I was critiquing a sermon for a client the other day who demonstrated a very common and real problem in his sermon construction. The preacher told me that he just couldn’t get his mind …

I wanted to talk a little bit more about a thought described earlier. One of the biggest ways we preach more than one sermon is to attempt to bring a great point into our …

One interesting question came up a little while ago. “Elder Cox, how do you advocate ‘three points and a poem’ while at the same time you advocate ‘one point in a sermon.’”

How Do You End The Sermon When You Want To Have A Challenge?

In the African American Preaching Tradition the ability to “tell the story” is highly prized. It is also helpful when preaching to any ethnic group. There is something about stories that captures the imagination of the hearer in ways that no other method can. Stories grab the people and place them in the Bible story as they recognize parts of the story playing out in their own lives. Stories are powerful especially Bible stories.

Preachers who preach from a full manuscript have no choice but to answer yes to the question. However what about those of us who preach from an outline or from even fewer notes? Must we prepare a full manuscript? This is a good question. I think that the benefits of preparing a full manuscript whether you use it or not far outweigh the liabilities. I want to describe a few of the benefits.

You Spend More Time on Rhetoric

When people ask me about preaching without notes, many assume that you must write out the whole sermon and then memorize the sermon. These preachers are looking for a method that will help them memorize such a large amount of material.

I feel like starting with the quote from Mark Twain who said: “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” There are many who think that the three points and a poem deserve to fall off the landscape of possible sermonic choices.

Peter Mead, at Biblical Preaching.Net, gives two options for turning a text into a half hour sermon in this article. Mead provides two options. The first is to carefully plan how to drive the main point into your people. This would include tactically deciding how you will present the idea. Mead succinctly summarizes this option as follows:

Many books on preaching only emphasize the preparation of the sermon. However, few deal with the issue of presenting the sermon. In the book Best Advice for Preaching Mitties McDonald de Champlain provides some things to keep in mind when preaching the sermon.