Use of your body Watch What You Do With Your Hands Mistake #1: Use No Positive Gestures When I was a teenager, the church of which I was a member got a new pastor. Because I was actively involved in ministry in the church, he invited me, along with a few other teens, to meet […]
How You Speak Makes A Difference In the last post I began the subject that I called Guidelines for Sermon Delivery. I want to continue that subject in this post. Having said, in the last post, that we should keep a pretty vigorous pace of speech, above 150 words per minute, now I want to […]
How You Talk Makes a Difference In the last post I talked about the fact that your sermon has to be interesting if people are going to go along on the journey of your message. In this post, let’s begin a series of posts that describe some guidelines for sermon delivery that will help your […]
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 […]