(2) Start preaching with the very first words that come out of your mouth. Do not talk about what a wonderful time of worship we’ve had, or what happened that morning on your way to church, or the weather, or your kids, or grandkids, or what sports teams you’re a fan of, or any other triviality, or utter some inane nothingness like, “Good morning everybody, how are you all doing?” Shock your audience by having your very first sentence be part of the sermon.
(3) Do not introduce yourself. Not even when you are a guest preacher and nobody knows who you are - and perhaps you are even culturally expected to say a few words about yourself and your ministry. Again, when you get up to the pulpit just start preaching. If people want to find out who you are they can ask later.
(4) No titles. When a speaker introduces himself as “Dr.” So-and-So, I know that I’m in for a bad sermon. (Usually his doctorate is from a DMin anyway, and I don’t regard that as a legitimate degree.) Spurgeon eschewed the title “Reverend.” Good for him. You can’t help what other people call you, but you can help what you call yourself. It is best not to call yourself anything – but if you must say something, just giving your name will suffice.
The disciplined habit of not talking about yourself (even to the point of not mentioning your name!) puts the focus where it belongs: on Christ and Holy Scripture.
(5) You only ever need 2 words to begin a sermon: “Our” and “In.” If the Scripture passage has not been read, begin with “Our Scripture text is…”. If someone else has already read the text before you get to the pulpit, you can always begin very simply with the word “In.” For example, “In verse 6 of our text, the Apostle Paul expresses dismay over the fact that…”; or “In verse 19, opponents of Jesus look for a way to arrest him.”
(6) Do not begin with a story, anecdote or illustration. Yes, I know that famous preachers like Chuck Swindoll and David Jeremiah do this with every sermon, and it’s what I was taught to do in seminary. It’s wrong. Begin with the text and exposition of the text. When you begin with a story you upstage the Scripture, because the Bible passage itself will not be as interesting as your story – especially since, for many people in the congregation, the text will be something they have heard many times before while your story is brand-new.
(7) You may have heard the advice, “You have to start by grabbing their attention.” No you don’t. This is false. You already have their attention just by virtue of the fact that you have stood up to preach. The important thing is not to gain their attention but not to lose it. That is why stories and anecdotes and illustrations are more effectively placed later on in the sermon when attention begins to flag and people need to be snapped back into focus with an illustrative example.
(8) No jokes. There is a distinction to be made here. Casual humor in the course of the message is fine – Tertullian, Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, Harry Ironside, Warren Wiersbe and Stuart Briscoe were all very funny men. (Spurgeon, accused of being too comic in the pulpit, protested that he deliberately held his humor in check!). But while natural humor - wry observations, deadpan irony, amusing wordplay and such all have their place (if one has the gift for it), you must never tell an actual joke to warm up the audience. (E.g. “A priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk walk into a bar..."). To be clear, no one loves silly jokes more than I (my lovely wife can attest that all who dwell in my presence abide under the shadow of insufferable buffoonery). But never in the pulpit! For that matter, I also love eating French Silk pie and delighting in the ecstasies of conjugal embrace – but I engage in neither while preaching earnestly the Word of God.
(9) Your seriousness of purpose will receive a needed boost if you keep before your mind the sober truth that it is a statistical certainty that some who hear you speak will spend an eternity apart from God.
“Seriousness of purpose” (or John Piper’s excellent phrase, “blood earnestness”) is not to be confused with an unhappy, grim, whining, shrill, or brow-beating manner of expression. In every sermon that John MacArthur preaches he sounds like he wants to strangle you. Mike Fabarez has been sounding like that too. Your congregation should not come away thinking, “Why is he so angry all the time?”
(10) Do not adopt a “preacher voice” or “preaching style” that is distinct from the way you normally communicate important information. The poster child for this mistake is, I’m sorry to say, John Piper. To his credit, Piper is the best question-answerer I have ever heard. If you listen to his “Ask Pastor John” series you will hear exactly the right tone: respectful, patient, earnest and thoughtful as he gives spot-on Scriptural responses to difficult questions. But when he gets into the pulpit, for some reason he tends to transform into such an animated cartoon of preacherly affectations that he can become unlistenable. Preach with a normal voice.
James Montgomery Boice is an outstanding role model for what earnest but unaffected preaching sounds like. So is Tim Keller.
(11) Never say “Repeat after me” or “Say this out loud.” Lots of preachers are doing that these days. It’s patronizing. I’m afraid I just stare dully at a preacher whenever he orders me to say something. Classy grown-up speakers never command their audiences to repeat after them. (Can you imagine C. S. Lewis doing that?)
(12) Never elicit affirmation. A preacher friend of mine peppers his admonishments with the trailing tag-question “Amen?” It’s awful. Ditto for “Are you with me?” or “Right?” or the embarrassingly desperate “Somebody ought to say amen to that!” Instructing your congregation to affirm that you have just said something compelling is a surefire way to degrade your authority and weaken your message.
(13) If a congregation ever applauds some line of yours, it is a sign that you have failed. It is impossible simultaneously to applaud and repent. I have heard countless preachers (Tony Evans and Jack Hayford come to mind) who would deliberately build up rousing crescendos of rhetorical flourishes until people literally stamped their feet with enthusiasm. No one ever comes to Christ that way.
If people applaud you, it means that you are preaching to the choir and not saving anyone’s soul. Erwin Lutzer in later years developed the truly wretched habit of thundering out crowd-pleasing power blasts of rhetoric (several times a sermon!), and then pausing to wait for people to clap.
No one clapped when Jonathan Edwards preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” They wept instead, and asked, “What must I do to be saved?”
(14) With regard to tone: Keep in mind that you love people and earnestly desire their ultimate good. This will help to provide a humble, godly contour to the manner with which you speak. You are not there to entertain, scold, impress, or get people to like you. When priorities like that overtake a love for God and people it will definitely show through in one’s bearing and tone.
(15) Voice: Do what you can to speak with quiet, humble but uncompromising authority. Not all preachers are blessed with a natural, fatherly baritone. (Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest speechmakers of all time, had a notoriously thin high voice). But try your best to sound like a grownup. To me, Mark Jobe’s vocal styling and phrasing frankly makes him sound like a 7th grader. Francis Chan and Crawford Loritts regularly fall into an odd rhythm of hollow wispy squealing that I think is meant to convey earnestness but to me is just off-putting.
Some recordings of C. S. Lewis’ voice are available online. In listening to him you will instantly know that this is an adult who expects to be taken seriously.
(Don Carson, as he aged, wisely eliminated the whistle-tone shrieking that characterized his earlier messages. Of course, even back then when he would go into that excited register that only dogs could hear, the content itself was always rich and deep.)
(16) Be reverent. People need reverence, and long for it even if they don’t know that’s what they’re longing for. Never start a sermon with a funny YouTube video to kick things off. Read Lewis’s sermon The Weight of Glory for a shining example of reverential treatment of sacred themes.
(17) Never tell a supposedly “true story” whose details you cannot verify. The fact that some other preacher related it, or it appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, does not count as verification. I have heard the following emotional taglines in dozens of sermons over the years, and they all come from stories that are 100% fictional.
“I was John Harper’s last convert.”
“The little boy had thought that by donating blood to his sister that he himself was going to die!”
“The estate auction is over. The mogul’s will stipulated that whoever received the (portrait of) his son would inherit the whole estate.”
“Coach, today was the first time my father saw me play.”
“The judge concluded, ‘Evidently, the tavern owner believes in the power of prayer, but the church does not.’”
“The chalk dropped from the atheist professor’s hand, rolled down the sleeve of his jacket, down his pant leg, rolled off his shoe and landed on the floor unbroken.”
“Ma’am,” he responded, “I myself wrote that hymn. I would give anything to feel now what I felt when I first penned it.”
“As the two Moravian missionaries sailed off into a slavery into which they had willingly sold themselves and from which they would never return, they shouted to their friends on the shore, ‘May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!’”
Keep in mind the sober fact that your audience knows how to Google. You will kill your credibility with sincere skeptics if you pass along stories that they research and find to be false.
(18) Outlines may be helpful but are not strictly necessary. If you need a 3-point outline to organize your thoughts and help you structure the meaning of the text, by all means use one. But many great speeches of the past (The Gettysburg Address, I Have a Dream) did not use bullet points. Outlines work best as handy tools, but as inhibiting chains they must be discarded. If a sermon has internal cohesion and every sentence proceeds logically from the previous one, then imposing an outline on it (just because your homiletics teacher insisted on it) will only be a distraction.
No one will remember your outlines anyway. They may remember certain insights, interpretations of passages, a quote perhaps, and your stories. But I personally cannot reproduce even one outline from all the thousands of sermons I’ve heard over the years.
(19) It is impossible to address the needs of everyone. In your audience there will be some victims who need comfort, some villains who need rebuke, some weary souls who need relief, some apathetic sluggards who need rousing, some rebels who need to repent, and some legalists who need to chill. The danger is in assuming that everyone in the congregation falls into one of those categories. Alan Redpath preached as if everyone was lazy and complacent. Tullian Tchividjian preached as though everyone was trying too hard already. In today’s evangelical climate, the disturbing trend is to address everyone as though they are already saved. Take for example this recent howler from J. D. Greear: “Right now look at that person to your right or to your left. You may or may not know them...That is a child of the King!” Really, Mr. Greear? All 12,000 people at your megachurch are children of the King? Jesus called Pharisees sons of the devil. I can't believe you don't have at least some of those in your congregation.
Watch your wording lest you imply that everyone you’re talking to is saved rather than damned, or a victim rather than a victimizer, or a lazy wretch rather than a conscientious saint.
(20) Some preachers insist on preaching without notes, some prefer an outline, some use a full manuscript. To your own self be true. Only preach without notes if you are extraordinarily gifted (e.g. George Mattheson, Stuart Briscoe. Spurgeon used very sparse notes.) I don’t recommend it for ordinary mortals. Mortals become wordy, repetitive and cliché-driven when they try to preach noteless.
My case for a full manuscript (a la Jonathan Edwards, David Jeremiah, John Piper, Philip Ryken):
-It keeps the sermon tight. You are less likely to waste words. It makes it easier to limit yourself to about 30 minutes.
-It prevents errors. You have time to look up everything beforehand so that you don’t confuse Elijah and Elisha, or misquote a key verse that you half-remembered on the fly.
-You never lose your place or train of thought, or make your audience feel sorry for you as you scramble out of a tough spot and try to be coherent.
-When preaching extemporaneously it’s almost impossible not to resort to stock phrases and stale means of expression. Noteless preachers also become annoyingly repetitive, regularly spouting 50 words when 8 will do. A manuscript allows you to be fresh, concise and compelling.
=You can use the sermon again when preaching in another location (and editing it to actually get it right this time!).
Of course, having a manuscript does not mean that you stare at it, looking down and reading it the whole way. Go over it several times beforehand so that it is well enough in mind that you are relatively free from it.
When preparing a manuscript sermon, constantly keep in mind that written and spoken communication are inherently different. You are not writing an essay but a sermon, something not designed to be read but to be heard. As you prepare, speak your sentences out loud and write down what you speak. Take dictation on yourself. This will help you to avoid sounding stilted and formal.
(21) Conclude your sermon with a prayer that you have written out in full. (The eyes of your congregants will be closed so they won’t see you reading it.) Preachers who “wing it” with their concluding prayer nearly always, in my experience, flail about and go on way too long. That hinders effectiveness. In messages that conclude evangelistically, I like to pray a simple conversion prayer and invite people to pray along silently with me if they want to trust Christ.
(22) My lovely wife read the above and said, “If someone follows your advice, he will never be a megachurch pastor.” Yes. Good. I have no problem with that.
