Now over a year into retirement (and disability) I have cleared over half of my books from my personal library.  While I still have lots of books, I am finally looking only at those volumes I most cherish.  Now I need to move to the project of clearing files filled with old sermons, worship bulletins and newsletters.  I have a hard-copy of every sermon preached going back to 1975.  Does anybody else do this?  Save all their old sermons?  Does this make me a “Sermon Hoarder”?

What hit me hard was a comment from my wife as we moved these files in order to lay new carpeting.  “If something were to happen to you, what am I going to do with all your stuff?”    This got me thinking about the fact that I rarely go into these files to read old sermons.  Why keep all this stuff?

Aha!  It’s taken some time but I am slowly realizing that my life isn’t about the boxes of all the things I save.  What do we store in our hearts and minds?  What’s truly important?  Honestly, who really cares about all my old sermons and files!

Some random thoughts as I prepare to downsize:

Through the years, when I was still an active pastor, I used to find some value in going through old sermons in searching for an answer to the question I asked from time to time:  What to preach?  Is there a chance I will find a sermon worth repeating?  Even so, I never repeated a sermon without first completely re-working it!

What about this?  Old and musty hard copies of sermons are no longer sermons!  A sermon is only a sermon on the day and hour proclaimed.  A sermon only has life for as long as it remains in the hearts and minds of those who listen for God’s Word found within my words?

I am wondering what some of your thoughts might be in reflecting on years of preaching!  And what do you do with all those old sermons?

A little secret:  Every sermon I preached after about 2002 is on my computer hard-drive.  I’m not going to toss my computer!