What I Never Actually Said

I was as prepared as I could be. I swore I was ready to preach today. Even though I had one of the less popular passages that you'd expect a sermon to come from, I was quite confident that I was going to deliver and show that there is still important things to take from the greeting of one of Paul's letters.

I was slotted to start off 2 Timothy. While I wasn't all that excited to preach the first five verses where Paul basically says hi to Timothy, I managed to make it work. Or, at least I thought I did.

As I was walking up after the song, I quickly ran over everything I needed to say with my mind. For whatever reason, the second I started talking, I launched right into the middle of my notes. I caught myself doing it, but I couldn't stop - I just kept talking. I even remember, somewhere in the back of my mind, thinking, "oh no, I started right in the middle? This means my sermon is going to be like all of five minutes!"

Since we were preaching through Paul's letters chronologically, we did 1 Timothy, Titus, then we started on 2 Timothy today. As there was actually quite a fascinating background to this book/letter, I was actually stoked to tell everyone all about the context, how the letter came to be, about how Paul was basically going to die right after he finished this, etc. I managed to give some of it, albeit brief and spread out over a few places.

But I had it all planned out!

I was going to talk about how this is Pauls last hurrah, his going out in a blaze of glory, or whatever you do right before you die. And then I was going to recount the journey that he had with his disciple Timothy, which lead to his reminiscing of the situation that Paul was in while he wrote the letter. It was supposed to be an epic adventure.

The entire time I talked, probably all ten minutes of it, I was so confused. Even though I managed to get to most of the applicable parts of the sermon, talking about how we need to constantly nurture our faith to keep it genuine, much of what I said wasn't actually the way it was supposed to come out.

Honestly, I don't even really remember what I said during the whole thing; and I'm almost afraid of listening to it.

So I finished up and walked off the stage rather depressed, probably visibly too. I refused to make eye contact with anyone until the service was over. After service finally did end, a few people came up to me to thank me for my message and said that it was a good one. Now, having been here for five months, I've come to learn that people here are insanely nice and gracious. So the first few people to tell me that it was a good message, I was really skeptical because I felt that they were probably just being nice. Then, the associate pastor told me that he meant it when he said it's my best sermon since coming here, and I finally felt a little relieved.

It's almost ridiculous how that works sometimes. I tell myself to say something, but whatever it is that's coming out of my mouth is not lining up with what my brain said. It drives me nuts. It confuses the crap out of me. And yet, after it's done, I am comforted by the fact that God's using me for the better. I'm reminded that I need to shut up about what I want to say and let God do the talking. It's his message after all; I'm just the person that delivers it.

So while I am perfectly fine with God doing that to me, I just wish I didn't have to feel so terrible about it. Ah well, the enemy will attack at every corner that they can. Even though it's still a sermon that I probably would rather like to forget, I'll at least know next time that this happens why it's happening.