Top 4 Preaching Fundamentals
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- čas přidán 6. 09. 2024
- The Preaching of the Word of God is extremely important and sacred. As preachers, we are heralding the actual Word of God. Sermons aren’t cute little messages or therapy sessions for Christians. Preaching is a time that we receive the Word of God, allow it to change and transform our minds, souls and spirits and put our gaze upon the Lord.
#1. Write An Outline
One of the most practical disciplines you can do as a preacher is to write out an outline for your sermon. Why is that? A couple reasons. 1st is it keeps us preachers on track and our ideas focused. A preacher that is shooting from the hip or getting lost on rabbit trails is incredibly distracting. Being organized and writing an outline is very important to your preaching.
I typically do 3-5 main points for my sermons. This keeps the sermon straight forward and easy to digest. You want the people to be able to walk away and know exactly what you were trying to communicate through the sermon. My suggestion is to always have a small salvation message at the end of every service. Always include the call to repent and put their faith in Christ.
Write an outline, don’t shoot from the hip with a generic thought in your head. The Holy Spirit moves through the preaching, but this is not an excuse to be “led by the spirit” and not fully prepare a message or write a well though out outline.
#2 Preach The Text
If there is one thing that really concerns me about a lot of preaching today is preachers that don’t faithfully preach the text they have selected or don’t have a scripture text at all! The time of preaching is a time to exalt the Bible, not your favorite topics and opinion. This is why at our church, we preach expository through books of the Bible. When you preach expository preaching, you are focusing on the text and exposing what it means. This is vastly different than thinking of a topic you want to preach about and searching out texts that support what you are trying to say. Stay faithful to the text. Context, context, context. Study your scripture. . .Pour over the words and the verses and pray about what God is saying in the text. Don’t preach your opinion or agenda in the sermon. Let the text preach for itself. Read the commentaries from guys like Spurgeon, Darby, Wesley, Henry, Calvin and all those old dead reformers. You should know the text you are preaching on backwards and forwards, inside and out.
#3 Don’t Preach Too Long
This is a common mistake among preachers, they preach way to long. In my humble opinion, the sweet spot for preaching is about 28-35 minutes. When you go much past about 35 minutes, people are going to start to zone out, and most everything you are preaching is going to be going in one ear and out the other. Think of it like watering the grass. You need to give it enough water to nourish it, but when you leave the water on for too long, the grass gets flooded because it can’t soak up all of the water. Don’t overdo it. You want people to remember what you are preaching on and retain it. Most people are not going be able to soak up much past 35-40 minutes. Once you enter the 35 minute and up area, eyelids are going to start drooping, a mass exodus of bathroom breaks will happen, and ultimately a distraction from the word of God happens. This is not because we would rather not hear or cannot handle a long sermon but because there is only so much the mind can take in one sitting before it stops being retained and hidden in the heart.
#4 Preach With Reverence
We call the Bible the Holy Scriptures. They are Holy. They are the God Breathed words from God given to man from inspiration from the Holy Spirit. Preach with reverence and honor. A sermon is not the time to work on your stand up comedy act or build a report with the people. So many preachers I see today on Facebook and CZcams have a very flippant and irreverent attitude to the Word of God. They are cracking lots of jokes, shooting the breeze with the congregation, saying things that are sacrilegious, and overall just treating the sermon time as common and not Holy. Many churches have begun to call sermons, “talks” or “discussions” and I’m not even a big fan of “message”. The word preach comes from the Greek word “kay-ru-so”. This word means “to be a herald, to officiate as a herald. . . . .to proclaim after the manner of a herald. . . . always with the suggestion of formality, gravity and an authority which must be listened to and obeyed.
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Good stuff. But for a small church, the required salvation message at the end becomes a cheap invite in the minds of regular members when almost no one comes through. It doesn't encourage them to witness outside church - 1. Its the pastor's job 2. no one wants it
Just what we are encouraged to do at our church as lay preachers! Great! I agree totally! Your videos are a tremendous blessing, only discovered them tonight, keep up the anointed work! Greetings and blessings from Trinidad & Tobago!
InstaBlaster.
Excellent..
Thanks brother!
What about visuals? PowerPoint? Any tips?
Dude! As a preacher, this is gold! Thank you for this, just recently made my first video towards my vision towards my channel, hope we can be connected here at YT, God bless you bro
Great Stuff! Thanks for sharing.
Love it! On point!
Funny in the adlibs of this video but I'm learning
What church do you pastor at?
35 - 40 minutes is pretty long in our culture these days.
Sometimes that is the case :( That's why having a very clear and well thought out outline is crucial!
Football games and movies demonstrate differently. Having 'content' when preaching makes a huge difference. It's not filling x minutes, but stopping when the message is delivered.
Why not do a 1 Point sermon?
Would you ever stand up and walk out during a sermon if it was bad enough? Have you ever done that?
Great question! I would definitely walk out. If they were preaching heresy or something grotesque/sin I would. Honor to the Lord is more important than a potential distraction or offence.
I have to disagree with you a bit. Wow you are right and everything that you have been saying, you’re very legalistic. Yes I agree with reverencing the word of God and keeping the sermon very cut and dry so to speak however I also think that it’s OK for a pastor to use a story or an illustration, I love when my pastor throws in humor into the service because it keeps me occupied I have ADHD, so there’s a little snippets of humor, and those little jokes, distract me for a minute make me laugh a little bit and then he brings me back to the main point.
You have to cater to people’s attention span and what makes them tick, sometimes you may have to throw in an illustration or a couple of illustrations, sometimes you have to throw in a little bit of humor, and sometimes more than usual sometimes less than usual. There is a time and a place to be serious and stiffnecked Christians, but there’s also a time and a place to be lighthearted as well. I don’t think we have to be so cut and dry with every single sermon we preach. Maybe that’s not the point that you’re getting at here but I just wanted to let you know I like what you do and I like this video, but at the same time I disagree with you slightly but thank you for the tips in the guidelines, I have been wanting to preach for a very long time I’ve always had a desire to do it and felt led to do it.
Thanks for the comment:) I think stories and illustrations are great, no problem here! My point was to encourage preachers not to focus the whole message on the illustration and keep the text at the center. Sometimes the focus of the Biblical text can be lost once the story or illustrations takes a higher priority than the scripture. Changing things up definitely helps me too!
Jesus seemed to have used a lot of illustrations. They bring the text to a practical application. And easy to understand.