A biblical Israel trip was never on Pastor David Mercer’s radar — not because he didn’t want to go, but because he had spent twenty-two years telling himself he didn’t deserve to. There was always someone who needed him more, always a budget that said “not this year,” always the quiet inner voice that whispered that a man who served God shouldn’t need something so … indulgent.
In This Article
The Man Who Preached Galilee But Never Went
David had preached through the Gospels four times. He could describe the density of fishing villages along the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, the way morning fog settles over the water before the sun burns it away, the smell of the market streets in first-century Capernaum. He had painted those pictures for his congregation from a pulpit in suburban Ohio, thirty-five hundred miles away, never once having stood on the ground himself.
His wife, Karen, had been the one to bring it up. Not as a demand, not even as a request — more like a quiet observation one evening after the kids were in bed. “You’ve given twenty-two years,” she said. “What if you actually went?” He changed the subject. She let him. She had learned to pick her moments.
That was February. By April, David was sitting in an airport gate in Chicago, boarding pass in hand, genuinely unsure if what he felt was excitement or guilt. It was probably both.
The Moment the Land Broke Him Open
The group arrived at the Sea of Galilee on their third morning in Israel. It was early — the tour guide had insisted on it, something about the light. David stepped off the bus still half-asleep, coffee cup in hand, and then stopped walking entirely.
He didn’t know how to explain what happened next. He’d heard other pastors talk about moments like this — the way the land “comes alive” when you’re finally standing in it — and he had always listened politely while privately wondering if they were being a little dramatic. He was not being dramatic when he told Karen later that he stood at the edge of that water and wept like he hadn’t wept in years.
It wasn’t grief, exactly. It was more like something releasing. Twenty-two years of sermons about a place he’d never been, twenty-two years of giving to people what he himself had never fully received, twenty-two years of standing in front of a room and describing a Savior who walked on this water — and now here it was. Real. Solid. Ancient. And quietly asking him what he had done with his own soul lately.
Walking Where Jesus Withdrew
One of the more unexpectedly moving moments of the trip came not at a traditional holy site but on a hillside outside Capernaum, where the guide paused and read aloud from Mark 6:31 — “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” It was a verse David had read hundreds of times. He had even preached it once, in a sermon about margin and self-care that he secretly felt didn’t really apply to him.
Standing on that hillside, listening to those words read aloud in the place where Jesus might actually have spoken them, something shifted. The invitation stopped being a principle and became personal. Come away. Rest a while. Not as a reward for exceptional service. Not as something to be earned. Just — come.
David told me later that he sat down on a rock on that hillside and stayed there for twenty minutes while the rest of the group moved on. Nobody came to hurry him along. The guide had seen this before. He knew what the land does to pastors when they finally let it.
There is something uniquely powerful about a biblical Israel trip for ministry leaders who have spent years living in the text. The geography does something that no commentary or sermon series can replicate — it makes the story three-dimensional, and in doing so, it has a way of making the pastor three-dimensional again too. You can read more about how to prepare for that experience at our Holy Land tours page.
What the Biblical Israel Trip Gave Back
By the end of the ten days, David had walked the Old City of Jerusalem, stood in the Garden of Gethsemane, floated in the Dead Sea, and renewed his wedding vows with Karen on the banks of the Jordan River — something she had suggested on a whim and he had immediately agreed to, which surprised them both.
But what the trip gave back to him was harder to put on an itinerary. He came home with a quietness he hadn’t had in years. Not passivity — he went back to his church and preached what most of his congregation still call the most powerful sermon series of his pastorate. But there was a depth to it that hadn’t been there before. A firsthandness. A man preaching about the grace of God from a place of having recently received some.
Karen noticed it first, of course. She always does. “You came back present,” she told him one evening. “You’re actually here.” He didn’t argue with that. He knew what she meant.
The Bible Places resource David had used to prepare for the trip became something different after he returned — less a reference tool and more a kind of journal of places where God had met him personally. That, perhaps, is the real gift of walking the land of Scripture.
Permission to Go
If you are reading this and you are the kind of person who has preached from texts you have never experienced — who has given and given and quietly told yourself that rest is for other people — then David’s story is for you specifically.
Psalm 23 does not say the Good Shepherd leads the productive sheep beside still waters. It says he leads me. The depleted one. The worn one. The one who forgot somewhere in the middle of ministry that they were a sheep too.
A biblical Israel trip is not a luxury. For many ministry leaders, it is the first time the Bible becomes a place they have been rather than a place they describe. And that changes everything — not just how they preach, but how they pray, how they rest, how they come home to the people they love.
You do not have to earn this. You just have to go. For those curious about what pastor Holy Land tour options look like and how to begin planning, our sabbatical trip planning resource is a good place to start the conversation.
Ready to start planning? Contact Grant at MinistryVacations.org — expert travel planning for those who serve. Every trip also includes the Gratitude Giving Program — your rest can bless your ministry at no extra cost.
