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One of my greatest joys these days is working with young preachers, trying to ‘fast track�� them through some of the lessons I have learned through almost three decades of preaching. I was blessed to attend some great schools, but truthfully most of the bit I have learned about preaching came from painful Sunday afternoons of lamenting the ‘getting it wrong�� and determining to do it better next time.

I am humbled and blessed by the thought that my lessons learned through much travail can be given to hungry young preachers who are just starting out. Here are some of the mistakes I’ve made and observe:

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One of the things I longed for as a young preacher—and found very tough to find—was practical help with how to actually communicate. I was deeply persuaded about the importance of exposition and the need for application and all the main things, and there was a ton of info on how to interpret and outline a passage and settle on the big idea, etc. But what I could hardly find was practical help in the actual process of communicating. I’d like to begin posting some little snippets of ‘how to communicate.�� Not because I think I have it down in any sense, but because I know how hard it is to find input and discussion at this level.

Below is a clip from a sermon on Revelation 2. I was referencing Jesus�� statement: “I know�� repeated in each of the 7 letters. I wanted people to understand that Jesus�� ‘knowing�� is far more than fact-based knowledge. I chose to compare knowing factually, with Kindergarten knowing. The simple move I made, and commend to you, is setting up the Word before you need it. By making the Word significant in the hearers�� minds before you want to use it, you accelerate your move from explanation to application. Tell me what you think , and try it yourself this weekend. PREACH THE WORD!

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Every minister of the Gospel that I’ve known who bears fruit has encountered opposition. I have encountered it. And if you’re committed to the unapologetic preaching of the Word of God for the rest of your life, opposition is coming. ��Through many tribulations we enter the kingdom of God�� (Acts 14:22).

But opposition is just one part of a ministry pattern we find repeatedly in Scripture—a pattern that I wish someone had shared with me in my early days in ministry. Watch below, and let nothing dissuade you in your passionate commitment to be faithful to the Gospel, until Christ returns or calls us home. This is a clip that leads into a study of Acts 13-14, that I gave at an Acts 29 Bootcamp we were privileged to host. that shows the same pattern in some of the cities where Paul took the Gospel.

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I want the whole gospel:

Every single ounce of truth; give it to me straight just like it is in the Bible.

I want the whole gospel:

Don’t dilute the living water—it might not quench my thirsty soul.

I want the whole gospel:

Turn on the light of Jesus Christ and don’t shield my view—I need every beam of His radiant glory to dispel the darkness in me.

I want the whole gospel:

Don’t block the door, or I might not get through.

I want the whole gospel:

I need an accurate map to the narrow road, because only a few are finding it.

I want the whole gospel:

Because I am wholly lost, God’s verdict is wholly just, and my damnation is wholly certain.

My heart is wholly depraved and my sin is wholly mine.

My efforts are wholly futile and my escapes are wholly hopeless.

I need a whole Savior, whose whole suffering, wholly satisfies a holy God.

Please, please don’t cut the corners. It’s appointed unto man once to die and I have to be sure I get it right.

I have to have the whole gospel—give it to me straight. Nothing else will do!

Yes…God help us, let’s give the whole gospel.

The past three weeks have been a whirlwind on the , amazing in so many ways—and we’re not even finished with leg one. So if a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a novella of an update…keep praying!

After 10 cities in 12 days (and refreshed by two days of rest), our spirits are strong and our team remains united in purpose. We are clearly being upheld in prayer, and I thank you deeply for partnering with us in that. Bringing the message of Vertical to Phoenix tonight—then Riverside and Orange County, over to Las Vegas, and up to Fresno to finish the week. Keep praying!

Contrary to popular opinion, God has done more than give us good news He wants to get out. He has given us a manner that must accompany every method and a rationale for that manner.

The single term that best describes the way God wants his gospel given is boldness. And because it’s translated various ways, even faithful students of Scripture might overlook its frequency. Boldness (parrhesia) is used forty-two times in the New Testament. It is translated “openly,�� “freely,�� “plainly,�� “with confidence�� but most commonly some form of the word “bold.�� A bold witness is not a pushy witness. A bold witness is not a loud witness, unless it needs to be. Boldness is not obnoxiousness. It’s not rude or demanding. Boldness is the furthest thing from some wild-eyed preacher screeching in the streets, “You’re going to hell!�� Boldness is clear, direct communication in the face of potential opposition, nothing more or less. According to Proverbs 28:1, it is a characteristic of the God’s children: “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.�� Are you bold for Christ?

Objections to Boldness

Some suggest that boldness is a matter of personality or preference, not binding on all Christians for all time. Paul, however, clarified that boldness isn’t just a good way; it’s the right way, the God way, the biblical method for talking to people about Jesus. To the Ephesians, Paul disclosed his fear that he would fail in what God required, saying, “[Pray] for me �� that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak�� (Ephesians 6:18-20).��Others will say that they prefer the method of Christ Himself whose distinguishing characteristic was �� say, gentleness or probing questions. In reality, the disciples learned their boldness from watching Jesus’s boldness.

Jesus taught that boldness means speaking plainly: ��And [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly�� (Mark 8:31-32).��That word plainly is the same one translated in other places as boldness. Boldness is simply speaking the Gospel plainly. How many Christians fear to speak for Jesus because they think they need eloquence when plainness of speech is all God needs: “God loves you. Jesus Christ died for you. He can change your life. He did it for me. He will do it for you.�� That’s the garden-variety, plain-old, blue-jean boldness God blesses.

Jesus taught that boldness means speaking openly: “Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, ‘Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? And here he is, speaking openly?”��(John 7:25-26)��Hide it under a bushel? No! Again the word boldness, but here it’s the idea of freely expressing truth as you see it. It’s not preachy, arrogant, or force-feeding anything. Boldness is the way you would talk to someone with an urgent message. If you were vacating a building because there was a fire on your floor and you met some people in the lobby from your office walking toward the elevator, you wouldn’t hesitate for a second to freely express the danger of going in the wrong direction. You would know they were unaware and would never consider withholding something so obviously needed and unknown to them.

Jesus also taught that boldness means speaking clearly: “The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech but will tell you plainly�� (John 16:25).��Again it’s the same word, boldness; Jesus was declaring a time when figures of speech would be set aside in favor of plain, open, clear communication. That time is now!

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After a great day of rest—and a little fun —today we’re in Dallas with the . Already pumped to bring the message at First Baptist tonight and cry out for God’s glory with God’s people. So thankful…keep praying!

When was the last time you participated in a faith-driven, expectation-filled prayer meeting that invited God to reveal His glory and show up in power at your church? Not where one or two people pray the will of God, but where everyone in the room is in passionate agreement that God will displace our desperation with a manifestation of Himself. In a prayer meeting like that, voices are raised, God’s will to save and heal and restore is confidently petitioned by faith as people cry out to the Lord with a palpable sense of determined persistence. Have you ever been part of a prayer meeting like that?

Sadly, so many Christians have never been part of a fervent, faith-filled prayer meeting. More than anything else, is really a story of the prayers of God’s people. A church that is not praying like this is not Vertical no matter what else it may do. God must speak in the preaching, God must show up to receive our worship, God must ripen the hearts of people to the gospel, and all of that He will do if we pray biblically, but He will do none of it if we do not pray.

Prayer is the easiest thing to assume in church and the hardest thing to maintain. Prayer is the first thing our flesh stops when times get easy, and true prayer is the last thing we resort to when times get tough. Prayer has been the point of greatest victory in my walk with the Lord and the most persistent place of failure. I have prayed great prayers that literally shook the foundations of our church and led to an outpouring of God’s glory. I have laid out before God, pleading for miracles in my life and family when they seemed impossible, only to receive them against all odds in answer to prayer.�� Even now, revising these sentences in final edit, my eyes fill with tears at the memory of these monumental prayer moments. But I have also failed to pray and floundered as a leader, and falling into patterns of behavior that hurt the church and people. Where I have succeeded, it has flowed from the place of prayer; where I have failed, a more detailed analysis revealed a prior failure in prayer. In Vertical Church it all comes down to the praying. If you want to see a great outpouring of God’s presence upon your life and ministry, you must go much deeper into this matter of personal and corporate prayer.

In my experience, pastors and church leaders are not failing in prayer for lack of knowledge. It’s not that we don’t know about God’s promises or the way He prioritizes prayer; it’s that we don’t do it. Failing in prayer, we wander further and further from the Vertical Church vision. In our prayerlessness we seek to replicate Vertical results with weirder and increasingly fleshly horizontal methods. The story of my ministry and our church is really a chronicle of our prayers. My goal here is to challenge you to seek a new high water mark in personal prayer and in the prayer emphasis of your church. If you do, everything will change rapidly, Vertically.

Prayer in My Church of Origin

I grew up going to Central Baptist Church in London, Ontario. It’s the��church my grandparents were married in, the church my mother was��saved in, the church in which my mother-in-law, my wife, and I were��baptized, the church I preached my first sermon in, and the church that��welcomed worshippers to my grandmother’s and mother’s funerals. It was��a large church, almost one thousand people during my teen years, and a��church with a rich history of pastors, from its Scottish founder James McGinley to Franklin Logsdon, who went on to Moody Church, to��Howard Sugden, a wonderful Bible teacher and confidant of Warren��Wiersbe. Though the preaching was textual at best with frequent forays��into “it seems to me,�� and the worship was mostly shoulders up, people��were regularly coming to Christ, and I was in a place where God was��working. It was during the summer of 1981, while I worked as an intern��in the church, that I discovered��“the prayers of the saints,�� which are fragrant “i�Գ���Բ����� to God (Revelation 8:4). After going evangelistically door to door��each morning, we would visit senior church saints in the afternoons, and��I had my first exposure to fervent��prayer. I had often sat in a��prayer meeting and heard a distant pray-er across the sanctuary,��talking to God in hushed��tones as every head was bowed.��But to sit in the homes of these��saints and hear them pray with��passion and tears for the work��of God in our church was truly��life changing. Some prayers I��heard were regular and formulaic,��but a few were truly��powerful with God. In those��moments I instantly knew they��were not posturing for the��young pastors who came to��visit, just humbly allowing us��to walk by a river that ran deep��and wide in their souls. Like��discovering a secret factory��manufacturing bombs for the war effort, I believe I had stumbled upon the true source of God’s work��in our church. Far from the typically anemic prayers for minor health��concerns so prevalent in poorly attended Protestant prayer meetings,��these prayers were powerful, passionate, faith-filled��petitions. After that��summer I was never again comfortable with weak praying.

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Week 1 of the has been overwhelming, in the best sense. The presence of God moving through churches and conference rooms filled with worshipers as His Son is lifted high and His Word is proclaimed, is so powerful and profound it is difficult to describe. Much thanks to all who are upholding us in prayer. Keep praying—today we’re in Oklahoma City, can’t wait for tonight!

Looking back, we can see that much of what went wrong with preaching at the end of the last century flowed from men determined to connect with their listeners. At the time, many preachers were understandably fed up with profitless Bible babbling that inflicts boredom on the hearers, doing great detriment to their souls. In college, a veteran preacher named Trevor Baird taught me that “the greatest sin in the ministry is to bore people with the Bible,�� and I have gladly exhausted myself attempting never to do so. At times I’ve failed in this, but I have never done so with resignation or rationalization that the problem is the hearers.

A herald comes directly from the king and brings a message of urgency to bear upon those who need to hear it. The message we have from our King is called the Bible. The promises our King has made about preaching extend to preaching the Bible and nothing else. If Paul had not been so clear, we might cast about to other sources for subject matter to preach on, but we are restricted to just to the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:16) and the Word of God (2 Timothy 4:2). God has not promised to work through your insights about marital communication, no matter how accurate. God gives no assurances to bless my gleanings from psychology or philosophy or sociology. Now if you want to jump in here and remind me that all truth is God’s truth, I have no problem with that statement and agree that it is so. The geographical truths confirmed by Columbus and Magellan, the scientific truths discovered by Galileo and Copernicus, and Einstein’s and Hawking’s insights into space and time relativity are all God’s truth discovered. Yes, all truth is God’s truth, but hear this: all truth is not God’s Word. While it is true that 2+2 = 4 and E=MC2, neither of those equations alter your life or your eternity. None of the promises God has given in Scripture about His Word extend to the things human beings have discovered about His created order. When God says, ��The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever�� (Isaiah 40:8), which category do you think the supposed insights of Freud fall into? Are they grass that withers, or are they Word of God that stands forever?

Your conviction on this has massive implications for whether glory comes down when you preach. When God says, ��My word…shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it�� (Isaiah 55:11), do you suppose the Lord is promising an unstoppable sovereign purpose to any factual insight a preacher might share from, say the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis inventory or from the Dr. Phil show on relational harmony? I hope your answer to this is decidedly no, and if it is no, then we must hold fast the conviction that God’s voice will not be heard in our churches unless we are preaching the Bible. Not preaching about the Bible, where biblical themes flow randomly out of the preacher’s own imagination. Not preaching from the Bible where a passage raises a subject but is not allowed to say anything about it because the preacher intercepts and runs to the end zone of his own thoughts on the matter. The goal is to actually preach the message of the Bible itself, where a passage is read and what is said about its subject is what the text asserts about that subject, and what is said about those assertions is what the text says about those assertions. Biblical preaching is where passages are expounded for their main points and the points the text makes about those points. In that kind of preaching, people are truly hearing what God is saying to His church by the Holy Spirit and glory comes down.

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Last night was our first event in . And it exceeded all expectations. NEVER have I felt so prayed for as I preached. Thanks to all who are crying out for God’s glory to pour down. Keep praying!

When Jesus said, ��For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also�� (Matthew 6:21), He was punctuating the absolute centrality of worship as the determinant for every human future. Worship or adoration is the most powerful expression a human being is capable of. When worship is directed to an unworthy person or object, we call it idolatry. Idolatry, not pride as we are often told, is the root of all sin. Pride is the wrong view of self that fuels idolatry, but the ultimate sin is the actual act of placing anyone or anything on the throne that is God’s alone. The first of God’s “Top 10�� commands forbids idolatry with the words ��You shall have no other gods before Me�� (Exodus 20:3), and Jesus reiterated that reality, circling ��Love the Lord your God�� as the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:34��40; Mark 12:28��34).

The highest and most powerful human experience is to express our love to the most worthy object of that affection. In the elevation of Christ’s worthiness, our greatest joy is discovered. The greatest sin, then, is directing that adoration elsewhere; not only because it insults God, but also because it insulates our hearts from the delight we were created to revel in. To fail at worship is the greatest failure a human is capable of with the gravest and most immediate of consequences. But when a believing community amplifies worship as their ultimate priority, they are shaped by that adoration into the most powerful human force possible.

Worship Defined

The Hebrew word translated worship means, literally, “to fall or to prostrate yourself before someone on the ground, touching your forehead to earth.�� Physically or figuratively, worship involves bowing or prostrating yourself before someone in humility and is actually a picture of subservience. In the New Testament, two words describe this action. One is the word proskuneo, which means “to kiss toward or to kiss the hand”—it’s the idea of adoration (this is the word repeatedly used in John 4). The second word is latreuo, meaning “to give or to pay homage.��

When you worship, you are saying, “This one is worth more.�� At the same time you are implying, “I am worth less.�� Worship is the magnification of God and the minimization of self. One of the most succinct expressions of a worshipper’s heart in all the New Testament came from John the Baptist: ��He must increase, but I must decrease�� (John 3:30).

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Today, I invite you to pray for the , as we finish loading and set out for the first of 40 events throughout North America. Pray that God would be glorified in every city as His Word is proclaimed and His Son is exalted (Ephesians 3:21).

In the book, The Power of Crying Out, Bill Gothard draws our attention to how many times in the Scripture we’re told to call to the Lord, to cry out to the Lord, to lift up our voices. It’s one of those threads woven through the Bible that, once it’s pointed out, we think, How did I miss this? And yet how often do we pray loudly, out loud? Is it true in your life that most of your prayers would be inaudible to a person standing beside you? How did we come to this musing and whispering, which are far from what the Bible portrays as prayer that God delights to answer? God is not moved by our meditative whispering and frequently invites us to cry out, to call out, lift up our voices, to pour out our hearts. In chapter 3, I told the story of making myself hoarse calling out to God in prayer, something I would not have done had circumstances not sent me in search of greater fervency. We know that ��the fervent prayer of a righteous man results in much�� (James 5:16), but for some reason we seem resistant to embrace the most obvious path to fervency, which is volume. Can you give a single example of fervent communication that is whispered given normal circumstances? We may quietly ask our family to exit quickly through a second-story window as the ax murderer climbs the stairs, but apart from an explanation of some kind, fervency and volume go together. In 1 Samuel 1, Hannah’s whispered prayer was an attempt to avoid the notice of Eli, the fat guy who couldn’t restrain his worthless sons and ran a place of worship so delinquent that his first assumption about a woman praying quietly was that she was drunk. Apart from a similar circumstance, mind-only praying and whispered praying are to be the exceptions and not as they have become: the rule or norm.

I realize that the way God wired you may not easily lend itself to volume or intensity in prayer. You may not be called to lead multitudes to boldly ��draw near to the throne of grace�� (Hebrews 4:16), but that doesn’t mean you can’t max out your own capacity for fervency. What we see of praying and prayer teaching in the Bible can’t be God’s way of saying, ��Whisper something to Me in passing; I know you’re busy. Just throw a couple of thoughts My direction, a couple of quick requests over your shoulder while you’re on your way to the grocery store. That’s all I desire.�� Instead, I wonder if God’s word on prayer isn’t summarized ��How much does this matter to you? If you would turn your intensity dial to full, I would like to meet you at the place where you express your heart fully.��

�� Isaiah 40:9 says, ��Lift up your voice with strength…lift it up, fear not.��

�� Psalm 116:1 reports, ��I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice.��

�� Romans 8:15 teaches, ��You have received the Spirit…by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!����

Something wonderful happens in the heart of God when His children get themselves out on a limb and say from the depth of their souls, “God, if it’s not You, it’s nothing. We don’t have another plan. We don’t have another hope. All our eggs are in Your basket; there is no plan B. We believe this is Your will as revealed in Your Word, and we are staying right here until You act on our behalf.�� Weak praying has no place in Vertical Church.

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