What Happened During My Sermon on May 10, 2026

I just experienced one of the most humbling, strangest, and vulnerable feelings imaginable, yet at the same time, it felt so freeing, convicting, and unexplainable. On Sunday, May 10, 2026 (Mother’s Day, of all days), I stood up to deliver a sermon, as I had on most Sundays over the past 8 years. But things did not unfold as they always did. When I watched the sermon video back, what I was experiencing couldn’t be fully detected on the outside, so I wanted to share this with you, but I also wanted to write this to help myself process it. This is a lengthy post, but I didn’t want to forget what happened today.

While I was in the middle of my sermon, with the people looking on, I found myself with an overwhelming feeling that I couldn’t get my thoughts together. I felt an unshakable burden for what I had planned to say, but just couldn’t seem to get it out. While I wasn’t crying, emotionally I couldn’t get myself together. Physically, while I wasn’t sick at all, I had sensations like my throat feeling like it was closing. I was looking at my notes, and it felt like they were written in another language. But I really don’t think all of this started here. Let me take you back to what had happened before that day, over the past couple of weeks in my own life, and then I’ll go into more about that specific preaching experience.

A couple of weeks prior, I had begun praying and thinking about what God would want me to preach as our next Sunday morning series. We had been journeying through the book of Luke (we’re almost halfway), and I had paused preaching in it for Easter and another series I felt led to do. So I had contemplated jumping back into Luke, but I didn’t sense that’s what God wanted for us. At the same time, I didn’t know where to go.

While I was mowing my yard last weekend, I was listening to a podcast that really challenged me in my walk with the Lord and in the ways I sometimes think about church ministry. A pastor was sharing how, on all accounts, his church appeared to be successful in ministry standards—they had thousands attending, built new buildings, and were moving people to get involved in groups and serving. However, he had come to realize that what they were using as the metric of success wasn’t actually success at all in God’s eyes. You see, they had charted “engagement” as the metric of spiritual growth. In ministry lingo, “engagement” includes tangible actions that people are doing, which make them, from a time commitment standpoint, more involved in church—worship attendance, group involvement, giving, serving, etc. On the surface, you’d think that if people were involved in these things, it’d be ideal. Except when this pastor and his team actually began charting who was involved in what within their church, and used those metrics as the “spiritual growth scoreboard”, they came to find out that the person who was at the top of the list of what they were calling their “pathway to spiritual growth” was a self-proclaimed atheist. He scored even higher than some of the deacons. You see, while success in God’s eyes can and should involve these things, they are not the totality. They’re not even the true gauge.

These thoughts drew me to a passage in Revelation. Not a passage on the apocalypse, but a cautionary letter from Jesus to the church in Ephesus. Revelation 2:1-7 says,

“Write to the angel of the church in Ephesus: Thus says the one who holds the seven stars in his right hand and who walks among the seven golden lampstands: I know your works, your labor, and your endurance, and that you cannot tolerate evil people. You have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and you have found them to be liars. I know that you have persevered and endured hardships for the sake of my name, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you: You have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then how far you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. Otherwise, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet you do have this: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Let anyone who has ears to hear listen to what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.“

Like the church in Ephesus that this letter was written to, this pastor’s church had people doing good things, but in the end, these works weren’t having a spiritual impact because a number of the people weren’t truly in love with Jesus.

This brought me back to our church. Since 2024, our church’s mission statement has been clearly defined. Based on Jesus’s command in Matthew to make disciples of all nations and teach them to obey him, we describe it as “Creating connections and sharing the gospel so people can come to Jesus and grow in him.” We’ve recently started working toward a vision of creating 50,000 kingdom-minded connections within the next five years (conversations/interactions that move people toward a relationship with Jesus). But it occurred to me in thinking through all of this (now keep in mind, this is the pastor in me talking), what if (because 50,000 connections could be seen as the scoreboard of success in our church, or going to groups, or serving, or anything else) we could be doing good things, working tirelessly, but end up with very little to show for it because Jesus has removed our lampstand (influence for him)? (Sorry for all the parentheses.) What if Jesus didn’t work through us in the ways we wanted him to, because he wasn’t our first priority, but rather the church “metrics” became the priority, and the sum of how we define our Christianity? What if people won’t be drawn to Jesus by the connections we’re making because they’re not experiencing His Spirit as an overflow through us while we’re talking with and ministering to them? And maybe even worse, what if we made people feel like they were good-to-go spiritually because they’re doing all the stuff, but they’re not actually having regular encounters and true fellowship with the Spirit of God? In other words, what if we’re just spiritually a mile wide and an inch deep? I hope you picked up on the inclusion of myself with the “we’s.”

Back to the podcast on the lawn mower…I was also convicted by the call to prayer that this pastor had challenged people to. I decided that for the next week, I was going to spend more time, not just talking to God, but sitting quietly and listening for God to speak to me. As I did this on several occasions, I felt Him impress upon me that I should preach the Revelation 2 passage to my church. A few thoughts that went through my mind—Revelation is sort of a random place to jump into a series, but also the Sunday I would be preaching it would be MOTHER’S DAY! The last thing people want/expect to hear on Mother’s Day is a message from REVELATION about REPENTANCE.

I felt moved to have a conversation with our church staff about it all. After all, we can’t expect something to be real in the lives of others if it’s not real in our own. During our weekly staff meeting this past week, I read this passage in Revelation and asked us all, “Could it be that we’ve lost our first love?” I went around the room and asked each of them what first compelled them to go into ministry. Not one of us said anything like, “I went into ministry to get people in seats” or “to minister in a nice building.” Unanimously, each of our desires was something along the lines of “to be faithful to what God wanted us to do” and “to see people know God.” I acknowledged that, personally, along the way, my motivations can sometimes get skewed. We had a great and honest conversation about wanting to lead our church in this way—toward a growing and real relationship with Jesus and not just one that’s based on doing “stuff.”

So for almost two weeks, I was grappling with this text, with these thoughts, with these prayers. On Thursday, three days before I would deliver the message, I sat down and began putting my notes together. At this point, I almost felt like I didn’t need to study because everything had been so ingrained in me, but it was more like just organizing and collecting my thoughts. I got everything together as I usually do. I talked through my message on Saturday night to prepare myself, as I do each week.

But I did something different on this Sunday morning. Around 7:30 AM, I decided, even though it was cool outside, that I was going to sit on the porch, read some Scripture, and just listen for the Lord to speak for a few minutes. All I could hear were birds. A lot of them. I found myself wondering what kinds of birds I was hearing, and I remembered an app someone had told me about that uses the phone’s microphone to detect what birds you are hearing. If you’re interested, here’s the link. It logged around 17 different birds, all random noises to me, but to the app, it seemingly heard them specifically and individually. In that moment, the Lord pressed on my heart that is how our worship, fellowship, and relationships are to Him. For example, when we sing at church, we only hear each other as collective voices, as I did with the birds. But as the app heard them individually, God is additionally receiving our worship and everything we do on an individual level. Only GJ Farmer can offer worship to God on behalf of GJ Farmer. Only you can offer worship to God on behalf of yourself. This brings us back to the question, “What happens if we, as a church or as individuals, have lost our first love?”…He removes our lampstand. He removes our influence.

So after coming out of about two intimate weeks with the Lord, and an enlightening perspective that I felt the Lord had given me that morning, when the service came, I felt confident. Maybe too confident.

The worship service started as usual. We sang one song, and then I was to deliver the welcome. I greeted guests, explained how to get connected to the church, and told the moms, “Happy Mother’s Day.” I shared a few minutes about the bird app, the perspective God gave me on it, and read the passage I had read that morning. Everything was going smoothly. I went back to my seat for two more songs. After the singing, we have a time in our service where people can financially give offerings to the Lord. I usually stay seated until this is over and then get up and begin my message. For whatever reason, I decided I was going to go up on stage early and just get set so I could get rolling on the message as soon as it ended.

From my perspective, the message started smoothly. I invited people to turn to the passage, shared that I had felt compelled to preach this sermon, and shared a little context about the passage before reading it. I read the seven verses and prayed. However, when I said “Amen” after the prayer, it was as if things shifted. I don’t know how to explain it, and I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was as if there was a spiritual and emotional burden that overtook me, which also played themselves into me physically and mentally. As I said, I was looking at my notes, and it was as if they were written in another language. I was trying to speak, but my throat felt like it was closing. As I looked out into the people’s eyes who were to hear this sermon, all I could think about was this overwhelming feeling, a burden you might call it, that God had worked on my heart for two weeks and it was culminating in delivering this thirty-minute message to these people I loved, and there was a specific reason from God that we all needed to hear from Him. I was the vessel He chose to use, but in that moment, I was reminded of how weak I was. I couldn’t even get the words out I was trying to say.

I decided to pause for a moment and called on another of our pastors to come up and pray, while I stepped away to gather myself. I went to the back and did a complete reset—I used the restroom, threw some water on my face, prayed, and for a second, stood there dumbfounded as to why I couldn’t get this together. I knew I couldn’t take long, so I walked back into the sanctuary, ready to jump back in with a clear head.

But in me, nothing seemed to change. I still could not make sense of anything. Not until I decided to pivot away from my notes and speak from my heart. The things I shared were things I know I had written, but it was like at times, there was someone, or something, that blinded me to seeing the typed words on my iPad screen. I stood up there and felt like someone had metaphorically hit the back of my legs with a baseball bat, and I was weak. I have a doctorate degree in PREACHING, yet I found myself at a place where I was literally speechless.

I decided to let go and just speak as God was moving me. I preached on repentance, making sure Jesus was our first love, and how I didn’t want us to put a bunch of effort toward works that God may not bless if we aren’t doing it out of our love for Him.

I wrapped up the message feeling totally defeated. In fact, after the message, I said, “If I’m honest, from a human perspective, that’s probably the lamest sermon I’ve ever preached.” And I truly felt that way, both from an academic perspective and from the powerlessness I felt.

But I remembered what Paul said to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2:

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

In those final moments, I knew that if anything was to become of that sermon, it was only because God and His Spirit were working in us on this particular morning.

I called the people to repentance and prayer, to pray for themselves, our church, and what the Lord may want to do through us in the future. And to my surprise, there were many who came to pray and many who wrote me after the service, saying how moved they were. I say this to say it could ONLY be a GOD THING. There was NOTHING I did in that message that was anything to boast about. In fact, if I had preached that sermon in a preaching class, I would have hated to see my grade. Yet, I know God’s Word says, in 2 Corinthians 12:9,

But [Jesus] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

Another thing that was strange…after I walked out of the service, it was as if a switch flipped. I didn’t have the feelings I did on the stage anymore. I didn’t have any clouding of mind or weight on me. I mentioned in the service about experiencing spiritual warfare, and I believe wholeheartedly that’s a real thing. We would be foolish to believe otherwise. I find it not-so-coincidental that the letter that Paul wrote to the Ephesians, who were also the same people John was writing to in Revelation, included this reminder in chapter 6,

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

I know there was a spiritual battle going on. There always is. I’m just not sure if it was the enemy attacking because he didn’t want me to deliver a needed message, or if it was the Lord who allowed me to experience powerlessness so I would have to solely depend upon Him in that moment…and be reminded that no degree, no years of experience, no amount of preparation is ever enough to think I can stand on my own. Either way, I truly believe God is up to something.

Over the next few weeks at Beacon Hill, we are going through a series called Back to Basics. In this series, we are going to be looking at, as Revelation 2 puts it, “doing the works we did at first.” We are going to discuss spiritual disciplines that can help us see a move of God in our lives, but we are going to tackle this subject from the angle of being Jesus-centered and him alone being our motivation. Not some imaginary spiritual scoreboard, not some church routine that we’ve always done, not even so we can feel good about ourselves, but for our love and desire for Jesus alone. And I want to invite you to come and experience what God can do in your life as we take this journey together.