Tonight when I was preaching on the idea of 'praying that you don't fall into temptation' from Luke 22, I drifted into a state of consciousness that athletes know as 'the zone'. It's really kind of hard to explain and I don't want to sound like that I'm extra holy or bragging or anything like that. But it's like this...often when we preach, we preach what we have been studying on, we seek to connect with audiences, and we tell the truth the best that we can. But sometimes, guided and prompted by the Spirit, we go somewhat further to this state of almost epiphany, where we just simply KNOW that this is true, there's nothing we can do to deny this; it's as real to us as our own existence and nothing can convince us otherwise.
Tonight I felt like this, though this can be dangerous. When I preaching about temptation and the regrets that we feel when we fall into temptation, I felt almost a little bit too honest about all my failures, and after a moment I had to remind myself that preaching was not all about my own experience, but God working within all of us. We might well confess far too much in a time like this, and people may look at us as the wicked people we really are (perhaps this would be better than putting us on a pedestal, however?), and it comes back to bite us in the end. But when truth is flowing, where do you hold it back?
