It’s a day you’ve all been waiting for. You’ve got the day off and you finally get to take your children to their first ever baseball game. But it’s hectic getting them ready—just like every other morning. After a good thirty minutes chasing the kids around the house you finally restrain them long enough to put (and keep) clothes on them. After wrestling them to the ground you gain your greatest victory of the day—shoes and socks on their feet.
Now you have to go through your inventory.
Diaper bag? Check.
Extra clothes? Check.
Keys? Check.
Wallet? Check.
Scanning through everything else on your list, you leave the house and drive to the stadium just before the opening pitch. As you get to the gate you are disappointed to learn that you didn’t actually bring everything—you forgot your tickets.
One thing. All those other things where helpful and necessary. After all you can’t take kids to a ball game in their underpants (no matter how much they beg you). But the most important thing to going to a ball game is to REMEMBER YOUR TICKETS!
You can have the most well packed diaper bag, the best groomed children, and all the super dad supplies but you aren’t getting into the game without those little joy bringing rectangles that get you access into the stadium.
Preaching and ministry is the same way. There are many things good and well that go into a sermon and into an overall ministry. But there is one thing necessary. If you lack this then you aren’t much of a pastor.
Hear the words of Isaac Watts:
Had you all the refined science of Plato or Socrates, all the skill in morals that ever was attained by Zeno, Seneca, or Epitcetus; were you furnished with all the flowing oratory of Cicero, or the thunder of Demosthenes; were all these talents and excellencies united in one man, and you were the person so richly endowed; preach—yet you could have no reasonable hope to convert and save one soul in Great Britain, where the gospel is published, while you lay aside the glorious gospel of Christ and leave it entirely out of your discourses. (Isaac Watts in The Christian Pastor’s Manual)
In fulfilling the ministry God has given to you—don’t forget the one thing necessary.
