You preached that before!

It is quite likely that you have members of your church that mark the texts that you have preached. It is not uncommon for one of them to come to you with a bit of a wagging finger and say "you have preached that before."

What church members fail to realize is that passages of Scripture are not disposable. In their minds, use it once and you cannot use it again. Might as well rip it out of your Bible.

This past Sunday, I again had one of those conversations with a church member. The church member happened to be my wife! Once again, I explained that I may have preached from that text before, but that it was in fact a fresh sermon. I had not even looked at any old notes.

But she had. In fact, she had notes from both sermons in her Bible....and the sermons were nearly identical!

At this point, I was a little embarrassed. Had I really, unintentionally recycled an old sermon?

It is my preaching goal to have my sermon echo the spirit and content of the text. Here, several years apart, I had come to the same text, prayed over it, examined it from every angle I could, tried to understand the Spirit's design for the passage and then developed two extremely similar preaching outlines.

As I thought about it, the text hadn't changed so why should the sermon? The more I thought about it, the better I felt about both the messages.