Home Pastors Articles for Pastors 7 Real Reasons Your Sermons, Writing or Ideas Are Boring

7 Real Reasons Your Sermons, Writing or Ideas Are Boring

2. Focusing on what people need to know, not on what people want to know

There’s a tension for every communicator between talking to people about what they want to know and talking to people about what they need to know.

If you want to draw a crowd, it’s easy to focus on what people want to know.

But every communicator knows sometimes you just need to tell people what they need to know, even if they don’t want to hear it.

That’s an especial challenge for preachers.

If you always preach about what people want to know, you’ll likely miss what people need to know.

If you only focus on what people need to know, people have a way of tuning you out.

When people tune you out, it might not be evidence that you’re being faithful (as many preachers claim). It might just be evidence you’re being ineffective.

So what do you do?

Here’s where I’ve landed. I try to discern what people want, and then I deliver what people need.

For example, few people want to hear about what the Bible has to say about money or sex.

But as a communicator, if I drill down on why God gave us instruction in this area and look for the benefit God intends to bring to people’s lives through it, I’ve then isolated what people will want to hear and can better deliver what they need to hear.

3. You haven’t described a problem people want to solve

The problem with a lot of communication is that it doesn’t start with a problem.

Too often, communicators or writers just start.

Your audience is asking one question: Why should I listen? Why should I read further? I have problems to solve and you’re not helping me.

Counter that explicitly.

I almost always start any talk I’m doing describing a problem people face—at work, at home, in their relationship with God or in their relationship with each other.

How do you do that? Describe the problem in detail: i.e., You’re so frustrated with God because He says he’s a God of love, but you read the Old Testament and beg to differ. And you wonder if you can even trust a God like that.

If you really want people to drill down on the issues, take the next step. Make the problem worse. Describe it in such detail that people are no longer sure there’s a solution to it.

If you want to see this in action, I spend the first 10 minutes of my message on violence in the Old Testament explaining the problem and then ‘making it worse’ before I address it.

You can watch that message here.

4. You didn’t express an old idea in a fresh way

For the record, Solomon was right, there isn’t anything new under the sun.

None of us truly speaks about anything new.

As a result, it’s easy to fall into cliches and common descriptions of issues everyone’s trying to address.

For example, I almost called point 2 of this blog post “You’re answering questions nobody is asking.” But I realized that as you skimmed the article you would think “I’ve heard that a thousand times” and tune out.

So I changed the expression of the point to “Focusing on what people need to know, not on what people want to know.”

It’s a little fresher.

Again, that’s not a brand new idea, but it’s a more unique expression of it.

If your ideas are simply retreads of other people’s ideas, people will tune out.