10 Preaching Tips (Part II)

This is the second half of my two-part post on 10 Preaching Tips (part I here).

 6. Recognize Preaching as Spiritual Warfare

This is a point that I did not grasp or understand when I started preaching. We often prepare our messages in a bubble. We think about how good our content is going to be; we think about how if people would only listen, understand, and apply it, their lives would be great. But there is one issue: we have an enemy. We have a real enemy. He labors against our efforts. Do not think Satan is inactive when we are preaching. Do not think Satan sits idly by while you prepare your sermons. Preaching is an act of spiritual warfare. 

In Matthew 13, Jesus tells and explains the story of the sower. In the story Jesus highlights some seed that has been thrown on to the ground. The seed represents the Word of God. However, there are enemies to this seed taking root and growing and producing fruit. There are the trials and tribulations of this world that threaten to choke the life out of the seed. But Jesus mentions another enemy - the devil. The evil one comes and snatches the seed that has been planted (13:19). Satan wants to actively snatch seeds of the Word off the path as we are throwing them down. You are not simply exchanging ideas with people when you preach, you are engaged in a war. This battle we are in is not flesh and blood, it is spiritual in nature, and we have an enemy (Ephesians 6:12).

7. Avoid Adding Too Much Content

One of the temptations of every preacher is adding too much content. Too much information can be bad. We can leave our congregations and hearers confused, overwhelmed, or lost in a sea of content. This does not mean we should "theology-light" or shy away from digging deep; however, it means that we do not have to throw everything we know about a subject into one sermon. Take for example this post. I could list more than ten tips for preaching. There are countless things that could be said about preaching (some of you have probably thought of them as you have read this). But I kept the post to ten tips. I also broke the ten tips into two posts, instead of one big post with all ten tips listed. Do not overwhelm those who are listening to you preach or teach with so much content that all of it is lost. 

8. Balance Your Exegesis & Application

This has been and will always be, a constant point of emphasis for me. When I started preaching, I was application heavy. I would read a passage, skim over the surface of it with my explanation, and then move to the "so what" factor. But the more I learned about the Bible and theology, I went the opposite direction. The more knowledge I acquired about theology, the less application I gave my hearers. This is a dangerous seesaw. 

The healthiest approach to preaching is a balance of Scripture exegesis and interpretation, with pointed application for the hearers. Yes, we must dig into the text, and highlight crucial doctrinal issues that emerge, but we also must show people how this touches their lives. We cannot only talk about what the Bible says, we must show people how to incorporate it into their families, workplaces, thought-life, and the rest of their lives. Always check your sermons when you finish preparing them for healthy balance. 

9. Marinate Your Sermon, Don't Microwave It

This tip comes with two applications attached. The first, we need to prepare messages with time in between preaching them, that we can digest what we plan to say. Preparing a message on the weekend you are to deliver it is not wise. You may get away with doing that a few times, but if this becomes a habitual pattern, it will reflect in your preaching. Everything is better marinated and cooked slowly. I would rather have a pork tenderloin that has been marinated in a crock-pot all day, than a microwave dinner cooked in one minute and thirty seconds. The meals your congregation needs to be fed and healthy, are the ones you have been marinating for more than a few days, not microwaved. 

The second application of this tip: we need to marinate our messages in prayer. The is a neglected part of sermon preparation. We should be prayerful every step of the process. Sermon preparation should be filled with prayer. Thinking through application, working through the text, and preparing to deliver the message should all be bathed in prayer. As you are actually preaching, inward prayer groanings should be an accompaniment to your sermon. Marinate your sermon, don't microwave it.

10. Expect Some People To Dislike Your Message

Not everyone is going to be a fan of your messages. This is not easy for us to accept. One reason is that a sermon becomes like our child. We have nurtured, cared for, and labored over that message. We do not want anyone telling us our baby is ugly. However, we must understand the nature of our message causes many to turn away. The cross can be a stumbling block. The cross is foolish for some people. There are many professing believers who struggle with worldliness. Do not be surprised when you offend people with a call to repentance or holiness. People do not like having their sin pointed out, even when you are pleading with them to flee to the Savior. 

George Whitefield is one of my heroes of the faith. I love reading his sermons, and about his life. Whitefield is widely considered as one of the most gifted and anointed preachers to ever live. He had incredible ministry success. However, this gifted and anointed man had detractors. There were actually times when he preached where people hit him with rocks, mud, and even human feces. If you have not experienced that in any of your sermons, then you face less resistance than Whitefield. As preachers, we need to develop thicker skin. We often develop hard hearts instead of thick skin. We do not appreciate people disliking or questioning our messages. Friends, we must prepare our messages and deliver them knowing not everyone will love them. This puts us in good company, because not everyone loved Jesus' sermons.

This concludes the tips. These 10 Preaching Tips are not exhaustive. There are many more helpful things that could be said about preaching. I hope my list can be profitable for you and your growth as a communicator of God's Word. May we never forget, that we are proclaimers of the excellencies of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:9). We have the greatest message in all the world. Let's work hard to sharpen our skills, and pray for God's power to rest upon us as we teach the Scriptures. 

10 Preaching Tips (Part I)

I love preaching. There is nothing else in all the world I would rather do with my life than preach Christ crucified and resurrected. I consider myself a student of preaching. I am always seeking to learn and get better at this high calling. If you are reading this, you probably feel this way too. I also believe I have a stewardship to train and help other preachers. This is not because I am the expert on preaching, rather I feel a responsibility to share any knowledge I have acquired to help others.

At my church, The Journey Church, we take training preachers serious. We raise up preachers from within our congregation and give them opportunities to actually do it. We have preaching seminars where we train them and give them chances to practice. We also give these men chances on Sunday mornings and Wednesday night services. Our church is only seven and half years old, but we have raised up and trained 24 different men in our church to preach. In those seven and half years, we have only had one person from outside the church come and preach. We highly value training up men in this way.

I want to share 10 Preaching Tips that I have learned along the way, either from experience or from others. They are not in any particular order, nor are they exhaustive. I hope these tips can help you as you labor to proclaim the excellencies of Christ (1 Peter 2:9) in whatever setting he has you. This post is Part I, Part II is here.

1. Pose a Problem and Offer a Solution

Preaching is ultimately about offering a solution to a problem. Proclaiming the good news comes on the heels of sharing the bad news. For example, if your doctor came in the room and said, "Congratulations, I have the injection you need right here. You are going to be just fine." You would probably be caught off guard, a little confused, and questioning why you needed this injection. However, if the doctor would have come and shared with you that you have a serious illness, and if untreated it would lead to your death, then he told you he had the injection you needed, that would be good news.

It is vital when preparing sermons, whether we begin from a text or a topic, we need to answer the question: what problem does this raise in the lives of the people I will be preaching to? I need to show them that they have a very real and serious problem facing them, but praise be to God, my sermon, and (most importantly) the truths contained in it, hold the solutions for that problem. Introducing a problem that everyone faces on the front end of a sermon also serves to catch people's attention. It tells them why they need to be paying attention to what you are about to say. Peter's sermon in Acts 2 demonstrates this approach very well. The people were cut to the heart, asking, "what shall we do?" Peter then gives them the solution (Acts 2:37-38).

2. Anchor Yourself to a Text

Regardless of whether you are teaching through books of the Bible or doing topical series, it is crucial that every sermon be anchored to a text. I understand there may be sermons that bounce around to different passages of Scripture throughout its entirety, but that should not be the norm. A good sermon will be anchored to a text of Scripture.

Why? First, because if Scripture is not central in your preaching, you should reconsider your definition of preaching. We are proclaimers of the Word of God. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing from the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). Jesus prayed that the Father would "sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth. (John 17:17)." It is the God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16) Scriptures that transform people's dead hearts and make them alive. We should stand on Scripture in our sermons. The second reason to do this, is that having a central text keeps you in between the guardrails while you preach. A text can keep you on track and keep you from getting into the ditch with rabbit-trails and wandering off-topic.

3. Resist the Temptation of Preaching for Approval

I have been preaching for almost ten years and I still have this temptation. It happens very subtly. You find it sometimes in your sermon preparation time. You will be working through ideas and writing your sermon or jotting down notes, and without realizing it, you are thinking about whether people are going to agree with you. "Will they like this?," or perhaps even more subtle, "Will they like me if I say this?," begins to creep into your mind. It can also happen as you are preaching. You start judging people's facial expressions and body language and start trying to appease them, rather than envisioning God's posture to your message.

I recently found out from some friends that a sermon I had preached had offended a few people and they were mad. Their accusation against me was off-base and showed they had not listened to what I actually said. However, I still found myself battling internally over not winning the approval of these people. I knew my message was honoring to God. I knew I could test everything I had spoken against Scripture, yet I was wrestling inside over people not agreeing with me. (Tip #10 will deal more with this)

We must keep in mind that the temptation to preach for approval is not just avoiding saying offensive things so that people will continue to like us. It is not only about preaching in a way that people don't get mad. We also fight the temptation of preaching so that people will think we are really something special. You are preaching for approval when you are subtly thinking, "how many people will tweet this quote?" or "how smart or profound do I sound when I make this statement?" Oh friends, the temptations to preach for approval lie in wait around every corner. May we resolve to preach with a heart to please God.

4. Keep the Cross & Resurrection of Christ in View

In our preaching seminar we teach the guys that if any good Jew, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, or Muslim can say "Amen" to your sermon then you did not press the cross and resurrection of Christ to the forefront well enough. It does not matter what text or topic we are dealing with, we must do as Spurgeon said, "make a beeline to the cross." One of the greatest dangers we face in a sermon is to stand and make a lot of great points about life, truth, and any number of things, but never get to the good news of Christ.

We are not self-help counselors. We are heralds for the King. We have an announcement to make to the world from the King of Kings. That message: "Jesus Christ is Lord; he died in our place and rose from the grave. Salvation is in him alone. Repent and believe the good news." When doing sermon preparation, keep asking yourself the question, "Am I establishing the necessity of trusting the finished work of Jesus, through his death and resurrection?" If your sermon does not need to hit on those points,  you need to throw away your sermon.

5. Preach with Heightened Affections

The preaching and teaching that inspires me the most is affection-driven preaching. When I can smell that a guy loves the Lord and loves proclaiming the gospel, I love his kind of preaching. We are preaching the most glorious truths in all the universe. How could we ever preach them in a dull manner? How in the world is it possible to preach truths so glorious and a message so good as the gospel in a boring way? A guy can stand up all day long and talk about true things, but if his demeanor does not match the realities of what he is proclaiming, I don't believe him. Either the truths he is proclaiming are not as glorious as he says or he does not believe the glorious truths that he proclaims. I hope you get the gist of my point. Yes, tell me what is right and true and what I should believe, but show me how much you love these things! Show me these things are eternally important. Let me feel the gravity of these truths in your voice, body language, and affections.

I certainly do not suggest that anyone should fake affections. So this leaves us with a constant challenge. We need to be spending time with the Lord. We need to prepare our hearts just as thoroughly as we prepare our content. We need to work our affections up to a fervent pitch before stepping into the pulpit. These truths matter too much to be read like a menu at a restaurant. Exhort them as if you truly believe them and their implications.

 Which of these tips are most helpful to you? I'd love to hear your feedback.

Part II of this post contains tips 6-10

The God of All Comfort

This life is full of so many ups and downs. It is undoubtedly easier to live in those "up" moments, but it is not always better. God can and does use our "down" moments to draw us near to Him. These "down" moments lead us to pray more pointedly, more fervently, and more desperately. Those are good things. When we are in those "up" moments we can easily get by without prayer (not in reality, but in our own minds), without any fervency or desperation.

My family and I have learned this through all the trials we have experienced with our son, Kaleb. As a kidney transplant patient, he is on medications that suppresses his immune system, so he can get sick easily. Any time he is not feeling good, it is easy to be catapulted into one of those "down" moments. This is just the reality of being a parent who loves your child.

But I have learned personally, that these moments cause me to rely more on God than I was before. I have learned that our God personally comforts those in affliction. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 says, "Blessed be the God and Father or our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all of our afflictions..."

Friends, it does not matter what you are facing today; our God comforts in ALL our afflictions. I am comforted; that does not mean I am always comfortable. But I am comforted. I have peace, even when I am desperate. Thank God for the trials you face; these pains bring you closer to Him and make you more dependent on Him than we often are without the trials. Keep in mind the suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our Savior knows the agony of pain. He knows what we face. And he is our Mediator and Intercessor. He can sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15) and he promises to give us sufficient grace for our trials (2 Corinthians 12:9). Run to him, friends.

The Short Life-Span of Suffering

One day suffering will be swallowed up. It will be engulfed. The things that often torment and haunt us now will eventually be defeated and we will triumph with joy abounding forever. Eternity offers us the hope that our present sufferings are only temporary.

Paul says in Romans 8:18 (ESV) "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us."

These things we face, and everyone faces them, will eventually be history. God has promised victory. One day those in Christ will experience this victory. Dostoevsky, the 19th century Russian novelists, understood this. In his book The Brothers Karamazov he makes this amazing statement:

"I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man's Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world's finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men."*

Many are going through different trials and tribulations today. Would you pray for them today and ask the Lord to strengthen and encourage them? Would you also pray for the Lord to bring forth the day in which all things will be restored, and the above description comes to pass? Suffering does have a short life-span. We must remember that. It is partly how we are able to carry on in the midst of it.

How can remembering suffering has a short life-span serve to better endure it?

Related posts: A Prayer for the Overwhelmed

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*Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 235-236