One of the best feelings in the world is to deliver a sermon and get positive feedback. You spend a large part of your week preparing your message—translating the text, studying its syntax, reading commentaries, looking over background materials, and then refining and honing your message. Often it seems as though your messages go unnoticed. You preach your guts out and no one seems to care. As your congregation leaves the church they offer a word of greetings or a perfunctory thanks and move on. I’m not saying that the usual reception is defeating but rather that it makes the positive comments stand out.
Positive comments are encouraging on two fronts. First, pastors desire with all of their hearts to see their preaching make an impact in the lives of their congregations. They want to see their churches grow in their sanctification, to reflect the image of Christ. While it might be slightly anecdotal evidence, when someone positively responds to your message the hope is that the Spirit pressed the sermon to good effect. Second, when you work hard you want to receive some sort of feedback that you’re on the right track. You don’t want to preach week after week, month after month, only to find out that you’re breaking Karl Barth’s number one rule of preaching—you’re boring your congregation!
But preachers beware, you can easily get addicted to positive comments to the point that seeking good feedback becomes the goal of preaching rather than fidelity to the text and to Christ. In this respect you must pray that Christ would keep your pride at bay and enable you to preach with and for all the right motives and reasons. You should preach to be faithful, to herald Christ, to bring people to salvation, to wield judgment against unbelief, to sanctify the church, but chiefly above all else, to bring glory to the triune God.
If you keep these things in mind, hopefully you can be balanced in your reception of feedback. To borrow a cooking analogy, you can’t serve a seven-course meal every time you’re in the kitchen. You can’t serve lobster every night; sometimes you will serve meatloaf or mac-n-cheese. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you should be slothful and not offer your best efforts and labor each time you preach. Rather, recognize that some sermons will be good but common while others will be excellent and uncommon. If you strive for positive feedback every week, then you put yourself on an endless treadmill that has an ever-increasing incline—you seek to top last week’s sermon because you want the good feedback. Preaching no longer is about fidelity to the word and Christ but about getting people to praise you. Seek to please Christ, not your congregation. Seek to be faithful to the word.
