Have you ever prepared a sermon, but when it came time to preach it, you felt led to preach something else?

Or you felt led to change up entire parts of the sermon?

It happens to all of us, and it's wise to be ready for those moments.

There are a number of considerations to deal with, in this episode, I'm going to share seven with you. Seven things to keep in mind if you are going to switch things up last minute.

Years ago my church hosted a conference to encourage and equip our lay leaders and staff.

One of the speakers at the event impacted me with her engaging presentation.

She spoke for nearly an hour training our leaders how to do ministry effectively in our context.

About halfway through her presentation I had filled my page with notes and was eager for more.

I started to think about what made the experience so captivating. Turns out, she had four key traits of irresistible speakers. In this episode, I'll share the four traits with you and show you how you can use each of them in your next sermon.

Do you ever get stuck in a sermon prep rut?

I know I do.

Sometimes the sermon comes together like a beautifully crafted work of art.

But other times I struggle to get any thoughts to come together.

It’s hard to break out of sermon prep stuck-ness, but I’ve learned a few things that help me overcome these stuck times, and I want to share them with you.

In this episode, we cover 16 things you can do this week to get unstuck in your sermon prep.

As a preacher you want to make your ideas come alive. When you labor preparing a message and perfectly craft your points you’re not thinking, "I’m sure this will be altogether unremarkable, but I’ll give it a try!"

No, you’re thinking, "How can I make them see this and feel it and be changed by it?"

We all want this because, what good is it if you make a great point, but no one feels it? If no one does anything with it?

An effective illustration is the secret sauce that makes your listeners grab onto your ideas on an emotional level. A good illustration will reach out and grab your listeners and pull them into your content. It will make them care.

But how do you use illustrations for the maximum impact? You can have a killer illustration that you misuse and have it fall flat. You can give a great illustration at the wrong time and have it lose its punch. You can have an amazing story that you tell poorly, or an interesting analogy that doesn’t quite...

There is almost nothing more important to sermon preparation than your outline.

It is the structure upon which your sermon is built. Without an outline that takes people on a compelling, purposeful journey your sermon will seem aimless.

If your sermon is aimless, people will not give it their attention.

In this episode, I'm going to show you my four-step sermon outlining method. It will give you a framework for building sermons that take people on a meaningful path toward life-change.

Preachers do weird things. One weird thing we do is prepare our sermons alone.

Every week you have to get up in front of a group of people and say words.

Those words have to be engaging, powerful, motivating, encouraging, accurate, practical and spiritual all at the same time.

Every. Single. Week.

And you prepare alone. All by yourself.

I think this started with Moses. He went up on a mountain and heard from God. He came down and told the people, “This is what God said.” We’ve never really changed the model. Preachers have been preparing sermons alone ever since.

I used to prepare my sermons alone. I would read commentaries, watch sermons and research articles, but it was mostly just me, by myself.

If you’re like most preachers, you prepare alone. But is there a better way? Could you benefit from bringing others into the process? The answer is yes, and in this episode, I'm going to show you how!

With each sermon you preach, you should be absolutely crystal clear what you want your people to take away from it. If you are murky about how they’ll be able to use your message, then you can be sure they’ll be clueless.

As preachers who want to communicate well, clarity must be a top priority in every sermon. But it’s easy, and sometimes necessary, to focus most of your prep time on your content and not your listeners. This makes it so crucial to think through how your listeners will receive and use your message.

In this episode, I want to give you three simple tests that will help you ensure that your sermon is ready to go in terms of its impact on your listeners and their ability to apply it.

It’s more important than ever before to work on gaining and keeping the attention of your listeners while you preach. Capturing and maintaining attention is one of the most difficult things a communicator must do.

The reason we have to work harder to gain and keep attention has to do with what competes for the attention of our people every time we preach.

Our listeners are so distracted, and we need to know what we’re up against. Some of these distractions are new, and some are as timeless as humanity, but they are all present every time you stand up to preach.

In this episode, we'll dive into four things that compete for your people’s attention when you preach - and what to do about them.

Sermon preparation can be vexing.

It's important to put in the necessary hard work and deliver a sermon that is worthy of a listen.

But when I write about the importance of working hard at sermon preparation, well-meaning people sometimes respond with this argument:

"Just let the Holy Spirit guide you! No need for all this work."

It is their desire to protect the purity of the process and not tarnish it with technique. They see preaching as this otherworldly exercise that the Holy Spirit superintends.

In their view, the work of the Holy Spirit is thwarted when the preacher makes an effort to improve his preaching.

In this episode, we'll look at why this is a misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit's role in sermon prep.

Often when I am preparing a message, I'm asking myself, "What is the point I'm going to make in this message?"

Granted, that's a valid question. But there is a more important question to ask that goes a level higher than that: What's my objective for this message?

To know if you were successful at something you’ve tried, you have to know what you were seeking to accomplish. This is true in every area of life but especially in preaching.

This is why I nail down the objective of my message early on in the process of writing it. The objective drives the process from there.

In this episode, I will show you how to arrive at the objective for a message and lay out one more vital question you must ask before writing any sermon.