Make Your Message Interesting You have to make your message interesting if you want it to be memorable. I’ve mentioned this many times before in this blog, as you can see from this post on illustrations, or this one on keeping your message clear. I want to emphasize again here, in this section on developing […]
Notes or No Notes? Are you a notes or no notes preacher? That’s the question for today’s post. In the last post we saw that it is helpful to have a map, or outline for your message. Now the question is how you lead people through your map. Who are the most effective communicators, in […]
Creating a map In the last post we saw that one of the most effective ways of creating a sermon is to pick one point, one major idea that you are going to bring to people in a memorable way. The second step is to create a map that will emphasize the point with enough […]
One Point Preaching John F. Kennedy was one of the great speakers in the history of the United States. People still study his speaking style and delivery, as well as the content of the speeches he made. One of the great secrets of his speeches came as the result of advice that he received from […]
In my last post, I listed three goals, or destinations for your sermon: to get knowledge into your hearers’ heads, to get Christ-like living into their hearts, and to inspire them in difficult times. One goal I left off the list. Sometimes you will preach so that people will accept Jesus Christ as Savior and […]
The last three posts have had to do with the introduction to a message. Now we turn to the body of the sermon. One of the secrets to having a successful sermon is to know where you are going with your message. Or, as Yogi Berra put it many years ago: So, where are you […]
We are considering how to “hook” people with good introductions to our messages. We’ve seen so far that a story will accomplish that. So will a shocking statement. Today we are exploring the fact that an intriguing question makes a good introduction to a message. Example of Phillip Yancey Below is an interview with Phillip […]
The in the last post, we began to look at the subject of the introduction to a sermon. We saw that a good story captures peoples’ attention, and then serves as the gateway into the message itself. Today we are going to consider that a shocking truth makes a good introduction to a sermon. Purpose […]
In the next series of posts we are going to look at how you go about developing a sermon. I will assume that you have done the basic work referred to earlier in this blog, things like defining the main point of a passage, what your goal is in preaching, and doing the study on […]
The title of this post is a famous quote by Phillips Brooks, a well-known preacher from the middle 19th century in the United States. It was in a series of lectures at Yale University that he gave this definition of preaching: Preaching is, “communication of truth through personality.” In other words, the person of the […]