?

I had to learn ancient Hebrew and Greek so that I could read the text in its original language. I had to look up the lexical meanings of words and apply the grammatical principles that would help me to comprehend what the text was actually saying, and then I had to locate those words within the time and culture of its original authors and readers. Finally, I had to read what other writers and students of the text had written when they studied the text. That often took 20 hours or more. Pray it in? What does that mean?

A pastor is not just making an academic speech. A pastor is tasked with “feeding” God’s people. That has been the understanding ever since Jesus fed Peter on the beach in Galilee and told him three times, “Feed my sheep”.

No person can accomplish the work of God apart from the Spirit of God, and that’s why often hours may be needed in prayer in order to let God work the message of the text into the heart and soul of the preacher. It is anguishing, hard work. It puts a person face up to his or her complete inadequacy, and simultaneously to his or her responsibility before God.

Preach it out? What is that?

A preacher is not a teacher. Preaching often has a teaching element to it, but at its core preaching is an appeal to the will. There is a bottom line of response that the preacher is working at from beginning to end. It cannot be tacked on at the end with a superficial and gimmicky, if not out rightly emotional request that people suddenly put their faith in God, suddenly get up and go down front, give their money, fill in as a Sunday school teacher, or attend the church social. No. Preaching has the bottom line of response in view at all times.

Preaching is where the people respond to God, because the preacher has been faithful to prepare well enough that the people can hear God through the preacher’s faithful proclamation.

When that happens, people feel the tug. There’s something they know they must do, and if they do it, whatever it is, it completes them in an act of faith whether or not it makes sense to anyone else in the world.