Prepared for Sunday's sermon

Most church attenders expect their pastors to be prepared to preach on Sunday morning. They expect the pastor will have studied the Scriptures, prayed over them and crafted a message that will speak to their spiritual and physical needs. These expectations are valid, but how many of them will have prepared themselves to hear the message? While some might complain that a minister does not know how to preach, how many of our church members know how to hear? If people rush around getting ready to go to a worship service, come in at the last minute, frustrated with one another, how much value will they receive from the worship service or the message? The same is true with the person who constantly glances at his or her watch wondering how much longer the service will last.

It's important that people come with hearts prepared to worship and to hear the message that will be preached. You are there to encounter God, not to check off a box on your weekly spiritual to-do list, and it's important that each of us are prepared for that encounter. The Puritans understood this and one of their preachers, Richard Baxter, explained how one should receive the message. He wrote

Come not to hear with a careless heart, as if you were to hear a matter that little concerned you, but come with a sense of the unspeakable weight, necessity, and consequence of the holy word which you are to hear; and when you understand how much you are concerned in it, it will greatly help your understanding of every particular truth....

Make it your work with diligence to apply the word as you are hearing it....Cast not all upon the minister, as those that will go no further than they are carried as by force....You have work to do as well as the preacher, and should all the time be as busy as he...you must open your mouths, and digest it, for another cannot digest it for you...therefore be all the while at work, and abhor an idle heart in hearing, as well as an idle minister.

Chew the cud, and call up all when you come home in secret, and by meditation preach it over to yourselves. If it were coldly delivered by the preacher, do you...preach it more earnestly over to your own hearts....

I have often joked that Sunday dinner in many Christians' homes is roast preacher. How much better would it be if that dinner time was used as an opportunity to reflect upon and discuss as a family what God might be saying in the message just heard? Could we not benefit from spending time after the service meditating on the message to learn what God is saying to us personally? Where do I find myself in the message, and how should I respond to that?

Several years ago, before I went into the ministry, I heard a preacher share the story of the Good Samaritan, a text I had heard preached many times. The thing that caught my attention was that he said that, at different times in our lives, we all are each of the characters in the story. Sometimes we are the robbers, sometimes we are the one beaten up, sometimes we are the ones who pass by without offering help, sometimes we are the good Samaritan and sometimes we are the innkeeper. I have thought about that message many times since then, and at different times in my life I have found myself playing one of those roles. For over 40 years that sermon still speaks to me and challenges me.

Sermons will have their greatest impact on those who have prepared themselves to hear them, are willing to spend time meditating on them and then applying them to their lives. As pastors we need to help teach people how to be prepared each Sunday to worship and to receive the message.