The speech before the speech is not something you write down to say, anymore than you would write down your remarks for a reception line. You are there to acknowledge your openness and your joy in the circumstances of your togetherness. It is simple stuff, but essential. Without it, you will arrive too hurriedly at your private agenda. Without it, you say to your audience, "As I see it, what I am about to say, is more important than our friendship." When done with sincerity, this axiom creates the bait for the important propositions with which you hope to snare their interest.
The violation of this axiom is often born in our insecurity. Every preacher I have ever known suffers from a common facet of low self‑esteem: people are soon to quit listening to me. I planted a church which in time grew to a couple of thousand listeners. When the church was small, I suffered from the notion that I would arrive to preach on Sunday and not a soul would be there. It never happened. Yet I believed it would. Even as the church became a large congregation, I would wake on Sunday morning wondering, Will anybody come today? Of course, they did.
All speakers suffer from the notion that even when listeners are present, are they really present? When they look like they're listening, are they? And when they don't look like they're listening, watch out, they probably aren't. One of the hedges against these fears is to say things like "Listen up!" or "Will you give me your attention?"
There are, of course, parts of a sermon that may need a special emphasis on attention. If you are working through the Levitical priesthood — an understanding of which is essential to your working through the book of Hebrews — you may want to ask them to carefully attend your words of explanation, because if they miss out on this part of the sermon, what is to follow later will be unintelligible to them.
But there is a difference between this kind of call to attention and the kind which continually — even habitually — asks people to listen. The continual saying of "Listen up!" grows from the preacher's insecurity that they may not be listening, perhaps because the sermon is poorly prepared and contains so little worth hearing, they have to keep insisting that people listen as though they actually did.
The best remedy for asking for attention is to have something so vital to say and to say it so well that people listen because they are fascinated and need not be called to attention. Such preaching is glorious. When the ear grows attached to the preacher's brain and larynx, there is no need to ask for attention. Any call for it is like bringing coals to Newcastle: the very call for it has been rendered pointless by the preacher's passionate and content‑filled style.