Listening To The Listeners

Listening to Listeners Haddon Robinson taught preaching for many years at Denver Theological Seminary.  The title for this post is the title of  one of the chapters in his book, Making a Difference in Preaching.  Listening to listeners…

Notes or No Notes Preaching

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…

Create a Map

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. …

It's About Jesus

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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.…

Know Where You Are Going

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.…

An Intriguing Question Makes a Good Introduction

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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…

Communication of Truth Through Personality

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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,…

Learn to Speak In Pictures

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      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.…

Questions to Ask

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      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…

Topical Preaching

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…