If there is one scripture passage that haunts me day and night, it’s this one. We always pray that God would bless us more and “enlarge our territory”. But what does that really look like? Gather around and listen.

This Fall Elevation Church is launching our third location…
…in Uptown Charlotte.

I’ve never seen our staff so giddy about an opportunity. They are predicting that this thing is going to explode. I’m inclined to agree.
We’ll be meeting on Sundays at 10am (tentative time) at the McGlohon Theater, in Spirit Square at the corner of 7th and Tryon.

We want several hundred of you to get on board and help launch the campus…especially students, singles, and young married couples, but hey, everyone’s invited.
Email: uptown@elevationchurch.org for more info.

And we want all of you to help get the word out.
We’ll keep you posted on the details.

In the meantime…if you work uptown, let the devil know as you’re driving in that he’s got 3 months to evacuate the area.

Lots of pastors preach through books of the Bible verse by verse, thus alleviating the “What shall I preach about this week?” conundrum. That’s how I was taught to do it in seminary. That’s not how I do it. At least, not right now.

I do take the task of excavating the message that God wants to bring to Elevation Church every Sunday very seriously. I have a general preaching schedule that projects the content of my messages for the next 9 months. (God often interrupts this schedule. More often than I’d prefer.)
There’s nothing haphazard about my preparation process. By the time I preach a message, I’ve studied on it and worked on it and prayed about it for weeks, at least. Sometimes, for months.

Yet I find myself on many Saturdays still searching for the elusive it. I can’t substantiate this with chapter and verse, and I’m not saying it’s like this for everyone.
But I believe there’s a specific and urgent thing-I’m calling this the it-that God intends for me to say to the people every Sunday. I can’t just pick a text and roll with it. Yes, all Scripture is God breathed, and yes, God will always bless His Word. Nevertheless, there’s an it factor to the selection of a message that is hard to explain.
And some weeks I have to dig harder than others to discern what it is. Every once in a while it feels like I’m digging clear to China to get to the heart of the message and lift it out for everyone to see.

When you find it, and you know you’ve got a Word from the Word, you can hardly sleep Saturday night. It quite literally consumes you.
When you’re preaching it, and you know you’re all over it, there’s nothing like it.

Searching for it is the most frustrating part of every week for me.
Discovering and delivering it is the most satisfying sensation I’ve ever experienced.
Before you can preach it, you’ve got to find it.
And when you find it, watch out.
It’s more powerful than you could ever imagine.

Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King) says that for him, stories are not created things. They are found things. He compares them to fossils in the ground. His job as a writer isn’t about making a story from scratch. It’s about excavating a story that’s already there.

Is that true for a fiction writer? I don’t know.
Is it weird to make an application about my sermon preparation process based on something I read in Stephen King’s memoir? Yes.
But the concept really resonated with me.

I hear other preachers talk about writing sermons, and the way they say it throws me.
I have never really written a sermon. It’s not like that. The phrase preparing a message doesn’t sum up the process in my experience, either.
To me, the work of sermon preparation is most closely akin to unearthing. I’m not approaching the Bible trying to find Scriptures to substantiate a message that I’ve created. I’m approaching the living Word of God to uncover a Word from God from the Word of God.
(Read that sentence again.)

The message is already there. The Word is already powerful. My job is to dig it out.
And God has given me tools to lift it out very carefully-to keep it intact-so that the Spirit of God can make it come alive in the hearts of everyone who hears.