Sermon Central
“Your temper is uneven; you lack love for your neighbors. You grow angry too easily; your tongue is too sharp – thus the people will not hear you.” John Wesley wrote these words to a struggling preacher. In them, we are reminded that the impact of our preaching isn’t ultimately determined by our mastery of homiletic technique or our clever use of illustration. The preaching that transforms lives is rooted as deeply in how we live as in what we say. In other words, preaching to change lives requires us to preach with integrity. Integrity is “the state of being whole or undivided.” As preachers, we demonstrate integrity when unity exists between the truth we proclaim to our congregations and the lives we live before them. Simply put, integrity exists when we “practice what we preach.”
The call to preach requires more of us than verbal proclamation of truth. We must not only speak God’s Word so it can be heard, we must live God’s Word so it can be seen. Full Text
Like most pastors, I learned early on that if my preaching was to be powerful, it had to be memorable. That sounded simple enough – until I had to pull it off week in and week out.
All too often, I’d spend hours putting a sermon together hoping to change lives only to find out later that the only thing anyone remembered was the funny story about my kids or the illustration about getting lost in Seattle, instead of the biblical principle it was supposed to drive home.
So called communication experts told me I needed to use more props and compelling stories. Other people told me to get rid of the gimmicks and stick to the meat of the Word. Some warned me to shorten my messages in light of shrinking attention spans while others pointed out that most of the best known and most listened to pastors were seldom brief in their remarks. Full Text
Contextual Preaching: The Key to Preaching So Your Audience Can Hear
At the heart of effective preaching is a solid missiological perspective. Are you communicating in such a way that your words actually convey biblical truth to your audience? Or does your preaching float right past your hearers because it’s not delivered “on a frequency” that they listen to? In this respect, we can probably learn as much about good preaching from Hudson Taylor as we can from Haddon Robinson. Full Text
There are many ways to handle the biblical text. What is the right one?
My wife and I have a friend whose name is Joy. When she was in her early twenties, a young man asked her for a date and she politely declined. He insisted that God told him that he was to go out with her. When she inquired as to how God revealed that to him (since He had clearly not revealed it to her), he told her that he took his Bible to study it and it fell open to Isaiah 55:12, “for you shall go out with joy.” He wasn’t kidding. The problem is that verse is actually referring to the excitement of God’s people as they are delivered from captivity. It’s not the name of a person to invite out on a date. Full Text
For me it all starts by communicating ten words, “Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead.” This is the crisp and effective message that transforms lives and secures our eternal destiny. There is a power in this gospel that is awesome. It is imperative that you are confident in the message you are communicating and that you communicate it as clearly and simply as possible. As I often explain, “The Bible is 66 books, but the gospel is ten words – Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead.” It is the preaching of the Gospel that makes evangelistic preaching effective. In order to preach the gospel, it is crucial that we have a clear understanding ourselves. Full Text
It is a pastor’s dream: To build a church with new conversion growth. For some it might seem like a pipe dream and they give in to a watered-down vision of transfer growth (i.e. sheep stealing). But let me dare to dream—with you and for you—a dream that we have realized in our own church. Full Text
Our church started about 30 years ago. I started preaching when I was nineteen, started pastoring at 20, and have been with that same church since it began. We have a weekly attendance of around 15,000 people. Back in 1990, we started large scale evangelistic events that we call Harvest Crusades. Since then, we have been able to bring the gospel in person to almost four million people and have seen some 380,000 people respond in person at the events coming forward to make professions of faith to follow Christ. (We’re very careful to say that those are professions of faith because only God knows if they are conversions, but they are people that have at least come forward at the invitation.) Full Text