Eric Mckiddie put together - 40 Lessons I’ve Learned About Preaching After My 400th Sermon. The lessons are so amazing that I have duplicated them below because I want to keep coming back to them.
1. Progress. You don’t have everything about preaching figured out after 400 sermons. You’re just getting started. This short video does a great job of summing up what is going on in your first few hundred trips to the pulpit.
2. Feedback. Your best sermons are ones you get feedback on before you preach them. Let someone you trust go to town on your outline in the middle of the week.
3. Sin. You don’t have a sermon until you know what sin you’re preaching against. Until then, it’s either a lecture, or a devotional.
4. Pray, pray, pray.
5. Illustrations. The four keys to getting good at sermon illustrations are: 1) knowing where to find them, 2) knowing where to keep them, 3) knowing how to write them, and 4) lots of practice.
6. Yikes! Make sure your fly is up before you get up to the pulpit.
7. Manuscripting isn’t necessary, but the process of crafting it is very helpful. It clarifies your language and burns your message into your soul. The result is that you are less tied to your notes, not more.
8. Substance. Accurate exegesis and rich theology are the most important parts of your sermon.
8. Substance. Accurate exegesis and rich theology are the most important parts of your sermon.
9. Pre-application. Illustrations are second most important. You must use illustrations if you want to motivate people toward application. You don’t get motion, without emotion.
10. Titles. Don’t underestimate the importance of your sermon’s title, especially if you publish it on your website the week before you preach it (which you should do). The title of your sermon is your best shot at bringing in people who are shopping online for churches to visit.
11. Breadth. Preach through one book from every genre as early as you can in your preaching career. Like swimming, it reveals unexercised preaching muscles you never knew you had, and forces you to develop them.
12. Schedule. Figure out your best pace for sermon prep. Some guys go hard-core for a couple days at the end of the week. I prefer the crockpot approach of working in smaller chunks of time throughout the week.
14. Gospel. If you just preach the cross, you get a congregation of ascetics. If you just preach the resurrection, you get a congregation who expects success without sacrifice. If you just preach mission, you get an active congregation who doesn’t accomplish the Great Commission. Gospel-centeredness comes from preaching Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost.
15. Frustration. Don’t take it personally when people don’t listen.
16. Eye contact. Don’t underestimate the power of sustained-to-the-point-of-feeling-awkward eye contact.
17. Work. Thomas Edison’s quote, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration,” applies to preaching. Rarely does the sermon get zapped into your brain.
18. Your work. To tell your people, “Thus sayeth the Lord,” rather than, “Thus sayeth the commentaries,” you must do the work of handling God’s word for yourself.
19. Life experience. Your best applicational teaching will be what you have learned from long time experience, not what you just learned that week.
20. Trivia. 95% of the cool exegetical insights you gain during your prep will not make it into your sermon. But save them for later.
21. Procrastination. Half the battle of sermon preparation is getting started.
22. Criticism. You’ll say less in your sermon, not more, if you qualify everything. One sentence often does the trick for a theological connection, a punchy illustration, or a convicting insight.
23. Adaptation. Your sermon preparation constantly evolves. Never assume that you have it down.
24. Giftedness. Any preacher who does not eisegete and preaches the gospel is a good preacher. This is easy to forget in a celebrity-obsessed evangelical culture.
25. Precision. For us who preach from the Bible, our greatest sins are not usually what we do say, but what we don’t say.
26. Books. For preaching purposes, books on biblical theology tend to be more helpful than commentaries at the front end of preparing a series. I want to see more books like this and this published.
27. Book-ends. Your most important illustration is the one you open your introduction with. Second is the one you close your conclusion with.
28. Background. Preach the biblical text that is on the page. Don’t get bogged down in historical or cultural backgrounds. If you’re not careful, you will confuse the background with the foreground.
29. Hypothetical illustrations work much better for the preacher than they do the listeners. It’s convenient to create a situation that corresponds exactly to your point, but it lacks power because it isn’t real. Never start an illustration with, “Imagine if…”
30. Rules. Some homiletics rules were meant to be broken.
31. Rules. It takes a couple hundred sermons to figure out which rules exactly.
32. Rules. It takes another hundred sermons to figure out when, why, and how to break them the right way.
33. Rules. It takes yet another hundred sermons to appreciate those rules again.
34. Idolatry. Don’t find your identity in the quality of your sermons. It’s something that goes without saying, yet I constantly need it said to me.
35. Paper. Figure out your ratio of outline/manuscript pages to sermon minutes. For me, a 5 ½ page manuscript, or a 3 ½ page outline, is 30 minutes. Anything over that means I need to cut stuff out.
36. Communication. Each of your main points may be only a sentence in your outline, but it takes more than one sentence to get the point across to your audience. Take a short paragraph to state each main point.
37. Improvise. Some passages, by virtue of their unusual structure, demand that we preach them in an unconventional way.
38. Efficiency. It can take up to 30 minutes or more of fruitless study before you hit the “flow.” Avoid the temptation to shift to other tasks while you wait for “inspiration” to hit.
39. Application. If you give only corporate application, then your church will be missional, but lack piety. On the other hand, if you give only personal application, then your church will be godly, but lack vision and mission. Do both.
40. Continuing education. The conferences that help you become a better preacher are not the ones that only tell you what to do, but that force you to put it into practice. I can’t say enough good things about the Simeon Trust Workshops on Biblical Exposition.
Comments
Post a comment