5. We overlook lots of great stopping places.
I have sat in auditoriums and heard preachers deliver great messages and seen them undermine their own effectiveness by not knowing when to quit.
The preacher has held our attention for 20 or 25 minutes. He has really connected with the people, he has made his point and driven it home perfectly. Now is the ideal time to send us home on a high note. Instead, he drones on and on. He thinks of something else to add, perhaps a story he left out of an earlier point. He belabors the application. He tries to herd us toward the public invitation but keeps stalling as though he’s afraid no one will respond. So, he talks us to death.
The congregation begins to fidget. They know the sermon is over. In fact, everyone in the room knows it except the man behind the pulpit.
One of the hardest lessons for young preachers to learn is when the sermon ends, sit down. I guarantee you that doing so will impress many in the congregation better than any insight the message delivered.
6. The focus of the message is all over the place.
I’m guilty of preaching pointy-headed sermons. It’s far easier than you might think. Your text is a story in the Bible that lends itself to numerous applications. Because you love this story—and in your study you came across some great insights that have nothing to do with the central thrust of your message—you feel that to leave out any of its lessons and principles would be shortchanging your people.
So, you tell them everything you ever learned about Bartimaeus, the blind beggar of Jericho (Mark 10 and Luke 18), or the Gadarene demoniac (Mark 5) or the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9, 22, and 26). When church is over, all anyone can recall about the sermon is the name of the main character you preached about. If there was “one big idea” in the story, it was lost in the forest of points and sidepoints.
Is there a place for such a message? Yes. In an informal setting where you and others are studying the Word open-endedly, deal with everything. When there is no attempt to build a unified lesson on a single theme, you and the class want to hear all that text has to say. From the others in the room, there is give and take, questions and answers, contributions and comments.
In a sermon in church, there is almost never any direct audience participation. This means the burden is on the preacher to keep matters clear, his principles relevant, his language focused and the audience with him.
7. We take alliteration to the extreme.
Your sermon has five points and they all start with the letter P. Or seven points, all of them beginning with the letter R.
Why?
“It makes it easier for the congregation to remember,” a preacher says.
No, it doesn’t. It’s actually a distraction. Even a silliness.
There may have been a time—may have been!—when outlining sermons was made simpler and more memorable that way. But it is long past. These days, your people are puzzled at this little quirk of preachers, making all the bones of the sermon’s body identical.
In fact, outlines made up of words like “the principle, the power, the place and the people” are useless. Even when church members are able to remember these words the next week, they still don’t have anything. Outlines are more effective when they embody positive principles and make full statements. (The 13 points of this article are full sentences that stand by themselves, although, as said above, we took the negative approach.)
