None should approach the sacred desk who have not been personally called to do so, by the Master.
As I watched the short video below, everything in me resonated with what was being said. My heart cried “YES!” Like Dr. Piper, I also was a young boy who could not speak before people. I understand that he also had a severe acne problem just as I did. I was a hospital case for many years. God’s dealings with the heart and mind of a preacher certainly varies case to case, but unless a man is passionately thrilled by what he finds in the text of Scripture, he should do both God and the people he serves a favor and stay well away from the pulpit. It is a high and holy calling to be a herald of the King. Woe to any of us if we are given the most awesome, spectacular and exciting message imaginable, the very Gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and bore people with it. I have seen many people who do so, and it sends a shudder through my soul. Dear God, let not that be true of me! May my love for the Savior and the glories of His word always be both genuine and contagious.
John Piper: “I think the way I became a preacher was by being passionately thrilled by what I was seeing in the Bible in seminary. Passionately thrilled! When Philippians began to open to me, Galatians opened to me, Romans opened to me, the Sermon on the Mount opened to me in classes on exegesis—not homiletics but exegesis—everything in me was feeling, ‘I want to say this to somebody! I want to find a way to say this! Because this is awesome! This is incredible!’
“So preachers today that go everywhere but the Bible to find something interesting or something scintillating and passionate—I don’t get it! I don’t get that at all! Because I have to work hard to leave the Bible and go somewhere to find an illustration because everything here is just blowing me away. And it’s that sense of being blown away by what’s here—by the God that’s here and the Christ that’s here and the Gospel that’s here and the Spirit that’s here and the life that’s here—being blown away by this, you just kinda say, ‘That’s gotta get out. That’s gotta get out.’ …
“I don’t think there’s much you can do to become a preacher except: (1) know your Bible and (2) be unbelievably excited about what’s there, and (3) love people a lot.”