Yesterday, after finishing my sermon at the first service and before the second service began, I was resting with a cup of coffee at the café in my church. At that moment, a church member who had come in for coffee approached me and asked, “Pastor, how much time did it take you to prepare this morning’s sermon? I heard that Pastor Ben Cross, who served as our senior pastor until a few years ago, usually spent about twenty-two hours each week preparing a single sermon.”
As an associate pastor rather than the senior pastor, I had no concrete basis for stating how many hours I typically spend on sermon preparation each week. So I replied, “Well, I have been preparing that sermon my entire life.”
A leader cannot do everything well. A so-called “jack-of-all-trades” is never a true leader. An effective leader must be able to focus on what they must do personally. In this sense, time management for a leader goes beyond managing hours and schedules; it is fundamentally the management of priorities—and, ultimately, the management of one’s life.
Everyone faces both important tasks and urgent tasks. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey categorizes all our responsibilities into four types: (1) important and urgent, (2) less important but urgent, (3) important but less urgent, and (4) neither important nor urgent. Naturally, we cannot avoid giving immediate attention to category (1), the important and urgent. Likewise, anyone who devotes himself primarily to category (4)—tasks that are neither important nor urgent—is bound to fail. The real tension lies between categories (2) and (3).
At this point, leaders face a powerful temptation: to deal with tasks in category (2) first. These tasks feel pressing because they are urgent. However, Covey’s research reveals something striking. What truly builds competence and capability in a person is the consistent, daily commitment to category (3)—important but not urgent tasks. Urgent tasks, no matter how many we complete, do not accumulate into lasting skill or expertise. In other words, unless a leader intentionally focuses on category (3), he or she cannot grow into an effective leader.
Let us apply this principle to sermon preparation. Among a pastor’s weekly responsibilities, is there anything more important than preparing the sermon? Yet on Monday, sermon preparation is important but hardly urgent. By contrast, a pastor’s week is filled with urgent matters—visitation, administration, counseling, and countless other responsibilities. As these urgent tasks are handled one by one, Thursday night arrives, and the sermon is still far from complete—perhaps not even begun. By Friday, stress levels peak. Sermon preparation becomes a fire at one’s feet, and over the weekend, the pastor’s top priority shifts abruptly to hurried sermon writing.
To be sure, by the end of the weekend, a sermon somehow comes together. But if Covey’s research is correct, this kind of last-minute, urgency-driven preparation may produce a sermon, yet it does little to develop the preacher’s competence. This is precisely why some pastors, despite a lifetime of sermon preparation, never truly develop the ability to analyze and expound Scripture with depth.
Now imagine beginning sermon preparation on Monday. At that point, the sermon is important but not yet urgent. There is time—time to approach the text without haste, to reflect on it from multiple angles. There is time to examine not only the passage itself but also its historical, grammatical, and theological background. As a result, the preacher can discover, with his own eyes rather than merely through commentators, what the text meant to its original audience (though consulting commentators remains essential). Beyond that, the preacher gains initial breathing room to wrestle with how the meaning of an ancient text should be applied—not only to modern society but also to the postmodern world in which we live. This final task is one that most commentaries cannot adequately address. After all, congregations say “Amen” not when a preacher explains what a passage meant to Abraham or Jacob long ago, but when the Word intersects with their own lives.
When sermon preparation continues in this way throughout the week, it moves beyond the category of “preparation” and enters the realm of a life of study. Compared to simple sermon preparation, research demands far more time. Yet when years—five, ten, or more—are invested in such study, its depth steadily accumulates into genuine competence. And as competence grows, the time required for sermon preparation naturally decreases. Even without special preparation, one is already drawing from a vast reservoir of stored knowledge. The same principle applies to prayer, and the same is true of leadership development.
“Yes, I have been preparing that sermon my entire life.” If my answer were limited only to yesterday’s sermon text, it would be a blatant lie. I have not studied that specific passage my entire life. However, as someone who has studied Scripture and theology continuously since adulthood and who engages in that work every day, my answer is not a lie. John Maxwell captures this truth well in Leadership Gold: “The reason I have been successful as a leader is not because I possess unusual intelligence or charisma. The only reason I have succeeded is that I set my priorities early on and have focused on executing them every single day.”