Jay Adams’ Preaching with Purpose and Warren’s more recent emphasis on purpose-driven preaching have pounded into my head the importance of purpose and my knowing the outcomes I am looking for as a result of the sermon being heard. Besides the immediate outcomes of a hearer raising a hand to request prayer during the invitation or coming forward for counseling at the altar, I must think of outcomes for the coming week or more distant future.
How can I make it happen?
In other words, “How does my audience need to hear what I have to say so that they will do what I want to them to do?” Rather than thumb through Grainger’s 150 Examples at this point, I think about the results I want and where the audience is now in relation to those results. What will I need to say first to show that I know where my audience is intellectually, emotionally, or volitionally on this matter? What will I need to say next? What will I need to say after that?
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If I think of the desired outcomes as the final destination and the introduction of the sermon as the “YOU ARE HERE” on a map, the sequence of my message’s thoughts and their final form come more naturally. If I fail to identify my ending and starting points from the beginning, I end up just spinning my wheels. The sermon then goes nowhere but my files.
Now that I think about it, these three questions were basically the same questions I asked back when I first started preaching. They were much simpler then, not based on any book’s thesis but upon my own personal “feel” for how to speak so that people might respond. My ignorance then does not make the questions any less instructive than they are for my more educated self today.
When all is said and done, preaching is as simple as pitching. Sometimes you just gotta rear back and let'er rip.
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Gregory K. Hollifield is Chaplain with Youth for Christ in Memphis, TN.