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.”
“Yet when a preacher exhorts a congregation on a topic of his choosing, using biblical texts only to back up his point, he will never preach more than what the preacher already knows. Expositional preaching requires more than that. It requires careful attention to the context of a passage, because it aims to make the point of the biblical text the point of the sermon. When a preacher exhorts a congregation by preaching a passage of Scripture in context-where the point of the passage is the point of his sermon- both he and the congregation will end up hearing things from God that the preacher did not intend to say when he first sat down to study and prepare for the sermon.”
Galatians 2:4 Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery— 5 to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you… 14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?” 15 We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16 yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.