When I was working on my PhD, there was one professor I had a difficult time with, Dr. Potter. I was a good student ... a really good student. At the top of my class. I worked hard and my grades reflected that fact.

But there was this one professor I was sure had made it her life's mission to cut me back down to size. She was an Aristotelian, and it was a graduate seminar on, interestingly enough, Aristotle. I considered myself an Aristotelian; I was going to base a large part of my dissertation on Aristotle's theory of emotions. So, I felt pretty good heading into the class. I was pretty sure I'd spent more time studying Aristotle than anyone else in the class.

But no matter how hard I studied, no matter how long I spent trying to formulate my responses, I never quite seemed to have the right answer to her questions. She was merciless to me, like she didn't like me—like she was always trying to prove I was a pretender who didn't belong in the program. She hemorrhaged red ink all over my papers.

So, when it came time to find someone to direct my dissertation, being the masochist I apparently am, I went to her. It was as an anxiety-producing decision as I could ever remember making. I knew that if she said "yes," I was going to spend the next couple of years of my life feeling absolutely stupid and incompetent, wishing I'd asked somebody easier.

But in my malformed little brain, I figured that if I could get my dissertation past Dr. Potter, there wouldn't be anyone else in the world who could pull it apart.

She was brutal on me. I used to dread getting a draft of a chapter back. She must have invested in Bic, because she dumped barrels of red ink my work.

But, what I began to see was that it wasn’t about whether she like me or not, wasn’t about us digging fishing worms together and exchanging Christmas cards, she made my work better—way better.

I eventually saw her unflinching commitment to telling me the truth about my work to be one of the most precious gifts she could give me. She wasn't being angry and mean, she was being honest.

I have learned to love editors for how they help make me better than I could have been, left to my own devices.

So, when I taught my classes at the university, and my students would complain that I was being overly picky about their writing, I would bring in my latest revision from Dr. Potter, and I would show them how much red ink I had to put up with. That usually shut them up.

A few years ago, the same thing happened, and so I brought in the copyedits I'd just gotten from my book. Over 6,800 edits. And I told my students I was grateful for every single one—which isn’t entirely true; I mean, some of those were way too picky, to be honest.

Sometimes the word you want to hear least is the one you need most.

I suspect that many of you have taken a public speaking course at one time or another. Some form of public speaking is usually a requirement in college—one that terrifies some people more than facing an Indiana Jones tomb full of snakes and Nazis.

When you go to seminary, they up the ante a bit, give it an even fancier name: homiletics. To be a bit less pretentious, it's preaching class. Turns out, if you're going to be a preacher, they actually want you to have taken a class on how to do it.

I have a confession: Even after having spent seven years in seminary, spanning three separate degrees, I never took a class on how to preach. Oh, I took theory classes: History of Preaching, the Nature of Homiletics, Narrative Homiletics. I've read stacks of books on preaching. But I never took a Homiletics 101 course.

Part of it was because the people who happened to be teaching that course at the different seminaries I attended ... were people, who when I heard them preach, put me to sleep. I know that's not especially generous of me. I admit it. But there you go.

In fact, I joke sometimes that the reason I went into the ministry was because I figured that if I had to sit and listen to someone preach every week, it was going to have to be someone over whom I had a little control. In fact, I think preaching is so important that I don't even trust myself unsupervised in the pulpit—which is why I preach from a manuscript. Every. single. time.

Anyway, even though I haven't sat through a course on how to preach, I've often thought what I'd do if I were ever asked to teach a class on preaching, which—shocking as this may seem to you—has never happened.

But if I were ever asked, one of the first things I would do is tell my students that the most important part of preaching is telling the truth.

Now, on its face, this kind of homiletical advice doesn't seem like such a tall order.