Whether it be before thousands of teenagers at a Dare 2 Share conference or hundreds of people in a church, I struggle and battle nerves when it comes to preaching the Word of God. When I tell people that, many of them look surprised.
Maybe because I preach with intensity and passion, it comes off as fearlessness.
It’s not.
I remember the first time I preached my first sermon as a twelve-year-old Christian school student. I was so nervous that I literally shook the pulpit. My hands were locked onto the sides of the pulpit, and they were quaking. There was a pencil on the lip of the pulpit where my Bible and notes were resting. It rattled back and forth so quickly that it sounded like I was working a maraca behind the way-too-big-for-me pulpit.
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I was sure that my nervousness was obvious to everyone. But those seasoned preachers who were rating my sermon wrote on my evaluation, “Way to preach with intensity! You were so intense that you were actually shaking the pulpit!” They mistook my nervousness for intensity.
I knew at that point that I was called to be a preacher.
Maybe that’s why I have always had a penchant for verses like 1 Corinthians 2:3, “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.” After all, if the great Apostle Paul struggled with nerves, then puny little Greg Stier could, too…and so can you.
Over the last three decades plus of preaching, here’s how I have learned to conquer my nerves instead of letting them paralyze me:
1. I let my nerves drive me to study harder.
There’s a great line in the movie Unforgiven when a one-armed deputy is asked why he always loads two guns. His answer was classic,
“I don’t want to die for a lack of shooting.”
In the same way, I don’t want to choke due to the lack of preparing.
I allow my nerves to get me back to the Bible. I let what Jim Collins in his excellent book, Great by Choice, calls “Productive Paranoia” drive me to exegete the text, build a solid outline, insert powerful illustrations, and close out with a clear call to action.
