I have had three primary changes in the 30 years under question:
- I have moved from “pointless” to “multi-point” to “pointed point” sermons. In other words, the early ones lacked focus. Then from the mid-90s until 2006 they had multiple, stated foci; for the last 15 years or so they have been reliably “one point” sermons.
- With increasing age and experience, I have grown in the freedom to address sticky issues in people’s lives: addictions, compulsions, patterns, and complacencies. It is a high honor when people say, “Were you a fly on our wall all week long?”
- Within the last year, motivated by the work of Timothy Keller, I have learned to turn many sermons about life into concluding moments about Jesus. It’s a thrilling thing when the atmosphere in the room changes because the message has ceased to be about me or the congregation but about the Savior we share. When the sermon changes from exhortation to exaltation, people are moved and the Lord is magnified.
Is there a certain “style” or preaching that you often use and why?
I am a strong believer in preaching that leads to a singular “bottom line”—a biblically faithful, theologically accurate, and rhetorically compelling summation of the sermon’s journey and destination. Once unveiled in the sermon journey, the bottom line functions as a “refrain” or a “chorus” that gets repeated often in the last third of the sermon.
Repetition implants the truth in the minds of congregants, and I hope to craft ways for them to “feel” or “experience” it, rather than just hear about it. Examples of bottom lines that have stayed with people through the years include, “What you tolerate today will dominate you tomorrow,” “Surrender your impulses so you don’t surrender to them,” “Why fight for approval when you can live from it?” and “Treat the people you LOVE as well as you treat the people you NEED.” Each of those sentences has exegesis and background and anecdotes behind them, but I offer them as examples of bottom lines with staying power.
Work Ahead
You have to prepare a message every week…so you may as well be preparing one for several weeks from now. I am typically eight weeks ahead in my message prep, which as you might imagine makes it easier on those on our team who plan music and other worship elements. It ALSO makes easier on my nerves!
How did I get so far ahead? First, I left seminary with four sermons “in the hopper,” so from my first week of ministry I already had a month’s cushion. Second, I prepare a message even on weeks when I’m not preaching. That message then goes into the file from which I will pull it out on the Monday before the next Sunday preaching. And that’s because my fourth suggestion for your wellbeing (and that of your congregation) is to …
Preach Without Notes
I have three foundations on which I build this principle in both my own preaching and the mentoring I do for others:
Foundational Premise #1: There is a difference between memorizing and internalizing.
- I do not believe that sermons should be memorized. If that were the case, then only robots could deliver them.
- On the other hand, I very much believe that sermons should be internalized. That way, pastors can preach them.
- Memorization emphasizes word-for-word recitation of a prepared script. Because of the human impossibility of such a feat, memorization leads inevitably to frustration.
- Internalization, by way of contrast, is more thought-for-thought delivery of a designed piece. Internalizing a sermon moves it from the page to the brain and ultimately into the heart. Once a message settles into the heart, having it emerge from preacher’s mouth is almost effortless. (Though of course, the more effortless it looks, the more effort it took!) Far from leading to frustration, internalizing leads to liberation.
Foundational Premise #2: If you forget where you are in the sermon, the only person who knows is you.
Let’s say you have accepted the challenge to preach without notes, have ascended to the pulpit, begun your message and…two-thirds of the way through, you have forgotten what is next. What to do?
Well, in that moment of internally high drama, you do well to remember: No one knows that I’m lost except me. No one! When this happens to me, I keep talking, walking around what I have just said, and without fail the next block of material appears in my mind (details on that below). All along I am remembering: they don’t know anything is wrong. The benefits of noteless preaching more than outweigh the cost of occasional forgetfulness.
