One of your jobs as a preacher is to teach your listeners how to live out the truths you preach from Scripture. If your goal is simply to educate or inform your audience so they can be more knowledgeable, then stop preaching. Preaching, of necessity, requires application. We’re preaching for life-change. We’re preaching to make the written word become the living word in people’s daily lives.

But the application part of the sermon is often the most difficult to execute well. I once listened to a sermon where the preacher concluded with a list of 13 ways to apply the message. Thirteen ways! Most people struggle to remember thirteen different truths from one sermon, much less apply them. He was well-meaning, but the buckshot approach just doesn’t work.

With that said, drilling down on just one application seems too narrow. You have a varied audience with varied needs. The text has one meaning, and hopefully your message can be summed up...

Recently my church hosted a leadership conference to encourage and equip our lay leaders and staff. One of the speakers at the event, Nikki, 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. I turned the page over and jotted down some notes that I want to share with you. Nikki embodied the 4 irresistible traits of speakers who connect with their audience.

Speakers who connect:

 1. Relate to their audience. Irresistible speakers know how to relate to their audience. They understand the need people have to feel understood, and they make an effort to demonstrate to their listeners that they “get” them. When Nikki spoke that day it impacted me because I was convinced that she understood me. The subject matter was...

One year ago today I published the first post ever on Preaching Donkey.com! Happy Birthday, Preaching Donkey! When I started this blog I had finally found a niche I was interested enough to stick with. There were plenty of resources on preaching available, but none that I could tell that focused entirely on communicating as preachers. I had plenty of ideas on the topic from experience, trial, and error. I wanted to share my thoughts on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to preaching.

After a few weeks of figuring out how to start a blog, Preaching Donkey was born. Next week I want to show you how to start a blog of your own. I think every preacher who has a message to communicate should blog with some consistency. In the next post I’ll show you how to get started.

I had no idea what this project would turn into in one year’s time. So for today, I want to share the progress with you. You are why Preaching Donkey has lasted a year....

Recently my church hosted the Sacred Marriage Conference with Gary Thomas, bestselling author of Sacred Marriage, Sacred Search and others. My wife and I gleaned some helpful insights from Gary’s teaching over the weekend, and it was nice to meet him personally.

During the conference I listened to about five hours of his speaking. It struck me toward the end of the weekend that I enjoyed his teaching so much that I wasn’t getting tired of him. This is a rare quality in a speaker and one that we can learn from as preachers. He had some approaches and techniques that set him apart as a communicator.  I observed five things that we can glean from his approach that will make us better preachers. Some of these are standard best-practices of public speaking, but his execution of them was excellent.

Five Things I Learned From Gary Thomas About Preaching

1. He jumped right into his content. He didn’t begin his talks with...

My church has three Sunday morning services. As I reflect on what it takes to preach three times in a day, I have put some things into practice that help me preach at my best at every service.

 The biggest challenge for me is maintaining and sustaining energy for all three services. I arrive at the church at 8:00 am and hit the ground running with the first service beginning at 9:15 am. The second service is at 11:00 am and the third is at 12:45 pm. By the time the 12:45 service is over I have been going hard all day – preaching, talking to people, and pouring myself out. It can be a long day. A great day, but a long one.

Preaching is such an energizing activity for me. I’m sure it is for you too. I’ll have these huge adrenaline highs while I’m preaching, then I come off the high just in time to preach again which brings me back up. I repeat this process for the next service, then I go home and collapse.

But the people at the second service...

This week I want to hear from you.

I am writing a book on preaching, and before I go any further with it I want to make sure it is the best it can be. The way I know it’s the best it can be is if YOU would read it. I want to share my vision for the book with you. Then, I want to hear from you to find out what you would like to see in it.

What the book is not. Before I get into what the book will be I want to share what it isn’t.  This book is not:

•  a seminary textbook on preaching. I love my preaching text books from seminary but I have no desire to write one.
• a preaching theory book. This book will be drop dead practical. It will only present theories to the extent they can be put into use.
• a book of sermons or sample illustrations. It will be more “how to” than a resource of examples.

What the book is. I want to share the basic plan of my book with you and get your feedback. This plan may change, and I am...

A mist in the pulpit is a fog in the pew.“~C.H. Spurgeon

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. Not to mention that they’ll pick up on your uncertainty and check out because their time is valuable and you have chosen to waste it.

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 a 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. 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.

This is drop-dead simple, and it’s meant to be. At this point in your prep...

The most effective preachers are continual learners. What separates ordinary preachers from extraordinary communicators is a relentless desire to improve. But there are so many things competing for your time it’s difficult to know which resources to take advantage of. To make it easier, I want to share 3 things you can do right now to communicate better as a preacher:

1. Read great preaching resources.

I once met with guy who was in his sophomore year in college. He felt a strong calling to be a pastor and wanted to know if he should change his major and pursue ministry as a career. I offered him some books to read that would help him think through his decision. He declined them, “I’m not much of a reader.”

“Well, then you won’t be much of a pastor.” I responded without thinking much about it.

He was surprised at my assessment that he should either become a reader or do something different for a living. I feel very strongly that those...

As preachers we must guard against pride. It is a trap that can destroy our effectiveness and our ministries. But we need confidence in order to boldly proclaim God’s word. A tension exists between pride and confidence.

Most of us would say that being confident in our abilities is generally good, but being prideful in ourselves is detrimental. We know that the Scriptures contain harsh warnings against pride. You can be a confident person without being prideful, but it often seems like a fine line.

A closely related character trait to pride and confidence is fear. Fear can be a huge inhibitor. Most of us bounce back and forth between pride and fear. Sometimes we’re prideful of our accomplishments looking for others to notice how awesome we are and validate us. Other times we are insecure in our abilities and fearful of what other people might think. We like confidence because it seems to be a good middle ground, but it is difficult to stay there...