I know you pray as you compose sermons. You probably include some kind of prayer for illumination before Scripture is read and exposited in your services. But what if there were a way to sharpen and hone these prayers? What if a consecrated master of language left us words to help us pray before we preach?
The seventeenth-century poet and pastor George Herbert concluded his book The Country Parson with “The Author’s Prayer Before Sermon.” When I make this prayer my own, passion to preach leaps in me; the joy of the story of our redemption unites with the gravity of the task of proclamation. I hope to stoke the flame of your preaching by highlighting seven movements in Herbert’s prayer.
1. Acclaim the Creator.
Before we prepare or actually preach, we look up from ourselves to the one who made us. Herbert opens with adoration:
O Almighty and ever-living Lord God!
Majesty, and Power, and Brightness and Glory!
Simply naming these attributes of the triune God lifts us, and our hearers, into affectionate awareness. An essential purpose of every worship service is to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is” (Colossians 3:1). In a secular age full of distractions, our people need to be reminded that they were created by God for the glory of God. Herbert continues,
You are our Creator, and we your work.
Your hands both made us, and also made us lords of all your creatures; giving us one world in ourselves, and another to serve us;
Then you placed us in Paradise, and were proceeding still on in your favors . . .
We are not an accident. We were personally fashioned by God and placed upon earth to live harmoniously and rule benevolently. Our very bodies are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14) — as is the world around us. Life is so much more than our daily grinds!
2. Admit our plight.
Yet the story of the fall can never be far from our proclamation.
. . . until we interrupted your counsels,
disappointed your purposes, and
sold our God, our glorious, our gracious God for an apple.
O write it! O brand it in our foreheads forever:
for an apple once we lost our God, and still lose him for no more;
for money, for meat, for diet . . .
Herbert shocks us with the ridiculous trade our first parents made in the garden. We exchanged our God for a mere piece of fruit! This primal sin gets repeated in every life in every age. We still toss away “our glorious, our gracious God” for the same old silly temptations.
In just a few lines of prayer, Herbert reminds his congregation of their beautifully high purpose and their cataclysmic failure to fulfill it.
3. Extol God’s mercy.
Now embarrassed and needy, Herbert returns to the character of God to find hope for our plight:
But you Lord are patience, and pity, and sweetness, and love;
therefore we sons of men are not consumed.
You have exalted your mercy above all things and
you have made our salvation, not our punishment, to be your glory:
so that then where sin abounded, not death, but grace superabounded.
As godly leaders in Israel often did when the consequences of sin brought calamity to the nation, Herbert returns to adoration. What other god is like ours? He would be justified (and glorified) if he enacted the punishment due for our sin. Our Lord could exalt his holiness in our incineration and still be in the right. But he does not.
Salvation, not punishment, is at the heart of the glory of God (Ephesians 1:2–6). Grace has superabounded, overwhelming sin and death. This is who our God is!
4. Marvel at the Savior.
The central section of the prayer recalls just how the triune God undertook to save us.
Accordingly, when we had sinned beyond any help in heaven or earth,
then you said, Lo, I come!
Then did the Lord of life, unable himself to die, contrive to do it.
He took flesh, he wept, he died; for his enemies he died;
even for those that derided him then, and still despise him.
Blessed Savior! Many waters could not quench your love!
Nor no pit overwhelm it. But though the streams of your blood
were current through darkness, grave and hell;
yet by these your conflicts, and seemingly hazards,
you did rise triumphant, and therein made us victorious.
The gospel is Jesus Christ in all the saving events of his incarnate life (2 Timothy 2:8). So, Herbert rehearses the story through doxology.
In half a sentence, he paints our desperation: “When we had sinned beyond any help in heaven or earth.” We were lost as lost can be. Yet the triune God conspired to rescue us; the Author entered the story. “Lo, I come!” What a declaration. Herbert takes us back to God’s words in Isaiah 59:16: “He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede; then his own arm brought him salvation.” He came in person.
Herbert prays the plot in three verbs: “He took flesh, he wept, he died.” Jesus’s sinless life led to his atoning death. Herbert makes sure we don’t overlook the paradox of this salvation. By definition, the one who has life in himself cannot die (John 5:26). Yet “the only wise God” found a way for Life himself to die (Romans 16:27). This scheme fooled the devil, the Romans, the religious leaders, and even the disciples. The eternal Son took up human flesh so that he could not only live faithfully in our flesh but also be pierced and hung out to die.
With wonder, Herbert extols Christ’s death for his enemies — all of us. His royal blood ran through “darkness, grave and hell” on our behalf. After recounting these “hazards,” Herbert marvels at the sudden turn of resurrection triumph, which has now become, astoundingly, our victory as well.
5. Ask for help.
Herbert’s prayer now follows Christ’s love that pours into the present day through the power of preaching:
Neither does your love yet stay here!
For this word of your rich peace and reconciliation
you have committed not to thunder, or angels, but to silly and sinful men:
even to me, pardoning my sins and bidding me go feed the people of your love. . . .
Your unworthy servant speaks unto them:
Lord Jesu! Teach me, that I may teach them:
sanctify, enable all my powers, that in their full strength
they may deliver your message reverently, readily, faithfully and fruitfully.
If ever we dare to take our preparation lightly, relying on a glib tongue to wing it on Sunday, this prayer will cure us. The news of “rich peace and reconciliation” has no other channel to reach the world. Astonishing as it may seem, God has committed the gospel message to “silly and sinful men.” O Jesus, help me! Who is fit for such a task?
Then comes some assurance: Christ’s reconciliation covers even the preacher’s sins. And he calls us to feed “the people of [his] love.” Why spend countless hours mining difficult texts? Why labor to prepare for Sundays? Because these are the people Jesus has given you to feed — people he loves! They hear the Shepherd through you.
In humility, Herbert goes on to make the essential preacher’s prayer in eight words: “Teach thou me, that I may teach them.” That’s our petition; that’s our life. Excavate the word in order to invigorate the people. Rely utterly on Jesus’s assurance: “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). Ask. All the time.
Renewed in passion for this task, Herbert offers back to God the gifts he’s given that they might increase to their “full strength.” He begs God to preach fruitfully.
6. Pray for the church.
As the people stand for the Scripture reading, Herbert remembers that worship on the Lord’s Day is happening not just in his little congregation in Bemerton. All over England — indeed, all over the world — Christ’s people rise to receive the word read and preached:
Lo, we stand here, beseeching you to bless your word, wherever spoken this day throughout the universal Church.
O make it a word of power and peace,
to convert those who are not yet yours, and to confirm those that are.
O let not our foolish and unworthy hearts rob us of the continuance
of this your sweet love: but pardon our sins and perfect what you have begun.
Ride on, Lord! because of the word of truth and meekness and righteousness. . . . Especially, bless this portion here assembled together, with your unworthy servant speaking unto them.
We can feel the energy rising as Herbert makes ready to preach. He prays that the word would “convert” the lost and “confirm” the found. He prays against the foolishness of human hearts that could rob his listeners of an encounter with Christ. As if waving palms along Jesus’s way to Jerusalem, he exhorts Jesus to enter the assembly with saving power.
I can’t help but think of the late Harry Reader’s practice of going to the empty sanctuary on Saturday afternoons. He would walk the pews, seeing in his mind’s eye the people who usually occupy those places. He would pray for Christ to meet them in truth and mercy the next morning. Herbert’s prayer shows that he too had already thought about the kinds of people who might attend and what they might need to hear most.
7. Petition for the preaching moment.
Finally, Herbert prays for the event at hand:
O make your word a swift word, passing from the ear to the heart,
from the heart to the life and conversation:
that as the rain returns not empty, so neither may your word, but accomplish that for which it is given.
O Lord hear, O Lord forgive! O Lord, harken, and do so for your blessed Son’s sake, in whose sweet and pleasing words we say, “Our Father . . .”
I hear his conclusion like this: “Lord, don’t let these words fall on deaf ears! Get them down into the heart. Then set them loose in the daily work and talk of your people. You promised that your word would not return to you empty but would accomplish all you purpose (Isaiah 55:11). Make it so even now. Let us not leave this place the same!” Then Herbert closes with the words he did not invent but which Jesus himself gave us to pray.
If we dare to take up Herbert’s example, what might God do with such a prayer-soaked sermon? Shall we try?
Desiring God