“No sermon should be considered alone. We are ministering to people week after week, and one message fortifies another. The harvest is not the end of the meeting; it is the end of the age.”
–Warren W. Wiersbe paraphrasing an encouraging nugget from Phillips Brooks (1835-1893).
I find this quite helpful. Sometimes the nagging, fleshly tendency toward entertainment, or people-pleasing, or the fear of man, and sometimes the godly desire to be helpful to the people creates a self-induced pressure to “make” the weekly gathering or the weekly sermon stand alone as the one event that will change the hearer’s life forever.
To be sure, there are those sermons that have radical, life-changing effects on people. Praise God. But the reality is that the cumulative effect of standing under the steady rain of God’s word week after week is what readies the full harvest.
Take the pressure off tomorrow’s sermon. Hit a string of singles rather than swinging for the fence. Be faithful to the text and let the word do its work as the Spirit conforms people to Christ. “The harvest is not the end of the meeting; it is the end of the age.”