12 Things to Do While Waiting For Your Chance to Preach

So what do you do when you have this desire to preach – you feel this burden to deliver God’s Word, to share his message with other people, but you just feel stuck?

You’re looking for that chance. You’re looking for that opportunity, but you can’t seem to find it.

What do you do while you wait for your chance?

Well today, we’re going to talk about that. And I want to give you 12 things to do while you’re waiting for your shot to preach.

1. Pray

Always start with prayer.

The first thing you should do if you feel this burden, this desire to preach, is pray about it. Talk to God about it. Lay it down before him and say, “God you know I feel like you want me to preach. Is that your desire god? I feel like I want to preach. Help me have the opportunity. God give me the chance to preach.

2. Check your heart

Why is it that you want to preach?

And this is an important question you’ve got to answer because some of us may feel a desire to preach because we’re excited by the sexiness of it—standing in front of a big crowd and the bright lights and the glory that can go along with delivering a great message to a bunch of people. People patting us on the back. People cheering or clapping or saying, “Great sermon.”

Sometimes people have a wrongful desire to preach because they want to get on stage and get the praise of other people.

So you got to ask yourself, “Do I want to preach just for the glory given to me by other people, or is it for God’s glory?”

And if you’re thinking that you want to preach just so other people will affirm you or approve of you or tell you, “Way to go. You’re doing good.” that is not the right motive. And maybe, just maybe, preaching isn’t for you.

But if your desire is birthed out of how much God has done for you, and what he has done inside of you, and you can’t wait to tell other people and just give God the glory—not yourself— then I think your heart is probably in the right place.

3. Tell somebody

Nobody’s just gonna walk up to you tap, you on the shoulder and say, “Hey you want to preach this weekend?” It’s not gonna happen.

If you haven’t told anybody yet that you want to preach, how will you ever get the opportunity?

It never hurts to get some godly advice and counsel from some godly leaders in your life. Asking them, “Hey, I feel like God’s calling me to preach. Do you think that might be a possibility? Is that something that God might be doing through me?”

“If God’s calling me to preach, what should I do next?”

Ask some godly leaders in your life, get some wise counsel. And that might just give you an opportunity or give you a chance10,000-houror maybe they’ll give you some direction on what your next steps could be.

4. Serve

Before anyone who’s ever just gonna give you a shot to preach, you’ve got to prove your faithfulness.

You can’t just walk into a church on a weekend and say, “Hey pastor, God’s calling me to preach. Give me your pulpit.”

That’s not gonna happen.

In fact, you’re gonna lose all credibility if you ever do that. That’s not how it works. You gotta prove your faithfulness. Even if you are an incredibly gifted communicator you gotta prove your faithfulness.

So are you serving already? Have you volunteered? Are you proving that you’re not just about getting on stage and doing your whole glory thing for you, but you are faithful to God. You just are faithful to the church. You’re faithful to the mission. And you want to do whatever you can, whether it is sweeping floors, changing diapers, or showing up early and setting up—doing whatever you can for the church and for God.

Start being faithful and then you will see. You will prove your faithfulness, and other people will give you more opportunities from there.

5. Seize any opportunity you can get

It doesn’t matter if it’s at a retirement home, or in the children’s ministry, or at a week-long children’s VBS (Vacation Bible School) at your church.

Whatever opportunity you have to stand before other people and teach them God’s Word, you need to jump on it now.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule, which basically says that before you can master anything you need 10,000 hours of practice.

Don’t think you’re gonna be a great preacher right off the bat. You probably know that you got some work to do. So start getting your hours and start putting in the work. Take any opportunity you can get no matter what it is or how much you feel like it’s beneath you or whatever.

Get out there, check your pride at the door, and just serve God by preaching for whatever audience he gives you.

6. Be patient

This kind of goes along with what I’ve been saying before, but you’ve got to realize this is gonna take time. It’s not gonna happen overnight.

You’re not just gonna be handed an opportunity to preach all the time right away. It’s gonna take some work, some effort, and some faithful plodding—one step after the other.

God has a plan. And in his perfect timing, you will get the opportunity if that’s what he’s calling you to do.

So be patient.

7. Get education

Whether that’s enrolling in a Bible College, or a seminary to get your official degree, or taking an online course like I offer, or maybe you’re just going to a conference about preaching or about a certain topic of the Bible that you want to preach about, get education.

Learn everything you can, and that learning and those opportunities are going to give you more weight and more credentials in order to get the opportunities you’re looking for.

Look, I know that when I was looking for pastor jobs, there were a lot of opportunities out there that wouldn’t have even looked at me if I didn’t have some sort of degree or some sort of certification showing that I put in the, work that I had studied the Bible, and that I was qualified to be a pastor. So do what you need to do in order to get qualified for the responsibility of preaching.

8. Read

This goes along with number seven, but you got to read a lot of books.

Read about preaching, and read about subjects that you want to preach about.

Fill your mind with as much goodness and truth as you can so when it comes time to get on that stage, it just bursts out of you.

9. Read the Bible

Now, I know this is just like step eight, but the Bible deserves its own category.

If you are not getting into the Word of God on a regular basis, how are you ever gonna deliver the Word when you get on stage?

You’ve got to just absorb as much Scripture as you can. Soak up God’s Word, fill up your heart, and then it will burst out of you when you get the opportunity. I promise you that.

The Bible is the most important book you will ever read. And Paul in 2 Timothy 4:2 commands his young apprentice, Timothy, “Preach the word.”

So when you’re preaching, it’s all about the Word. You’ve got to know the Word before you can deliver the Word.

10. Listen to great preaching

If you want to learn how to be a great preacher, you’ve got to listen to a lot of great preaching.

So who are the pastors out there that resonate deeply with you? You listen to them preach and you say, “Yes! I want to preach like that.”

Soak up as much of their preaching and teaching as you can, and don’t just listen to one pastor. You need to expand your influences, expand your horizon, and listen to a bunch of different preachers from a bunch of different backgrounds. And soak up as much as you can while you’re listening to them.

Don’t just listen to the message, listen to how they deliver the message. Why does that resonate with me? Why is that interesting to me? What is it about their delivery or their style of preaching that I like so much, that draws me towards this person?

Study the great preaching of great preachers.

There’s so many podcasts out there nowadays you can just listen to just about everybody for free anytime you want. Get on top of that and learn from other great preachers.

Now look, don’t copy them or try to steal their sermons and preach exactly like your favorite pastor. You gotta use your own personality, and your own style, and find your own voice of how you deliver a sermon.

But before we ever master anything, we need to emulate ourselves after the masters. Everybody learns from somebody. You take bits and pieces from other people, and you learn from other people the things that you want to incorporate in your own style. And you borrow from that, and you learn from that, and you use that, and that’s how you get good at it.

11. Write sermons

Before you ever preach a sermon, you gotta write the sermon.

Whether that’s an outline or a full-on manuscript, if you want to preach, before you can ever get up on stage, you need to go through the motions of what it’s like to prepare a message.

So don’t say, “No one’s giving me a chance to preach. No one’s giving me an opportunity.” if you’ve never even written anything down.

Good writing has a lot to do with good preaching.

Write the sermons you want to preach. Plus, it doesn’t ever hurt to have a reserve of sermons in the archive in case you ever get the opportunity, you need to pull a sermon out, or if you ever get a job as a pastor who preaches regularly.

You’re gonna need to come up with a new sermon every single week. And having those sermons already written never hurts. Ever.

12. Make a preaching video

There are a few reasons you want to do this: One, it’s great practice to record yourself and watch yourself preach.

You’re gonna learn a lot. You’re gonna see some of those bad habits you have, and a lot of the things that you need to work on.

It never hurts to record and watch yourself back.

Now, the second reason you’re gonna need a video is because people are not going to give you a chance to preach if they don’t know that you have the ability to do it.

You’re very unlikely to be able to preach if you’ve never preached before, and that’s kind of the catch-22. Right?

If you’ve never preached, you’re not gonna get a chance to preach because you don’t have the experience to preach. But how are you gonna get the experience to preach if you’ve never preached before?

I’m gonna roll back the curtain a little bit and let you in on a secret. Okay?

This is how I got my first youth pastor job: I was just about to graduate from Bible College, and I had only had two sermons that I’d ever preached in my entire life up to this point.

And I was looking for jobs online, and I found a lot of different opportunities, but they all wanted a sermon video because they wanted to know that they’re going to hire somebody who had the ability to preach—if it’s gonna be a regular preaching role for that position.

So I’m like, I have no preaching video. I’ve only preached like a couple of sermons. I think I can do it. I know of God has it in me. But I got nothing to show them.

So here’s what I did: I wrote the best sermon that I knew how to write at that point, and poured my heart and soul into it. I gave it everything that I had, and then I rehearsed it, and I rehearsed it, and I rehearsed it.

Then, I borrowed an empty room from a church and I preached my guts out just to my wife holding a video camera. And I recorded that sucker and sent it out, and sure enough, landed my first job.

So if you don’t have a lot of experience, you need to show people and prove to people that you have the ability.

Now you might say, “Well Brandon, isn’t that kind of a lie?”

No, not really. I didn’t tell them anything that wasn’t true. I did preach that sermon. I didn’t say, “This was 500 people in a room.” I just said, “Here’s a sermon that I preached.” And that’s it.

And it’s true. I preached that sermon. I didn’t say it was just to one person. You don’t have to tell him how many people are in the room. But it showed people that I had the ability if I would just be given the chance. This is something I could do regularly. I had it within me, and here’s a video to prove it.

And that proof got me a jet got my foot in the door and gave me the opportunity to preach every single week.

So if you’ve never preached before, get on camera. Make a video.

If it’s terrible, you don’t have to show anybody. If it’s great, it’s gonna prove to other people that you’ve got it in you.

So whatever you do, be patient. Don’t get bitter about it. Okay?

It’s easy to get angry at other people.

• “They just won’t give me a shot.”
• “No one’s gonna give me a chance.”
• “Everybody is out to get me.”
• “Everybody’s holding me down.”
• The man, you know?

It’s easy to get frustrated. It’s easy to get bitter if you feel this burden to preach but you’re not given an opportunity.

Don’t get bitter. Okay? Get better.

Keep putting in the work.

Just like the servant and the parable of the talents who did the best he could with what was given to him, take what’s been given to you, give it to God, do the best that you can with it, and in time you will be given greater responsibility.

So, what do you think? Did I miss anything?