Sermon Checklist – Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts for Preachers (Part II)
- Don’t Talk about Yourself.
In some circles, pastors have somehow come to be granted an exalted station well above our paygrade. The greater the celebrity, the greater the disparity and this invariably leads to the tendency to forget that our authority does not derive from our position, it comes from the One on whose behalf we speak. As pastors, we are waiters. God prepares the meal. We are tasked to run it to the table. The praise we garner for doing that is the epitome of misplaced adulation. Unfortunately, some pastors drink the paint and have subsequently forgotten their place and their sermons are a reflection of this.
Sermons are not opportunities for self-aggrandizement or falsely modest self-flagellation. Nor are sermons meant to be therapy sessions. Pastors are thoroughly unimportant. Pastors are mouthpieces – a ventriloquist’s dummy. If congregants leave the sanctuary on Sunday mornings dazzled by the mouthpiece – deluded into thinking the dummy is real – we have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Speaking for the Almighty is a supreme honor – one that we need to take seriously. But, we need to honor the duty, not the vessel. God opened the mouth of a donkey once (Numbers 22:28) so we need to approach the pulpit with the requisite humility.
Today, there are literally thousands upon thousands of autobiographies and memoirs in print. Many of them quite good. But, I would imagine it takes a special brand of moxie to sit down and write one. To think that one’s life is interesting enough or important enough to justify another’s expenditure of both time and money takes an unusual amount of pluck. But, given the alternative (television, social media, boredom) perhaps this belief is justified.
No such justification is available to the preacher. We are tasked to teach and to preach the word of God. We do not replace that with a reading of our diaries. If something of our experience glorifies God, fine. But, if not, then what are we doing?
- Ignore the Haters. You do You.
Authenticity is key. But, unfortunately, authenticity is hard for pastors in the West. We are mired in a consumer driven economy where idiosyncratic preferences are of paramount importance and where products and services are tailored to exact specifications. With a church on every corner, there is immense pressure for pastors to deliver a sermon and to tailor a service that meets every expectation. And so, the temptation is to be something we are not – to mold ourselves into the type of pastor or preacher we believe the people will want to listen to and to learn under. We study the latest trends and emulate the style of the next great preacher all in an effort to draw people in. What ends up happening, however, is this effort tends to repel people. Nobody wants an imitation. The inauthentic does not wear well and a replica is the easiest thing to spot. As the saying goes: If two preachers think the same way, speak the same way and pastor the same way then one of them is unnecessary.
What do we do then? We have to be authentic to who God has made us to be. He has given each of us a unique style and a distinctive personality and He has called us to express it for His glory. We cannot be all things to all people. We shouldn’t even try. That would be a monumental waste of time. And we have to get comfortable with the fact that not everyone is going to like us and we have to realize that not everyone has to. We only have to have enough people like us so that we can continue to remain faithful to God’s calling.
Well, you say, what if I commit to being authentic to who God has made me to be moving forward and nobody comes? That will not happen. People will come. If the internet has taught us anything, it is that every niche (no matter how unique or peculiar) has its audience. It is a bit much to think that we are a snowflake that nobody will relate to or that what speaks to us or sparks our interest and passion will do nothing for everybody else. We are more run-of-the-mill than perhaps we give ourselves credit for. What we enjoy, what we find interesting and even profound will resonate with the audience God has called us to reach.
Joanna Gaines began her journey as an interior designer by opening a shop in Waco, Texas that sold various decorative items for the home. She named the store Magnolia. It was a monumental success. Gaines writes in her book The Magnolia Story, “It had nothing to do with how I advertised, and it certainly didn’t have anything to do with my being some kind of amazing designer or having a reputation, because I wasn’t any kind of a designer at all, and no one knew who I was. I just knew what I liked, and I trusted that other people might like it too. And I was where I was supposed to be. I’d listened to my own intuition and let God guide me toward the plan he’d had for me all along.”
- Don’t Repeat Yourself. Say It Once and Move On.
We've all been there. We've all done this. We told someone a joke or made a statement that was beyond profound and, in return, we received a distinctly underwhelming response – an apathetic acknowledgement of the hilarious or transcendental that fell far short of what we deemed acceptable. And then, in that moment, we fell prey to the temptation to say it again just in case they didn’t hear us. They heard us. By saying it again we just made it much worse.
As pastors, the temptation to repeat ourselves is much more pronounced when preaching to an audience. The silence is more deafening. The apathy infinitely more difficult to ignore. But, ignore it we must. Because when preachers make the same exact point again and again without any creative alteration they unfortunately become exceedingly tedious and hard to listen to. I have been guilty of this. I have listened with empathy to those who have been guilty of this.
This tendency towards the repetition of salient points stems perhaps from a fundamental misapprehension of what exactly a sermon is. We can fall into the mistaken belief that sermons are a mechanism of persuasion. And so, when we make a persuasive point, we would like confirmation that our salvo has landed and that our audience is properly persuaded. A head nod, a smile, anything. What we need to remember is that preaching is not meant to convince, preaching is meant to convict and only God can do that. No amount of eloquence on our part can accomplish what only God can. And, to a certainty, needless repetition does nothing to help our cause as it can be perceived as patronizing at best, desperate at worst.
Furthermore, we have all experienced times when the most seemingly ineffective sermons garnered the greatest response while the most articulate of homilies elicited nothing but indifference. I was once in a high school service at church when the pastor, at the end of his sermon, played for the students a short video that he routinely played for his toddlers at bedtime. The video was a cartoon that explained the gospel in language a four-year-old would understand. Short, simple, and, within the context of a high school church service, mortifying frankly. Then, to my horror, at the end of the video the pastor gave an altar call! I could not bear to look. Almost immediately, several students gave their lives to Christ. I could not believe it. Oh, the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
- Write Out Your Sermon.
The discipline of writing out a sermon gives the preacher clarity of thought and lends to the sermon a level of depth and precision that is often lost in sermons that are haphazardly assembled or lashed together by a very loose outline.
There is a massive difference in clarity, precision and structure when a sermon is written out and when a preacher is tethered to a well thought out manuscript versus when a preacher is loosely fastened to a threadbare outline. A preacher tied very loosely to a stripped-down outline or to notes that are bare bones tend to drift and wander off topic and congregants tend to follow suit. Whereas a well written manuscript keeps the pastor on topic and the congregants engaged and prevents the preacher from relying on off-the-cuff remarks that may be slightly off kilter or, God forbid, profane or even heretical.
The two most often repeated objections to this exhortation are: (i) I don’t have that kind of time and (ii) This leaves no room for the Holy Spirit to speak.
First, James 3:1 declares, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” In light of this, we need to make the time. Preaching the word of God is the most important thing we will ever do and we will be judged accordingly. And the truth is that we all make time for what we value.
Second, God the Holy Spirit has too often been used as an excuse to be lazy in the ministry. I cannot imagine He would take kindly to that. Further, why are we assuming that God the Holy Spirit only moves in the pulpit and not in our study?
- Be Positive.
I must confess I do not quite understand the hellfire and brimstone preachers. In some ways, I am thankful for them. Their message is one that needs preaching. But, on balance, they seem to view the Bible as a ready cudgel useful only for the beating of the flock of God into wearied submission. Were we to ask any faithful expositor of Scripture to encapsulate Holy Writ with one word, invariably, most, if not all, would say: Grace. Because from cover to cover the grace of God saturates every page. But, many seem not to acknowledge that.
In some ways this is understandable. The danger for those of us who have long walked with the Lord is to allow the expanse of time to cause us to overlook the grace of God. God, by His grace and His mercy, brings us to a place of repentance, to a place of progressive sanctification and holiness and our short-term memory tends to fool us into thinking we’ve been here the entire time. And so we can become Pharisees – harsh, judgmental, vindictive and unloving. We can forget that we are, to our very core, sinners saved by grace. Many of us spent years wandering in the dark. And we failed Jesus time and time again and yet His loving kindness endured. He extended His grace and His forgiveness much farther and far longer than we had ever thought possible – certainly far longer than was justified. He loved us and He gently wooed us and it was ultimately His kindness that led us to repentance (Romans 2:4). We must never lose sight of that.
Please don’t misunderstand what I am saying. God hates sin and God will indeed judge. And we need to say as much. But, that message, like the heart of our Heavenly Father, should always be delivered soaked in tears.
- Don't be Overly Emotional and Sentimental.
People generally know when they are being manipulated and there is nothing quite as nauseating as a preacher who is desperately trying to get their congregation to cry. Moreover, the effort itself is a misguided one because a discipleship that is fueled by emotional appeals and cathartic experiences is unsustainable over the long term. And attempts to make disciples last on this basis eventually put churches on the road to charismatic excess. It will take more to make people cry this Sunday than it did last Sunday and eventually churches are left pushing on a string. True story: One pastor who loved to make people cry ended his sermon one Sunday morning with a short video clip of family members running into the arms of US soldiers returning home from deployment. I cannot for the life of me remember what the sermon was about. But, then again, what text of Scripture could have possibly justified the use of that video clip?
The truth is that the church has to be built up doctrinally, not emotionally or experientially. Genuine Christian maturity can only ever be attained through a serious and systematic study through the Bible, verse by verse, from cover to cover with depth and precision because unwavering commitment to Jesus must be grounded in the mind and in the will. In Luke 14:28, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ urged a solemn and sober assessment of the costs of discipleship prior to any commitments being made. And that cannot happen if we major on ecstatic experiences and mawkish displays of emotion. Sentiment has been defined as “feelings without responsibility” and if preachers make it their mission to turn Christianity into a series of emotional highs they will invariably relegate their people to perpetual adolescence where truth and commitment are determined by how you feel.