Developing Topical Evangelistic Sermons That Are Audience-Driven
Some Jesus-Related
Questions
• Why is Jesus
God?
• Why is Jesus
unique?
• Why is Jesus
exclusive?
• Did Jesus rise
from the dead?
• What destiny
awaits those who have not heard about Jesus?
Some Bible-Related
Questions
• Is the Bible
reliable?
• Do the Bible
and science conflict?
Here's a list of
common existential issues that can be seized for a salvation ending in
the final movement of your sermon:
anxiety
fear
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conflict
happiness
freedom
satisfaction
significance
broken
relationships
loneliness
restlessness
sense of loss
self-concept
victimization
inability to
change
adventure
sense of limitations
direction in
life
In these ideas,
questions, and issues, you are looking for the audience's underlying spiritual
needs and the ways they attempt to resolve or address them without Christ. Their
needs and attempts furnish topics and illustrations for preaching evangelists
(see the upcoming chapter on support material). The comprehensive nature of
the Bible allows a thousand entrees into the nonbeliever's issues and needs
for which Christ is the only answer. If Jesus Christ is placed in human hearing,
he enters the human heart in a hundred different ways. Ask a few people what
drew them to salvation, and you'll find various creative ways in which God showed
them their need for Christ. He uses the entire spectrum — broken hearts over
sin all the way to broken hearts over relationships — in order to bring people
to a realization of their ultimate spiritual need, with salvation clinched
by our presentation of the gospel.
You'll find entry
points for topical choices and illustrations in contemporary beliefs and events.
These beliefs and events are what your audience is thinking and talking about.
Therefore, they become fodder for audience-driven, text-based, or theologically
reasoned, topical pre-evangelistic sermons.
A cursory look
at my newspaper headlines today evokes the following topics:
"Doctors
Overlook Depression, Even in Themselves"
"Search
for Life Out There Gains Respect, Bit by Bit"
"Practicing
Patience, A Virtue of Some Urgency"7
If I were preaching
on these subjects, I would see if I could attach these audience-driven topics
to textual bases or theological reasons in order to achieve evangelistic finales.
With evangelistic experience and an observant eye, you'll catch topics that
possess evangelistic potential. For instance, "depression" as a topic
attaches to a textual base: Jesus's claim to give people a joyful rather
than depressing existence (John 10:10). And the news item can work as an opening
or concluding illustration, or it could conceivably help in developing the points
of the sermon.