Dr. Joel Beeke's sermon, 'What is the Reformed Experiential Preacher Like?', outlines the characteristics of an experiential preacher. He begins by referencing 2 Timothy 4:1-5, emphasizing the call to preach diligently and authentically. Dr. Beeke lists ten marks of an experiential preacher: belief in preaching, passionate and earnest delivery, deep commitment to prayer, maintaining authenticity, continuous personal growth, grounding in the Word, study, humility, prioritization of preaching, and motivation driven by the fear of God, truth, and love for people. He underscores the importance of a preacher's private prayer life influencing their public ministry and the need for an original and varied walk with God. Dr. Beeke highlights the critical role of preaching in impacting souls and the privilege and responsibility it carries.

Let's turn to 2 Timothy, chapter 4, 1 through 5. I charge thee therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at His appearing in His kingdom, preach the word, be instant in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lust shall they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears and they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables, but watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. Dear Lord, bless these words to our soul. Help us to be men of God who make full proof of our ministry so that it would be said of us, that is a pastor who lives what he teaches, who applies sermons to his own soul before he preaches them to us and the smell of Christ is upon him.

Oh Lord, please, please help us to be godly men in this godless age to bring the unsearchable riches of Christ from heart to heart with all that is within us. That the best energy of our lives may be devoted to preaching Christ and to preparing to preach Christ and that Christ may be all in all to us and that people, our own people, our family, would be able to see Christ in us. In Jesus' name, Amen. Okay, what I want to do in this talk is just give you some characteristics of the experiential preacher in terms of who he is in his own person and how he handles himself. I've got ten marks to give you.

We'll see how far we get by four o'clock. I'll try to move right along here. Number one, he's a believing preacher. Not just from self believing in Christ, but he believes in preaching. A believing preacher never takes on the spirit of the world, which looks on preaching as kind of negative or kind of effeminate.

Preaching as masculine, let me tell you. Nothing effeminate about preaching. So the whole world's concept today of preaching like this kind of weak thing, fake thing, in movies and stuff they make ministers out to be kind of fuddy-duddies. No, no, no. I believe in preaching.

I believe when I get on the pulpit in weakness and fear and trembling, yes, because who am I to be a mouthpiece of God? But I believe when I get up here that God's going to use this sermon because he said, he said, he promised his word will never return to him void. And so what a solemn thing it is to think that my preaching is going to be a savior of death unto death or of life unto life. You know in my tradition churches I serve the most my denomination and my old denomination. There's a very common saying in prayer in the elders room before you come in where they pray this, Lord please don't let anyone leave the church after this sermon the same way they have come.

And I pull those men aside and say, That's a wrong prayer. There's no one that's gonna leave. You don't have to pray for that. No one's gonna leave church the way they came. Because they're either gonna be hardened or they're gonna be softened and broken and matured and comforted, but they're not gonna leave the same way they came.

You see, because the Word of God is the saviour of death unto death, or life unto life. The greatest event in the life of every single person in front of them, the greatest event of their every single week, is your preaching. The sermon is the highlight of the week. And so what you're doing brother, is the most important thing in the world. You gotta believe in preaching.

When I was called to the ministry when I was 16, then my dad kind of took me under his wing and I remember him saying to me so vividly, powerfully, several times, if you become a preacher someday son, you've got a job that's far more important than living in the White House because you're dealing with the souls of men. Not just their material welfare, but their eternal welfare. And God normally saves people through preaching. You've got to believe in it. Secondly, an experiential preacher is almost always a passionate preacher.

A passionate preacher. Paul said, seeing we have this ministry as we have received mercy, we faint not, but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness or handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. 2nd Corinthians 4, 1 and 2. Our forefathers called this earnest proclamation, earnest proclamation. The minister must preach in such a way that it's both urgent and it's important, Very important.

And that means that your whole demeanor from the time you step on the pulpit to the time you step off is one of earnestness. You don't get on the pulpit and say, Well folks, great to see you all here today. And yeah, I've got a few things I want to share with you today. Share? Are you kidding me?

You're coming with thus saith the Lord, the word of God. We're not in a share time on the pulpit. We can share things in a little discussion group, some of our thoughts, but we're declaring the word of God. So all these words like I think or I suppose it's this way, Cut it out of the pulpit. You bring the word of God with authority, with power, with unction, by the Spirit, earnest proclamation.

So the pulpit as a general rule is not a place for jokes. I'm not saying that there isn't something that you might say in a great occasion that may be a little bit humorous, that there may be a little laughter, but trim that back, Dial that back as much as possible. What you're doing is deadly, deadly serious. Can you imagine a Puritan preacher getting up and telling a couple of jokes before he started his sermon? Ha, impossible.

Listen to Richard Baxter. "'Of all the things of this world that I hate the most, it's that kind of preaching which tends to make the hearers laugh or to move their minds with tickling levity and affect them as stage plays used to instead of affecting them with a holy reverence for the name of Almighty God. Ernest preaching aims not to please men, but to please God. The minister speaks with a conviction that God is his witness, that God is right here as he is, standing beside him, taking that word and using it. And so the experiential preacher strips away the masks, his own mask, his people's mask.

He makes himself vulnerable, makes the people vulnerable, he brings sinners before the throne of Almighty God. All flattery is abhorred. Listen to Backstor again, oh sirs, by the way if you've never read the Reformed Pastor, you've got to read that by Richard Baxter. You've just got to read that. And that will really lift up in your mind the value of what you're doing, but boy, will it convict you to be a godly man as a godly preacher.

Oh sirs, how plainly, how closely, how earnestly should we deliver a message of such moment as ours? In the name of God, brethren, labor to awaken your own hearts before you go into the pulpit, that you may be fit to awaken the hearts of sinners. Remember, they must be awakened or damned, and a sleepy preacher will hardly awaken drowsy sinners. Speak to your peoples, to men that must be awakened, either here or in hell." See, preaching is not lecturing. Preaching is teaching the word of God plus application.

So it's not a dry communication of information. Preaching is fitting the arrow to the bowstring, drawing it back, launching it straight at the heart by the directing power of the Holy Spirit. Preaching is earnest. We're compelling men to come in. We're using holy energy, we're using holy sincerity.

We're not just raising our voices and waving our arms for nothing. We're being motivated by zeal for Christ, by our burning love for God and for the value of every soul before us. Listen to Charles Spurgeon. If you were to ask me what in a Christian minister is the most essential quality for securing success in winning souls for Christ, I should reply in one word, earnestness. An intense zeal, a consuming passion for souls, an eager enthusiasm in the cause of God, and we believe that in every case, all other things being equal, men prosper in the divine service in proportion as their hearts are blazing with holy love for God and for man.

I don't know if this is the best thing to do but I'll tell you what I do in the second Psalter that we sing in our worship services. I often just look around in the church and just focus on different people. Just before I preach, oh yeah that man over there I counsel him in that situation. Oh that woman there is struggling with that. Oh, that child there just lost a grandfather.

I'm just letting myself feel the needs of people. I want to, I'm not just preaching to a mass of people, I'm preaching to my people. I want to, I want to feel their need. So this earnestness can be more direct, more personal, more loving, more winsome. Ernest preacher is almost always an experiential preacher and vice versa.

Third, a prayerful preacher. You can't be an experiential preacher and not wrestle with God in prayer for your people. I don't think any of us would match many of the reformers or Puritans. I mean, we're all guilty. I think of John Welsh right now.

I mean, don't even try this, it would be impossible. But his wife said after he died that she reckoned he prayed seven hours a day for his people. Seven hours a day? We don't even come close. But do we at least earnestly pray through our directory?

You know, I don't know, once a month. Do we get through? We've got 750 people, so as pastors we get together every month and we pray several pages for an hour or so, and then we'll do it again next month. But also privately, do you do that? Pray for everyone.

That's what John Welsh, the son-in-law of John Knox did. And his wife said, he never slept through an entire night. He would always get up in the middle of the night in the northern highlands of Scotland, it was cold in the side rooms and she was afraid he'd catch cold and pneumonia and he'd go off into the side room and he'd start praying for his people one by one at three o'clock in the morning. Whew! And she'd go out and she'd, the door would be closed of course, but she didn't dare open it.

It was too sacred she said, too sacred. So she'd call through the door, John honey, you're going to catch cold and pneumonia. Please come back to bed." And she'd hear this voice coming back. Oh, my dear, I have 3, 000 souls to take care of. That's the size of his congregation.

3, 000 souls to care for. And I know not how it is with many of them." And he'd pray on for another half hour, hour. Now... Acts 6, isn't that true? Acts 6 verse 4 says that we really have a job description with just two points.

Prayer and the ministry of the Word. Charles Bridges said Charles Bridges said at some point, and the first gives to the second its measure of success. Are we serious about being used for the maturation of the saints, for the salvation of the lost, for the glory of God? And we cannot but be men of prayer. I'm not saying you have to pray two hours a day, three hours a day, five hours a day.

No. I'm saying we have to be men who are earnest in praying for our people. You have to put that into your own your own time frame, your own possibilities, but but Soul winning is inseparable from prayer. And those divines in the past who have been most used by God have often marinated their preaching in prayer. Now probably every one of us earnestly prays for God to help us when we go into the pulpit.

But what about when we come back home? Which is just when Satan is busy to flit around and pluck away the seed of the Word. You know what Joseph Aline said, Joseph Aline was another one, that Puritan, whoo, Four to eight a.m. Every morning, spent alone with God. And if a blacksmith, he heard a blacksmith starting to work, say at 3.45 before he started prayer, he'd say to his wife, oh, how guilty I am that the blacksmith is at his trade before I'm at my trade with God.

And This is what a line said, for every sermon you preach, go from your knees to the sermon and go from the sermon back to your knees. And I'm guilty of, I do it sometimes, but often I don't. And What does that tell us? What does it tell me? It tells me that I'm more concerned about how I do, maybe than for the souls of my people.

That's a damning thought. I don't want to be that way. Get into the holy habit of regular prayer times for your people. It will do our souls so much good. So if we want to be fishers of men, we must be like Jesus, exemplary in prayer.

And it's private prayer that gives our public prayer and our public preaching an extra measure of authenticity. So you heard the story about Robert Ray McShane I'm sure but let me refresh it in your mind. There was a preacher that came to see him because he wanted to know, this young preacher in his 20s, God was using him for the conversion of so many people. He wanted to know the secret of his success. So he came to, but McShane was gone.

So he was disappointed. He talked to the janitor, Sexton, I think they call him. And Sexton said, what can I help you? And he said, yeah, yeah, I guess you, maybe. What, do you know the secret of Robert Murray McShane's success here?

Oh yeah, no problem. The guy said, follow me. So he took him into McShane's study and said, sit in his chair. The Guy sat in his chair. He said, spread out your hands.

Cry to God Almighty. They said, come follow me. Walk down the sanctuary. He said, get in the pulpit. Spread out your hands.

Cry to God Almighty. You see the whole point was McShane was in secret what he was in the pulpit. There was a continuity there and people felt that. And that's powerful. That's powerful in the ministry.

The church today desperately needs preachers whose private prayers season their pulpit messages and who continually remind themselves that awakening, heart engaging, life transforming preaching does not depend on ministerial eloquence or self-generated passion or powers of persuasion, but in the sovereign good pleasure of God operating through an earnest ministry given by the Holy Spirit through you. Number four, inauthentic preacher. You. Number four, inauthentic preacher. You know, preaching is hard to fake.

Maybe you can fake it a bit. As one minister said, you could take your best horse out of the barn with you to a conference on a weekend and you get away with it for a weekend. But week in, week out preaching in your own church. People get to know you. They get to know who you are.

They get to know how you think, especially your elders and deacons, right? And your kids, your kids see right through you. Because they live with you and your wife. Nobody, nobody wants their minister to be a fake. So our lives, this is a tall order, should be transcripts of our sermons.

We've got to be doers ourselves if we're going to influence our people to be doers. J. A. Bengal famously said, thyself wholly apply to thy text, and the substance of it wholly apply to thyself. The best sermons that we preach are the ones where the text masters us so that we may master it.

What we want to do for experiential preachers is we want to preach like John Bunyan who could honestly say, and I can't, but I hope you can, I can some of the time? But Bunyan said, I never did preach a sermon that I did not smartingly feel in my own conscience before I preach it. Wow. What a statement. Genuine piety, earnest piety that reverences God, loves the souls of people, makes a very effective preacher.

Not a fake piety, a genuine piety. Half-hearted piety slowly bleeds away a minister's strength. But piety, or godliness, same thing, enlivens a minister to seek God's kingdom. So it's far too easy to wear a ministerial mask on Sundays and be something really quite different in the home. And no, that doesn't mean it's a one-to-one equation.

It doesn't mean you can't laugh with your family and like you wouldn't laugh on the pulpit. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the way you live, the way you think, the way you respond to your children, the way you respond to people in private. They need to be able to feel this godliness, this Christ-likeness in you, in your kindness, in your generosity, in your warmth, in your love. And an experiential minister is always a minister who feels things deeply.

So this should be natural for us because we feel deeply our love for our children. We feel deeply our love for our people. Authenticity is very important. So that even when we go on vacation, I'm gonna let my hair down. No you're not.

You're going as a Christian. Maybe you can evangelize some people on vacation. Wonderful. Had a 95 year old elder in the early 90s for several years. He died when he was 96 but he was an elder until 95.

Every time I would go on vacation with my family, every time, he'd shake my hand, then he'd lean up close to my ear, and he'd say, don't go incognito. Very seriously, don't go incognito. You see? You say, well, but I'm not going as a minister. You are always a minister.

I don't agree with those people who say, well, you know, I'm not a minister. I gotta get away from the ministry. You are a minister. That's who you are. It's like you're a Christian, you're a minister, and you need to feel that, the very depths of your being.

It's a privilege. Edward Payson says, I sit in my study from time to time and I clap my hands and say, I can't believe it, I can't believe it. My God, the Savior of the world, the Savior of sinners, the God of the universe has called me to be an ambassador of Jesus Christ. Oh, thank you, Lord. What a calling.

What a calling. Be authentic. Number five, an experiential minister is a growing preacher. Growing preacher. I read once a statement in the preaching book that was written by James Stalker.

It's called, maybe I've got the reference here. I guess I don't. Anyone know it off? Oh well. James Stalker, he died in 1927.

He said this, it is only the man who has a large varied and original life with God who can go on speaking about the things of God for decades with fresh interest." Man, that statement just jumped off the page at me. I thought a lot about that. I've actually lectured, I gave a lecture on that statement. I'll read it again. Only the man who has a large, varied, and original life with God, who can go on speaking about the things of God for decades, with fresh interest.

What did he mean by that? Well, large life means you have all kinds of experience as a minister as the years go by with God and with man and relationship with your people and vis-a-vis God and the experience just grows in your life and the books you read and the community you have with the Saints. There's a growing life there. Your life is getting larger and larger with God also through people that you minister to. And that comes in all kinds of ways.

If I get discouraged, for example, sometime I do once in a while, and I'm not really a person that gets depressed often. Once in a while, I'll just pick myself up and I'll get in the car and I'll go, I'll give someone a call that I know is very spiritually mature. One of those five or ten people or so in my congregation that when I visit them, I usually feel more pastored when I leave than I pastor them. They're so mature. I'll go visit that kind of person and just get all this spiritual conversation flowing at me, enriching my soul.

And I leave that visit just with a sense of the reality of God. And it's just so wonderful to visit those people. There are not many, but I've had five or ten in every congregation I've served. Don't stagnate. Just keep growing this large life with God.

Read the best books, read the great classics and read them over and over and classics that really speak to the soul and as well as the mind. Develop this large life. Grow says Peter, 2nd Peter 3 18, in the grace and in the knowledge of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Then, says Stalker, have a varied life with God. Isn't that interesting?

A varied life of experience. Walking with God, especially as a minister, leads us along many a winding path with many ups and downs. No doubt about it. There are times of clarity, there are times of confusion, there are times of struggle, there are times of joy, there are times of peace, there are times of mystery, there are times of power, there are times of weakness. Oh, I often think a minister's life is much like the life of the psalmist.

All the ups and downs in the Psalms, all the experiences in the Psalms. In a way we get a little bit of all of it. And that's exactly what Calvin, later on I found that out, Calvin says, Calvin writes his five volume commentary on the Psalms more than any book. What does he say in this preface? He says, the Psalms are an anatomy of all parts of the human soul.

And then a little bit later on, he tells us his conversion story. John Calvin talking about himself? I can't believe it. Only two times. In all his corpus of 69 huge folio volumes does he say a word about himself?

One time it's just kind of a passing word, But here he actually tells us in two paragraphs how he got converted. Why did Calvin pick that place? Well he actually tells us. He says, this is the only time you ever find Calvin bragging about himself too. He says, I count myself, this is a paraphrase, eminently qualified to write a commentary in the Psalms because I have personally experienced all the things the psalmist write about.

Isn't that interesting? That's the place he tells us, opens himself up. A varied life with God. Calvin says, I've seen it all. And when you've been a minister 30, 40, 50 years, you will feel like that sometimes.

I've seen it all. Sometimes for good and sometimes not so good. But you persevere because your master calls you to persevere to the end. So why does God give his preacher such a varied corpus of experience? Could it be so that we can minister better as pastors to the people of God?

I think so. That's why some of the Puritans said, on an overall basis, and ministers don't like to hear this, by nature neither do I, but on an overall basis, because of the need to be able to relate to people in different situations, probably ministers will have more challenges, more afflictions in life than the average worker. Because we're dealing in such weighty things. God wants to train and mold us. So we need a large life with God, We need a very life with God, but we also need to grow in an original life with God Says stalker an original life with God Means that no one no one has your exact set of experiences and so in an original life with God I Have my own personality my own character my own set of personal experiences that God has charted out for me And that should be very dear to me.

This is my Heavenly Father directing every hair of my head, knowing them all by number. And my Father has never made one mistake. And when you can look back in your life and look at all the afflictions you've gone through, and I've had my share, brothers, you look at all the afflictions you've gone through, and you can say, I've needed every single one of them to break me and to make me dependent upon God. You're blessed. You're blessed.

It Doesn't mean that you think afflictions are pleasurable. Doesn't mean that you're going to ask God for more. Leave that up to him. But it does mean, now though no affliction for the present seems joyous but grievous, nevertheless afterward it yields a peaceable fruit of righteousness to them who are exercised thereby. And God exercises us and matures us so that we have a greater capacity to minister to his people.

So we do pray for an original, a varied, a large life of acquaintance with God. Then number six is an obvious one. A word-based, meditating preacher. A word-based, meditating preacher. If we're going to preach every week, we've got to be in the word brother.

We've got to take it seriously and we've got to meditate it, ingest it, chew it, digest it, assimilate it. Thomas Manton said, faith is lean and ready to starve unless it be fed with continual meditation on the promises of God in his word. Meditation does us so much good. It helps us prepare our sermons. It provides fuel for our prayers.

It enables us to have greater insight into the word we're going to preach on. And it weaves the Bible into the texture of our soul. Oh, how love I thy law. It is my meditation all the day. Seventh, an experiential preacher is a studying preacher.

A studying preacher. A really good carpenter will know how to use his tools. A really good preacher builds a library and uses it. Doesn't mean you read every book from cover to cover. But it means you buy the best books.

I love to buy books that are of an experiential flavor. They stir up my soul. And I love to read them. I count reading and studying as the most important means in my life. You may have yours to help me grow.

I can't tell you how many times in my life I've actually been weeping with my tears falling on the page of some Puritan book. Oh how sweet that's been to me. What a great thing. And then to get paid to study? That's unbelievable.

I mean, I would pay to study. We're so privileged. We get to handle these great truths of God's word? Wow. So how do you study?

Just wanna say one quick word here. Basically, I tell my students this. So always study at three levels. You study at your weekly level which is preaching level which is slightly below where you're at. You've got to know more than what you preach.

You've got to leave stuff on the cutting floor every single week but it's slightly below where you're at right? But that's your default position. You're always working at that level with adults in your congregation, with preaching and so on. But it's also good from time to time to work at a very simple level where you don't need any notes at all. Charles Spurgeon said every minister ought to be doing something on a regular basis where he uses no notes.

So you can still think on your feet. For me, That's my GCA, Grace Christian Academy is our Christian school. The GCA chapels. So I do a chapel for K through six, I do a chapel for seven through 12. And I don't use any notes.

I may glance over a sermon I've done, and then I just go and I speak it, change it all as I'm speaking, their level. I love it. I love how it makes you feel fresh on your feet. And I walk around among the kids, especially in the elementary night, ask them questions as I'm going. They sit like so quiet, you can hear a pin drop.

Like I get to form their souls. This is incredible. Maybe it's my favorite thing to do in life. Get something where you can just speak to maybe children or somebody, Some group of people with all your heart without having to go back all the time to your notes That's what Spurgeon said and then thirdly You want to be on the growing edge all the time? And so you want to do something maybe that's beyond you that you feel like you can't do Now we don't have a lot of time left here to do too much of this, but say you get an invitation to do something somewhere.

You say, I can't do that. That's above me. Or maybe you get an invitation to a scholarly article for a journal that's really edifying and you want to do it but you say it's above my pay grade. Do it. If you can find the time, do it.

It will stretch you. Especially if it's about an edifying subject. I've taken on many things in my life. Probably the most scary thing I ever took on, and this will sound silly to you, is preaching my way through the book of Revelation. I don't know, I just had such fear of chapters four through 19.

I just didn't think I could do it. But it kept weighing on me, and finally I said, you know what, I got to do it. And boy, did it stretch me. It really stretched me. But I learned so much.

And I'm so glad I did it. And I loved it, one sermon at a time. But it was trying at certain places. But you see, things that you work hard at and you come through it at the end often are the things that benefit you the most. So you want to live on the growing edge.

So do things above you, do things at your level and do things on a very simple level. All right, number eight, a decreasing preacher, a decreasing preacher. What I mean by this is we only grow by shrinking. He must increase and I must decrease said John the Baptist. So we're just poor sinners saved by grace, aren't we?

And we're no Lutherans, we're no Calvinists, We're nothing to brag about. Okay, get that in your mind. Even if you're in demand, even if you get lots of conference invitations, you're just an ordinary guy. And just thank the Lord for opportunities you have, but don't get a big head. That's the worst thing you can do in your ministry.

God knows how to keep you down of course. And he knows how to give you pain and sorrow and trials. Pain becomes a sand paper by which he strips away the old layers of self-made varnish to make way for a new finish, his varnish, which is humbling. The self-denied is a self put into the right place to be sanctified, transformed, and eventually glorified. We just need to die to our egos.

And Spurgeon called it the sweet feeling of self-annihilation. He said, die to yourself. And the more often you die to yourself, the more ready you'll be to actually die. And when you actually come to die, you only have to die just one more time. That's burjinesque.

So As soon as you find yourself thinking, oh, I'm a really good preacher, or I'm really good at this, or you're proud of this, or you handle yourself as a minister kind of like you're kind of stuffy and above other people, you're in the wrong place. You got to be down to earth with people, love your people, and if they thank you for their sermons and say, this is a really good sermon pastor, don't say, oh no it wasn't, you know, try to be really humble. And then they say, yes, yes it was. You get this big, ah, just say, thank you, may God bless it, and may God have the honor, and move on. Don't believe every little compliment you get from every little old lady you get.

I once got a compliment from a lady, told me it was a wonderful sermon. I saw her sleeping the whole sermon we're nothing special but our God is something very special so lift him up praise him number nine you got to be a prioritized preacher a prioritized preacher what do I mean by that your pulpit ministry is number one And when I was minister of a thousand people, the only minister of a thousand people, It wasn't uncommon for me to call up somebody I had an appointment with on Friday or Saturday, and I had to say to them, I am so very sorry, but I've been teaching in the seminary, I've been trying to keep up, and I'm behind, and I'm not adequately prepared for Sunday, would you please allow me to meet with you next Monday instead?" I've never had a single person turn me down on that, or even show any resentment. Now, there are emergency visits you have to do right then, right? But sometimes you just have to postpone a few things in order to get the absolute necessities done. So I'm saying know those things, prioritize your time.

That will help you to be able to devote yourself more sincerely to this experiential preaching emphasis. So what I do, and I'll just share it with you in one second, I've got a whole lecture on this, I'm going to give it to you in one sentence, I make three piles on my computer, things I must do today or this week, things I should do and things I'd like to do. I hardly ever get to the like-to-do pile, but what I've tried to train myself in life on is to actually like to do the should pile and to like to do the must pile so that I like it all. But yeah, it's hard, It's hard to keep everything. You have to get used to a lifestyle of not getting frazzled when you know there are hundreds of things waiting for you.

Just do the best you can, commend it to God, and pray that He'll help you prioritize the right things. And finally, number 10, an experiential preacher is a rightly motivated preacher. He's motivated by pure motivation. And I'll just give these three to you and then I'll close. I think you can fill in the blanks here.

The fear of the Lord, the childlike fear of God, which means I value the smiles of God above the smiles of men. I value the frowns of God above the frowns of men. That's got to be our motivation. I want to live in the fear of God. I stand before God on the judgment day, not before people.

Secondly, I've gotta be motivated by the love of God's truth, the love of God's truth. I want to bring the truth. I want to bring the total truth of the text I'm preaching. I want to be able to, on my deathbed, say with John Calvin, when the town council was around him, gentlemen, you know I have not falsified one word or twisted one word of the word. I have sincerely brought the whole word of God to you.

And number three, you're motivated by love for people. Love for people. You love the souls of your people. An experiential minister loves the souls of his people. He loves preparing messages for them.

He loves preaching to them. He loves visiting with them. He loves his flock. Love is the grand distinctive of experiential preaching. So there you have it, 10 marks of the experiential preacher.

Go over these ten marks in your own mind and I would advise you whichever ones you feel you're most short on, pray about them, seek God's grace to help you improve in them. But when you take this passage together, I think your people will see in you a godly man who wants to exalt Christ, abase himself, and wants to serve them for eternal good. Amen. Let's pray. Gracious God, please bless this short address and Bless the Q&A now and do help us to be men of God who are exemplary for godliness even though we can't see it ourselves most of the time.

Help us then to cry out for mercy. Lord, we come far short, but do help us to be Christ-like, to follow Paul in so far as he followed Christ, and to savor the things of God. Just to love the Bible, to love our people, to love the ministry, to love glorifying Thee. Lord help us to truly love the things of God and the work of God to the glory of God. In Jesus name, Amen.