When I was in seminary and serving as a pastor, I lived between two worlds. Four or five days a week, I was immersed in academia—lectures, papers, and theological debates. Seven days a week, I was shepherding a congregation—preaching, teaching, and counseling. In those formative days, my sermon preparation was often shaped with the academy in mind. I thought in terms of arguments, sources, and footnotes, because that was the air I was breathing.
But my first pastoral assignments were not in university towns. They were in small country churches—the kind of places where everybody knows each other’s business, but also where everyone knows when you need help. In those quiet, rural settings, I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my ministry life: the value of uninterrupted study. I can still remember hearing Warren Wiersbe say that every pastor should start in a small country parish so he can learn the discipline of quiet, unhurried preparation. That was true for me. In those days, I had fewer distractions and more time to let the text soak into my soul before I tried to preach it into anyone else’s.
Now, years later, as a forty-year-old pastoring a large, complex church in a small Southern town, I’m grateful for twenty-eight-year-old Andy. Those early habits of study, prayer, and solitude became the foundation I now stand on every week when I preach.
When I came to First Baptist Starkville, Mississippi—a church uniquely situated next to Mississippi State University—my preaching world changed. My congregation is a blend of farmers, PhDs, and farmers who have PhDs. On any given Sunday, I may be speaking to young professionals, retirees, children, youth, and hundreds of college students, each with different life experiences but all needing the same gospel.
Those first two or three years here brought about an audience shift in my preaching. I realized that my conversation partner in the pulpit was no longer a smoky seminar room filled with scholars, but the single mother wondering how she’ll make rent, the struggling college student wrestling with doubt, and the retiree trying to finish life’s race with faithfulness.
And here’s what the Lord pressed on my heart: the task is not to give them a distant lecture about what God did, nor an abstract ideal of what God might be like, but to proclaim Christ as the living, risen Lord who is present and active in their lives now. Union with Christ is not a theory to be footnoted—it’s the reality they must be called to live in today. As Dr. Stanley taught me by example, the goal is to teach people the Bible, not merely teach the Bible to people. That means meeting them where they are, with a Word that is alive and speaking to their exact moment.
It also means not looking past the moment in front of me—even though the moment is bigger than the moment. Every Sunday, the immediate conversation in the room is part of the eternal conversation God is having with His people through His Son. But if I rush past the person in front of me in the name of the “big picture,” I miss the very way the big picture becomes real: in this moment, for this person, through this Word.
That’s why the question I bring to every text is not only What does this mean? but How does this reveal Christ to these people right now? If the gospel is “God for us in Jesus Christ,” then preaching must be more than explanation—it must be an invitation. Not merely Here is what the text says about Him, but Here He is, alive, speaking to you today.
For me, that shift has meant fewer sentences designed to impress an academic peer and more words aimed at helping a weary saint see the face of Christ. It has meant moving from seeing my sermon as an argument to seeing it as an encounter. It has meant remembering that I am not simply handling a text—I am serving as a herald, called to announce a Person who is Himself the good news.
As Paul reminded the Corinthians, “We are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity… in the sight of God we speak in Christ” (2 Cor. 2:17). That’s the shift. I’m not speaking about Christ in the abstract; I’m speaking in Him, to those He loves, that they might know and abide in Him.