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 […]
Speak in Pictures My grocery store has them. So does the gas station that I use. So does the restaurant where I occasionally lunch. What am I referring to? Screens–lots of screens. Pictures saturate our world. Apparently, someone came to the conclusion that I can’t stand a few moments in line with […]
Questions Before Preaching Another way to prepare to preach is to ask specific questions as you go through the preparation process. In this post today I want to look at questions to ask when you are preparing to preach. The purpose of asking questions like these is to help you think through […]
Topical Preaching We have been looking at the subject of styles of preaching. In the last post, we looked at an example pf preaching exegetically. This week I want to turn our attention to topical preaching as a tool to prepare your message. One thing you will find, if you read a lot of books […]
An Example of Exegesis In the last post we looked at the subject of how you prepare to preach a sermon. We considered the difference between Exegesis and Eisegesis, and considered a suggested pattern to be used. In this post I want to look at preaching using exegesis in your preparation of a sermon. […]