If you try to do it well, preaching is hard. Never mind the mostly good-humored “it must be nice to work only one day a week” jabs. A big part of your work may be displayed on that one day, but it’ll succeed only when it’s preceded by some tedious hours in your study.

So yes, it’s hard. It’s tough to present more than a hundred sermons and classes to the same group of people every year and make them all fresh, interesting, and well-researched, with the right proportion of exposition and application.

Complicating things, you’ve got dozens of different opinions in every audience about what good preaching is, and it’s hard not to let people’s opinions affect you—for good or bad. You don’t preach for their approval, but still, you want your labor of love to bring some kind of visible fruit.

You’re thankful that God has given you the opportunity to preach His good news, but you’re not immune to what plagued Jeremiah and Elijah and everyone who’s ever stood up to speak the Word of God. Sometimes you get discouraged. And the old cliché is true: Sunday comes every week.

But that’s not the whole story, of course. Nothing this side of sitting with Jesus in heaven can compare to the feeling you get when God helps you connect with the people you’re preaching to, the people you love. That experience of seeing the prodigal son step into the aisle and walk toward the front with tears on his face and penitence in his heart. Or the look of glory in a young lady’s eyes as you raise her out of the baptismal pool as her husband and kids smile and sing.

A wonderfully tough work. In maybe no other calling is there the same mix of mountaintop experiences and down-in-the-valley challenges. Like Elijah, we climb to Carmel and see God’s power and then descend to the wilderness to confront our weakness. Like Peter, James, and John, sometimes we see Jesus in His transfigured glory and then walk down the mountain to face intense conflict.

It’s wonderful. And hard.

We know that, and as fellow strugglers we want to help you in this good work, particularly the preaching part of your ministry.

So why is this page here?

Our purpose is to help you do your work better. Specifically, we’ll offer you insight on various resources that’ll help you preach Jesus and Him crucified more effectively.

You have a finite amount of time every week to prepare your sermons, and we want to help you use that time more effectively by pointing you to both printed and online sources that’ll help you get the most out of your prep time.

What will you find here?

A lot of stuff, we hope:

  • Book reviews—we’ll recommend works that have helped our preaching and ministry, on topics like sermon preparation and presentation and leadership in ministry.
  • Helpful Internet sources—as you know, the Web is an endless resource that can be used effectively, but it can also be a bad time leak. We hope to guide you to—or at least give our opinion about—sites that have helped us the most.
  • Other resources—we’ll point you to magazine articles, journals, apps, whatever we run across that’ll help you do your work more efficiently.

We’re preachers, so we might be somewhat biased, but we believe gospel preachers are doing some of the most important work there is. Because of that, we want to help you do it to the glory of God for the good of His kingdom.

Thanks for visiting, and we look forward to working with you.