Jeremiah admits he feels overpowered and mocked, and still can’t keep the word shut up in his bones. Then, in Matthew 10, Jesus looks straight at that fear and says it three times: do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.

A few summers back I wrote a letter to pastors who feel alone, and I keep coming back to it. So before we get to this week’s preaching angles, a word for the one carrying the load: you’re never as alone as you feel.

Featured: Dear Pastor, You Are Never as Alone as You Feel Like You Are

You’re not alone. You never were and you never will be. Jesus stands beside you. Thousands of other shepherds join arms with you. Your brokenness over the spiritual condition of humanity matters to God, and your response in continuing to love and serve people makes a difference, whether you can see it from one week to the next or not.

Read the Full Letter

For This Sunday’s Text: What Costs Us Our Voice

Matthew 10:24-39

Jesus does not prepare his disciples for a frictionless life. He tells them there will be resistance, accusation, family division, and moments when faithfulness feels more costly than they expected.

And then, right in the middle of all of that, he says it again and again: do not be afraid.

That phrase can sound almost impossible when a leader is tired. Fear is rarely theoretical for pastors. It shows up in the sermon you are nervous to preach, the conversation you keep delaying, the criticism you can already imagine, the attendance trend you cannot control, the decision that will disappoint someone no matter what you choose.

But Jesus does not ground courage in confidence, strategy, charisma, or control. He grounds it in the Father’s care. Sparrows are noticed. Hairs are numbered. Hidden things are seen. Small lives are not small to God.

That means courage is not the absence of cost. It is the settled freedom to speak and live faithfully because our lives are held by One who sees more than the crowd sees and values more than the critics value.

For preaching, the angle may be this: discipleship is costly and disruptive, yet fear never gets the last word. The preacher’s task is not to make the cost disappear. It is to help people hear Jesus say, in the face of the cost, that they are known, seen, and deeply valued.

Preaching question: What fear is trying to take the place of the Father’s voice?

Other Angles in the Lectionary

Genesis 21:8-21: God hears the cry of Hagar and Ishmael, the ones a powerful household cast off, and opens a well in the wilderness where they were left to die. A word for anyone who has been written out of someone else’s story: the God who sees does not lose track of the discarded.

Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17: The psalmist prays “for I am poor and needy” not as an apology but as the basis for being heard. There is freedom in leading with our need instead of our competence.

Jeremiah 20:7-13: Jeremiah tells God the truth about feeling overpowered by his calling, and still confesses that the word is like fire shut up in his bones. This is permission for honest, even furious prayer from people worn down by a calling they did not ask for.

Romans 6:1b-11: Baptism is not a fresh coat of paint over the old self. It is death and burial, so grace does not excuse the old life but ends it. The question shifts from “What can I get away with?” to “How do I walk in newness of life?”

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From the Archive: Choosing Joy

This week, the Choosing Joy series feels like a fitting companion. Joy, courage, and rootedness belong together. Joy is not denial, and it is not an attempt to decorate pain with religious language. It is a resilient practice of seeing life from within the presence and promises of God.

If you are preaching through a season where people are tired, anxious, or trying to recover their sense of hope, this series may give you language for joy as something deeper than mood and stronger than circumstances.

Links for Leaders

Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child

“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God.” Manning’s language about belovedness fits this week’s Matthew 10 theme beautifully. Before we are useful, competent, visible, or brave, we are beloved. That is not sentimental. It is the identity from which courage grows.

Check Out the Book

Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

Brown writes, “There are a million cheap seats in the world today...” That image is especially helpful for leaders trying to stay brave without becoming defensive. Courage requires putting something real on the line, and leadership usually means leaving the safety of the spectator section.

Check Out the Book

Beyond the Divide / The Line on Nine

This Little Rock project tells the story of a historic Black business district damaged by urban renewal and the construction of I-630, and it imagines repair through memory, design, public art, and Black-owned businesses. It is a local story with a much wider word about what communities choose to remember, restore, and reconnect.

Explore the Project

Note: Some recommendations may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Brandon earns from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

Coaching Moment

One quiet sign of leadership fatigue is the pressure to always have the answer. When every question feels like a test, curiosity starts to disappear. But some of the healthiest leadership moments begin with a slower sentence: “Help me understand what you are seeing.”

You do not lose authority by becoming more curious. Often, you regain wisdom.

If you need a little room to think through leadership, communication, or what this season is asking of you, coaching can help create that space.

Keep your courage rooted. Panic makes noise; faithfulness bears fruit.

That is part of what I have been thinking about this week. Preaching often does its deepest work on a timeline we do not control. We prepare, preach, pray, and then wonder whether any of it mattered, while God quietly keeps growing what was planted. Sometimes the fruit shows up years later in another pastor, another church, another season of courage.

Featured Article

Most weeks, you can’t tell. You preach a sermon you believe in. You stand at the door. People shake your hand, say “good word, pastor,” and head to lunch. By Tuesday you are not sure if anything you said landed anywhere.

The article this week is about the hidden timeline of preaching, and why most of the fruit ripens out of sight.

Read the full article

Lectionary Preaching Angles

This week’s lectionary section is built around four short Possible Preaching Angles from the Proper 5, Year A readings for Sunday, June 7, 2026.

• When the Call Comes Before the Map
  Genesis 12:1-9. Abram does not get a map, only a voice, and the call comes before the destination is revealed.

• When the Speaker Is the Creator
  Psalm 33:1-12. When the God who spoke creation into existence tells you to move, the question is whether you trust the One who is speaking.

• When Circumstances Do Not Get the Final Word
  Romans 4:13-25. Abraham’s trust is not optimism or certainty, but a refusal to let circumstances have the final word.

• Jesus Crosses the Lines We Draw
  Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26. Jesus crosses lines others have drawn, moving through social, purity, reputational, and even death-dealing boundaries.

Helpful Links for Leaders

• Persuading Like James
  Jeffrey Arthurs offers a practical reminder that preaching is not only about getting the point right but about making it concrete enough to live in the imagination. Helpful if you are working hard on faithful sermons and still wondering why some of them land more deeply than others.

• Self-Control, the Leader’s Make-or-Break Virtue
  Drew Dyck on the kind of slow inner strength that keeps leaders from burning through their own calling. A useful companion to this week’s article because invisible fruit often requires invisible discipline too.

• Avoiding The Trap Of A Punch-The-Clock Mentality In Ministry
  Karl Vaters names a ministry posture that quietly drains joy and turns calling into mere output. Worth reading if your week-to-week work has started to feel more transactional than pastoral.

• Derwin Gray, The High Definition Leader
  One of the strongest recent lines in my Readwise stack came from Derwin L. Gray’s book The High Definition Leader: “We are no longer in a black or white America. We are in a multicolored, high-definition America.” That vision is not trendy window dressing. It names the kind of cross-cultural leadership the church still badly needs.

• Traditional Hot-Button Issues Still Dominate Political Talk from the Pulpit
  This one is worth reading less for outrage and more for reflection. It raises a fair question about what pastors keep centering from the pulpit, and what that reveals about our imagination, our fear, and our blind spots.

A Legacy Worth Revisiting

Part of why this theme matters to me is that I am still living inside the influence of Pastor Danny Kirk’s ministry. I have been preserving more of his sermon notes and messages at Preaching for Change, both because they continue to help me and because I think they can still serve other pastors and churches.

Start with Messages by Pastor Danny R. Kirk

From the Archive

If you are preaching or leading around the question of faithful formation over time, the This Is the Way series is a useful archive to revisit. It gathers sermon resources around the actual shape of following Jesus, not just admiring him from a safe distance.

A Quiet Note

If you are leading through a season where the next step feels hard to name, I offer coaching for leaders who need a quieter place to sort through burnout, calling, clarity, and courage. I also help churches and organizations communicate more clearly through 5ox Creative when the work is more about websites, messaging, or digital strategy.

If this leadership-focused section is not for you, you can unsubscribe from Preaching for Change emails without leaving Walk Humble altogether.

Keep going. The next faithful step counts.

“The whole world needs a pastor right now.”

~ Pastor Joe Chambers

That simple Facebook update – “The whole world needs a pastor right now.” – caught my attention when Joe Chambers, Pastor of Mountain Heights Baptist Church in Buena Vista, Colorado first shared it a couple of days ago.

I thought about it all morning.

And all afternoon.

And as I went to sleep that night.

I thought back to advice I heard Pastor Lee Roberson share with other pastors once about the need to show up and be a pastor for anyone and everyone in your town who might need one, whether they’ve ever heard of your church or not.

I thought about Matthew 9:36, which says, “When he (Jesus) saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

I thought about God’s complaint about the spiritual leaders in Israel through the Prophet Jeremiah and his promise to give them better pastors (shepherds):

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD. Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the LORD. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the LORD.

~ Jeremiah 23:1-4 NRSV

And I thought about some of the amazing pastors I’ve known.

Pastors are often written off in our culture because the stories that get attention tend to focus on those who are abusive or corrupt. But the fact is, most of the pastors I know love Jesus, love people, and want to help the hurting.

If we are to believe that the church (that is, the church when it is the church Jesus envisioned) holds the solutions to some of the biggest problems people face in the world, then we must also see that pastors are the messengers of those solutions.

The weary world needs a Word from God. And while every follower of Jesus carries around the good news of the gospel to share with others, pastors are called to a special ministry of equipping and empowering God’s people to share that message.

If you’re a pastor, please know that you matter. Your work matters. The fact that you seek to serve Jesus matters. Your desire to apply the message of the gospel to the deepest needs of humanity, and that’s a very good work.

The only practical step in this article is this:

Go be a pastor to the world.

Sometimes, someone won’t want you to be their pastor. That’s okay. Respect that and let them leave gracefully.

But anyone who will allow you to do so, love them, pray with and for them, counsel them, minister to them, and share the saving message of Jesus with them.

Recommended Reading:

• Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, by Ruth Haley Barton

• The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor's Heart, by Harold Senkbeil

I love that part of the story of the early church in which God allows persecution to scatter the Christians from Jerusalem like ants. The Bible says that everywhere they went, they preached the gospel (see Acts chapter 8).

Phillip, in particular, headed to a city in Samaria and became the earliest cross-cultural missionary. When he preached there, the citizens listened and embraced Jesus. The Bible sums it up by saying, “So there was great joy in that city.” (Acts 8:8 NLT)

I’ve spent a lot of time lately reading Acts and other sources of early church history. I’ve found this theme to be recurring. The apostles enter a city and preach Jesus against the backdrop of creation and the story of God. People embrace Jesus and the city takes on new life.

The other reaction that happens is riots break out and people get upset, but it’s usually the established religious leadership, feeling threatened by the dethroning power of this new gospel, that stir up the crowds.

As I’ve looked over the stories, from Samaria to Athens to Rome, I see some recurring themes.

• The apostles establish trust and common ground, often hearing local leaders in the synagogue before engaging.

• They start with the story of creation (with Gentiles) and with Abraham (with Jews).

• Some respond by embracing Jesus. Others reject the gospel. Everyone is free to decide without coercion.

• Churches are formed as disciple-making, disciple-maturing, and disciple-multiplying centers.

• Cities and cultures are transformed as people are influenced with the gospel.

• The gospel travels beyond that city into the surrounding territories and to new fields.

Unfortunately, I think we often bring about reactions other than joy in our cities.

Sometimes we ignore the city by walling ourselves off socially and keeping to ourselves as though we’re better than everyone around us.

Sometimes we imitate the city and lose any distinction as a community of Christian believers walking in the Way of Jesus, which is the way of love.

And sometimes we even irritate the city by shouting at all the nonbelievers who don’t necessarily think or act like believers.

I think there’s still a way to capture the essence of apostolic mission, which infiltrates cities with the gospel as new believers develop a sense of mission in every realm in which they live.

From within political structures, schools and education boards, workplaces, social services, and other realms of city life, the gospel – the good news about God’s redemptive work through Christ – earns a hearing and makes a difference. And in the end, great joy comes to the city.

In more practical terms, we can…

• Plant churches that make the good news both visible and audible to our community.

• Scatter throughout the community as small groups that grow spiritually and serve practically.

• Live the gospel, love people, and share Jesus as individuals.

• Bring down the cultural barriers that keep people of different ethnicities separated on Sunday mornings.

• Partner with the city’s governmental leaders to address real issues that affect local residents.

• Partner with local charitable organizations, Christian or not, that address problems like hunger and homelessness.

• Partner with local schools to improve education, minister to teachers, and help hurting families.

• Partner with other local churches in kingdom-focused projects.

• Minister to the hurting, the broken, the mentally ill, and the emotionally unhealthy through counseling and recovery ministries.

• Support families, not by replacing parents as disciple-makers, but by supplementing and aiding parents in the discipleship process.

Is there more? Sure. This is not some to-do list or official statement.

When you’re a pastor, cultivate a deep love for your city and let your own heart be broken over its pain. Then, be a vessel of the good news that brings joy to people’s lives.

Recommended Reading:

• For the City: Proclaiming and Living Out the Gospel, by Darrin Patrick and Matt Carter