For several years, I struggled with the same problem nearly every single week: trying to find something "fresh" to preach, something I had never preached before. I would pray, meditate, search the Scriptures, and sometimes agonize for hours if I didn't feel particularly "inspired" about a certain passage of Scripture. This often led to restless Friday and Saturday nights, lying awake and wondering what in the world I was going to preach on Sunday morning.
Being a bi-vocational pastor already presents its own challenges, especially when it comes to finding adequate time for prayer, study, and sermon preparation. Between working a full-time job, taking care of family responsibilities, and fulfilling the duties of a pastor, there are only so many hours in a week. Unfortunately, my constant struggle to find something new to preach was becoming a serious burden. It got so bad that I even began questioning whether the Lord was finished with me in the ministry. And, as I mentioned, this wasn't something that happened occasionally. It happened nearly every single week for several years!
Then, one Saturday morning, as I was once again praying and searching for a new message to preach the following day, the Lord opened my eyes to something that, looking back now, seems so simple and obvious. I don't have to preach a brand-new sermon every single Sunday!
Now, I'll admit, my first thought was that I must surely be imagining things. Perhaps I was just looking for an excuse to avoid the hard work of preparing another message. After all, I certainly didn't want to become lazy in my study or neglect the responsibility God had given me to feed His people. But the more I prayed and thought about it, the more I began to realize that I had placed a burden upon myself that the Lord had never placed upon me.
Think about it for a moment. If you study the Bible, you quickly discover that repetition is found throughout the Scriptures. For example, we have four Gospel accounts in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Although each Gospel presents different details and perspectives, they all testify of the same Lord Jesus Christ, His earthly ministry, His death, burial, and resurrection. God saw fit to give us four inspired accounts of the greatest story ever told!
We also find many important events and teachings repeated throughout the Bible. The Ten Commandments are recorded in Exodus and repeated in Deuteronomy. Much of the history of Israel's kings is recorded in First and Second Kings and again in First and Second Chronicles. The Apostle Paul's conversion is recounted three different times in the Book of Acts. Even the Lord Jesus Christ often repeated important truths in His teaching.
And why shouldn't He? Some things are simply too important to hear only once!
The same principle applies to our everyday lives. We repeat things all the time, especially the things we enjoy and consider valuable. I remember when I was a child, I couldn't wait for A Charlie Brown Christmas to come on television each year. I probably watched that same Christmas special every year for the first fifteen years of my life, and it never got old! I knew the story, I knew what was going to happen, and I probably could have quoted half the dialogue, but I still looked forward to watching it every Christmas.
My sister was the same way when it came to Gone with the Wind. She would sit down and watch that nearly four-hour movie year after year, just like clockwork, hanging on every word as though she had never seen it before. I never could quite understand her fascination with that movie, but she certainly loved it!
And what about the hymns we sing in church? How many times have we sung "Amazing Grace," "Victory in Jesus," "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," or "The Old Rugged Cross"? Some of us have been singing those same hymns for fifty or sixty years, yet we still love them. In fact, some of the sweetest moments in a worship service come when we sing one of those familiar old hymns that has encouraged our hearts countless times before.
Nobody stands up in church and says, "Well, we sang Amazing Grace last year, so I guess we can never sing it again!"
Of course not! We sing it again because the message is still true, the grace is still amazing, and the words still speak to our hearts.
So why should preaching be any different?
The truth is, whether we're talking about Scripture or everyday life, repetition is one of the primary ways we learn, remember, and grow. The things that matter most are often the things worth repeating. Sometimes we need to hear a particular truth more than once before it really takes hold in our hearts. And sometimes a message that meant very little to us five years ago may be exactly what we need to hear today.
Think about how much can change in a person's life over the course of a few years. Someone who heard a sermon while everything was going well may hear that same sermon again while walking through the darkest valley of their life. The words may be familiar, but suddenly they carry a depth of meaning that person had never experienced before.
The sermon hasn't changed, but the circumstances of the person hearing it certainly have.
And here's something else worth considering. Just because I preached a particular sermon three or four years ago doesn't mean everyone sitting in the congregation today has heard it. There may be new members, visitors, young people who were too small to understand it the first time, or someone who simply wasn't in church that particular Sunday. Even those who were present may not remember much of what was preached.
Besides, if God gave me a message to preach once, what makes me think He only intended for that message to be preached one time? If it was worth preaching then, why wouldn't it be worth preaching again?
Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm certainly not advocating laziness in the pulpit. A preacher should never neglect prayer, Bible study, or careful preparation. Nor am I suggesting that we simply pull out an old sermon every week because we don't want to put forth the effort to study. Every message, whether new or previously preached, deserves our prayerful attention. We should always seek the Lord's direction concerning what His people need to hear.
But I have come to believe that sometimes our reluctance to preach an old sermon has more to do with our pride than with anything else. We want to bring something new, something fresh, something nobody has ever heard before. We convince ourselves that unless we're preaching something entirely different every Sunday, we're somehow failing in our calling.
But who said we had to do that?
As a pastor and preacher of the Gospel, I must continually remind myself that my responsibility is not to entertain people with something new every week. My responsibility is to faithfully preach the Word of God. As Paul instructed Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:2, "Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine."
Notice that Paul didn't tell Timothy to preach something new every week. He told him to preach the Word!
After all, when we preach the Gospel, we're simply telling that wonderful old, old story of how a Saviour came from glory to save a wretch like me. It's the same Gospel that was preached by the apostles, proclaimed by faithful preachers throughout the centuries, and passed down from one generation to the next. And thank God, it still has the same power to save souls and change lives today!
Solomon reminds us in Ecclesiastes 1:9 that "there is no new thing under the sun." And while there is always more for us to learn from the inexhaustible riches of God's Word, we should never feel that the value of a sermon depends upon whether we've preached it before.
I've learned that a sermon doesn't have to be new to be needed. It doesn't have to be original to be effective. And it certainly doesn't have to be preached for the first time for God to use it!
So, preacher, if you're sitting at your desk on a Saturday night, staring at your Bible, feeling discouraged because you haven't come up with something brand-new to preach, let me encourage you. Don't overlook the messages God has already laid upon your heart in years gone by.
Pull that old sermon out of the drawer, dust it off, read through it again, pray over it, make whatever adjustments are necessary, and seek the Lord's direction. You may discover that the message God used to speak to hearts several years ago is exactly the message someone needs to hear this Sunday.
And if the Lord leads you to preach it again, then preach it! Preach it with the same conviction, the same enthusiasm, and the same confidence in the power of God's Word that you had the very first time.
Because the truth is, the power was never in the newness of the sermon to begin with. The power is in the Word of God!
So go ahead, preacher. Preach that sermon again!
