A church asks you to preach at the last minute and you pull out a tried-and-trusted sermon you’ve given several times and feel strongly about.

Another church asks you to preach months in advance and you preach that same sermon.

What’s going on here?

Some would say you are taking the easy way out by recycling an old sermon. “Grabbing something from the barrel.” “Preaching your sugar sticks,” they call it.

They are dead wrong. You are doing exactly what you ought to be doing and here’s why.

Having pastored a half-dozen churches over 42 years and having preached since 1961, I have finally come to a conclusion that is so satisfying that it’s almost scary:

To a certain extent, when it comes to preaching, I know what I’m doing.

What does that mean? And more importantly, what does it not mean?

It means I recognize when the Holy Spirit is drawing my attention to a subject or a Scripture. I have the basic tools for delving into the Word and coming up with a sermon. And I am reasonably confident that as the Lord guides and empowers me, I can deliver it intact.

What it does not mean is that I’m on my own here and can do anything without the Lord. I am not and cannot. But that’s just fine. Jesus told us if we remain in Him, we will bear much fruit. On the other hand, “Without me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

And I’ve come to a second conclusion:

Those sermons that I preach again and again are the hammered-out insights and and revelations and convictions of a lifetime.

They are the answer to a question my Uncle Joe Noles used to toss my way when I was a preschooler: “Hey Joe, what do you know?” His face would break into the loveliest grin, as though he had never said that before and had thought of it just that moment. I’m confident he heard the same thing in his childhood a half-century earlier.

I sat in an auditorium in downtown New Orleans where my friend Jerry Clower was addressing hundreds of college presidents and deans from across the South. As he told story after story in his inimitable manner, I found myself hungering to hear one tale in particular. So I did the unthinkable. I called up to him.

“Knock him out, John!”

That’s the most famous line in the story which put Jerry Clower on the map. I’ve heard the tale a hundred times but it never fails to delight. I just wanted to hear it again.

He told it. And he delivered it exactly the way he had done five hundred times before without a trace of variation. We his audience did not want variation. It was perfect the way he delivered it the first time.

So, I ask my pastor friends, “What sermons define you? What two or three (or six or seven) messages are the crowning achievements of your years in the ministry?”

Preach them. Preach them again and again. And if someone hears them two or three times, it’s all right. We all enjoy hearing a great song repeated. Why not a good sermon?

If you are serving a church as pastor, you can’t very well pull those sermons out and re-preach them. At least, not very often. I’ve known a few pastors who did exactly that in the summer time. “Back by popular demand” one called them. Another dubbed his “Summer Reruns.” My thinking is there has to be a better term for these sermons which make up the heart and soul of your entire ministry.

Maybe we ought to dub them “Sermons That Took Years to Prepare.” Or, “Messages of a Lifetime.”

A friend contacts me by e-mail or on Facebook with a question concerning their spiritual struggle. They ask for my thoughts on a particular subject. In the process of responding, I realize I’ve written an article on this very subject. It’s on my website. So, I suggest that they “google” the title of that message and read it.

This is one of the blessings of the internet. It keeps its own records of our articles and blogs. I could go to my website, www.joemckeever.com, and scroll down the archives column (they go back six years!) and try to find the article in question. But, by googling the subject, it pops up on the screen and saves me a half hour of searching.

When someone asked me recently about the work of the devil, I thought of the message “How God Fooled Satan at Christmas” and sent them to find it. I suggested, “Pay attention to what it says on the limitations of the devil.”

That message took forty years to prepare and two hours to type.

When a friend wondered how she could know what God wants her to do, I thought of my message on “Five Things God Wants You to Know About the Rest of Your Life” and suggested she google it. That sermon/article–whatever it is–came to me in one evening. However, I constantly tweak it as the Lord teaches me on the subject.

When a pastor invited me to spend four days with his people and help them rediscover their mission as a congregation of the Lord’s people–and gave me a blank slate–I went to the Father in prayer. “What have you taught me on this subject, Lord?” I asked.

What I did not do was run to the library (or Christian bookstore) and pull out every book I could find on the mission of the church. This was no time to re-invent the wheel. And there was no need for that.

That congregation had never heard me preach. They had heard none of my stories and knew almost nothing of me personally. I could say to them anything God laid on my heart.

It’s my favorite kind of assignment.

What I did–what the Lord led me to do!–was to assemble a series of messages on basic Christian themes fundamental to who we are and what we are to do in this world for Jesus. (The audience was the congregation in general, but especially every church leader. The community was not expressly invited, although visitors were welcomed.)

Nothing in it was anything I had never shared before. Some of it I had preached fifty times. Some I had only thought but had never preached. The result was this:

THURSDAY NOON — I spoke on “Change.” The text was Matthew 9:16-17. The theme of the message was: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to have a problem with Jesus.”

Using the easel and large Post-it poster paper, I wrote the theme in bold letters. By the end of the weekend, the wall was covered with these. At the beginning of each service, we reviewed the previous sessions.

THURSDAY NIGHT — Subject: “Church.” Text: Matthew 16:18 and Acts 20:28. Theme: “Whatever you do to the church, Jesus takes personally.”

FRIDAY NOON — Subject: “Church health.” Text: Romans 12. Theme: “God is far more interested in making you healthy than in making you happy.”

FRIDAY NIGHT — Subject: “Fellowship.” Text: Acts 2:41-47 and I John 1:7. Theme: “After the gospel, the best thing your church has to offer is fellowship.”

SATURDAY NOON — Subject: “Conflict.” Text: Acts 6:1-7. Theme: “Every church needs a little conflict from time to time.”

SATURDAY NIGHT — Subject: “Christian love.” Text: Luke 6:27ff. Theme: “Love is something we do.”

SUNDAY MORNING — Subject: “What faith means.” Text: Habakkuk 3:17-19. Theme: “If you ever do anything for Jesus, it will be REGARDLESS–of what you have or do not have, how you feel, what others say, your doubts or fears.”

It took a long time, but I finally quit feeling guilty if I preached an old sermon to a new congregation.

I did, however, find that keeping the sermon fresh required me to stay on my knees to make sure this was the message the Father wants these people to hear. Then, I asked Him to freshen up the message by His power and enable me to deliver it as though for the first time.

Has this liberated me from every pastor’s nemesis, the Saturday night anxieties? Somewhat. But the patterns of a long lifetime are difficult to break. Even when I know the Sunday sermon backwards and forwards, the angst I feel drives me to the Lord in prayer that this will be from Him and not just “one of Joe’s sugar sticks.”

After all, the last thing the congregation needs is a sugar high. Vegetarianism aside, what the Lord’s people hunger for and desperately need is a little red meat.