We all want to get better. But how do we improve?
After "good job" and "thank you," I think the next most frequent response I've received after preaching in my fifteen years serving as a pastor has been "you've improved so much since..." That has been a challenging compliment for me to receive. I tend to hear it as a veiled critique of my preaching in the past (how bad did I use to be for you to comment on my improvement?), and an unintentional criticism of my current preaching (my hope would be you wouldn’t notice my preaching, but that God’s Word would come alive, convict, and transform the hearer through the power of the Spirit).
My point here isn’t to reflect on how this particular compliment isn't much of a compliment (you can read Eric Geiger deal with that here if you’d like). Instead, I want to reflect on improvement.
There is encouragement in the fact that I’ve improved. Not long ago I was going to preach on a passage I had preached from some years before, and so I started rooting through my files of old sermons to see how I preached the text before. As I read the sermon, I felt no small measure of embarrassment. Oh my. That was not a very good sermon. Like a rubbernecker creeping by a crash, I kept looking. I dug up other early sermons and started perusing them. Goodness. You are right. I have improved! And I’m so glad that I have improved.
But how do we improve?
One comment before we return to reflecting on improvement. This trek through my early preaching makes me grateful for you, church. You have been so patient with me. I don't think I ever preached heresy. But my craft was clumsy. I’m still miles from Albert Tate, Francis Chan, or Tim Keller. That fact doubles my gratitude for you. You can go online and listen to any of a hundred different preachers who are far better than me. Thanks for bearing with me. It humbles me. It makes me grateful for you, church. It makes me hungry for more improvement.
But let’s get to how this relates to all of us. How can we improve?
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell made the 10,000-hour rule famous. It was Anders Ericsson who discovered the so-called 10,000-hour rule. Put simply, the rule indicates that after 10,000 focused hours of deliberate practice, there is significant improvement. When referring to the rule, what people typically think highlight the 10,000 hours, but just as significant is the “deliberate practice” piece of that.
If you don’t learn how to type properly, you can keep pecking away at that keyboard for 10,000 hours, but you’re not going to become proficient unless you intentionally practice proper typing techniques. I can go on a morning run every day but without intentionally improving my technique and pushing myself, I will not become a marathoner.
As a Christian I look at this and I see the necessity of Christian virtues to improve. First, it requires a significant amount of humility to improve. The idea of focused practiced necessitates humility. I can’t teach myself how to improve my tennis backhand, I need a coach to correct the flaws in my stroke. To be coached requires humility.
Improvement also requires patience and perseverance. How many times have I given up on workout routines? To get to 10,000 hours requires a tremendous amount of perseverance. To wait to get to those breakthroughs requires a whole lot of patience.
Improvement requires hope. You don’t know Spanish at all now, but if you keep studying hard, and taking the risk of putting it into practice, you can imagine yourself speaking fluently to your Spanish-speaking customers.
Add to these faithfulness and self-control and you see just how much of a spiritual exercise improvement is.
When I arrived at New Life, one of the things we began was a Monday morning debrief of the service including feedback on the sermon. It was helpful to learn and grow. Even more helpful has been the process Greg and I have developed over the last seven years or so. It began with us preaching our sermon to one another on Wednesday and getting feedback. That grew to adding a preaching feedback team that we preach to every Friday. It is tremendously helpful to receive feedback from Greg on Wednesday, re-work my sermon for Friday, and then get additional feedback before Sunday. Hearing how you did after the fact is somewhat helpful, but having coaches help improve what you’re doing before the fact is massively helpful.
What do you want to improve in your life? What spiritual muscles do you need to flex to get there? What practices do you need to install to ensure you’re headed toward improvement? I’d love to hear your answers to those questions, if you’re willing. Know that I’ll be praying for you as we walk forward in improvement for God’s glory.
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