I often struggle when I preach with what I call the “Good Enough” syndrome. I hate “Good Enough” because it feels like less than the Word deserves. Let me explain.
I work through a passage and suffer over the true meaning. It is like shooting at a target and I find myself sometimes burying the arrow in the dirt three feet short of the target. Other times I overshoot it by many yards. Left or right, I just plain miss. That is when I scrap the sermon and move to something else that I can preach. It might be a sermon I’ve preached before (about 10 percent of the time) or one that I’ve had waiting but it was not finished (even less).
But sometimes I hit the target and it feels good. The longer I preach the more I think I have done this. But my Big Idea is still not quite in the bulls eye. I am on the fringes or maybe even close to the center, but not IN the center. At that point I often want to scrap the message. But I do not. I walk away for a little while and work on something else, have lunch, take a walk down the hall, or read preaching blogs. After coming back, I find I can get closer to the center of the target because the ideas have bounced around in the caverns of my mind. The hard shell of the sermon seed can now be cracked and start to take root ready to grow into a sermon.
Yet, I still miss the bulls eye. And I have to decide that its not going to be perfect, but it is “Good Enough.” Usually this is on Thursday or Friday and I have to put together the sermon by Sunday. “Good Enough” has to be good enough.
The fine folks at Biblical Preaching inspired this post. A recent post discussed how sometimes our “Big Idea” or central proposition of a sermon is so good that we want to publish it and if we did others would want to steal it (or borrow it). Yet that seldom happens; we seldom find that kind of gem. In those moments we have to settle for “Good Enough.” Peter Mead of the Biblical Preaching blog was blogging about how some authors publish truly great, pithy, interesting, Big Ideas on web sites or in books and journals. We read those and feel like failures because we cannot be so eloquent every week. He said,
Probably the reason so and so is still using the example of his Big Idea from a 1982 sermon is that he has not come close since!
That may not be true. Some preachers have a special knack for this. But they usually have staff members helping them with research and have the luxury of spending 25 hours on a sermon. Or they only preach a dozen times a year. But for those of us who preach 120-150 sermons and bible studies a year, may just have to settle for “Good Enough” and realize that in God’s eyes that is good enough. That’s not so bad since He’s the one handing out the kudos in eternity.
