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9 Preaching Mistakes You Must Avoid

4. I Don’t Spend Enough Time ‘Snacking.’

Great sermons are personal. They reflect the reality that the preacher has soaked in the text, has drunk deeply of it and been changed by it.

I once heard a preacher (lovingly) talk about his ‘large’ grandmother. She was always cooking, he said, but never ate with the family. He couldn’t figure out, as a child, how she could be so large if she never ate.

Then, one day, he watched her in her kitchen. As she cooked, she snacked. All day.

This preacher said that we, as preachers, ought to be like his grandmother. We must be constantly snacking on the food that we’re preparing for others. When I do this, I think my sermons are more personal, more practical, warmer and easier to hear. I just don’t do it enough.

5. I Don’t Consider a Broad Enough Audience.

Often times when I think about the point of a text that I’ve been studying, I think of a particular demographic that this point applies to, and then I gear the sermon to them. I don’t do that consciously, but I think it happens subconsciously a fair bit. That may be appropriate in certain contexts, but when I’m writing sermons for public consumption, I need to think about more of a broad audience so that people can more clearly and easily see the relevance of the text for them.

Mistakes in Sermon Preaching:

1. I Preach Too Long.

Hear me on this: People need to hear preaching and Christians need to cultivate the spiritual discipline of listening to God’s word through preaching so that sermon-listening becomes an act of worship. I don’t think that one hour per week is too much to ask of God’s people.

I think if we sit through movies and sporting events and TV shows for hours on end, God’s people can and should be disciplined to sit and hear from God. The people at Grace Fellowship Church get this, and I love that about them. They love to sit under the word and never complain about length of sermon.

That being said, I do want to consider that sometimes talking too long diminishes the power of what’s actually being said. I need to work on correcting this.