Tag Archives: albert mohler

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5 Ways to Preach a Bad Sermon

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bad sermon

Yes, there are such things as bad sermons and sermons that should never be preached.

I’ve preached them, and if you are a preacher, you have preached them, too. They are painful, they put people to sleep, they make people decide church isn’t worth their time (and worse God isn’t worth their time), and they turn people away from the truth.

Now many pastors in an effort to not be accountable for their sermons and/or to not work hard on their sermons love to quote from Isaiah 55:11: “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” I rest in this verse as all pastors should, but this verse does not say, “Don’t work at your craft, don’t put in effort.”

So here are five ways to guarantee that your next sermon will be awful:

5 ways to guarantee that your next sermon will be awful.

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1. Be unprepared. Walk up to the stage, look at your church and have absolutely no idea what you are going to say. Wing it. Make it up as you go along. Be all over the map. Preach someone else’s sermon and see what happens.

Lots of pastors preach when they aren’t prepared. I’m not talking about the text isn’t still convicting you, because that will never stop. I’m talking about, you didn’t prioritize your sermon prep time, so you aren’t prepared. You let your week get away from you and others decided your calendar, so you are working on it Saturday night when you should be asleep.

Apart from someone dying or some other unforeseen catastrophe, my sermon prep time is blocked out and not negotiable. Why? Preaching is the most important part of my job. It is when I have the most influence over the life of my church. When else is everyone in one room, hopefully listening? Never. Preaching isn’t all that I do, but it is the top priority of my week in terms of my role at my church, and yours too if you are the main communicator of your church.

One way to guarantee a bad sermon is to be unprepared.

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2. Say what you want the Bible to say. This is incredibly common in a lot of sermons and one I have to constantly work against. Often what the Bible says is not as cool as what we want the Bible to say. What we want to say isn’t as piercing, confrontational or invasive as what the Bible says. But no one changes based off what I want to say; they only change through the power of the Spirit working through the text.

This reason is why I started preaching through books of the Bible. I know pastors build their case through the Bible as to why you should preach through books. I do it because I know my heart and tendency is to decide what I want to say, go find a verse that says that or I can make say that, and then preach a sermon. Preaching through books of the Bible prevents that for me.

I know you think people came to hear you preach, and in a way they did, but what they don’t know or maybe can’t verbalize is they showed up at your church to hear from God. You are just the instrument for that.

3. Don’t talk about Jesus, just give good advice. Another way to guarantee a bad sermon is to simply give out good advice and never talk about Jesus. Most would say if you don’t talk about Jesus that isn’t a sermon, just a talk, which I would agree with. But I digress.

Remember #2, they didn’t show up to hear you but to connect with God. They maybe can’t verbalize that, but that’s their heart cry.

4. Don’t have a main point. This is one of the hardest things to do in a sermon, to boil down your sermon to one point. Not three or five, but one. That is all your church will remember if they remember anything. I know we want them to remember all of it, but they forget about 80-90% of what we say, which is incredibly humbling when you think about it.

To make your sermon last longer than Sunday morning, you must think of ways to communicate it in a memorable sentence.

If you can’t say your sermon in one sentence, you aren’t ready to preach.

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5. Don’t tell anyone what to do. Pastors love to use Isaiah 55:11 to avoid application. The thinking goes like this: Just get up there, read a verse, say what the Bible says and then sit down and let the Holy Spirit bring the application. Nowhere does this verse even allude to this. This is the one that I often struggle with the most, creating clear next steps. Moving from, “The Bible says this,” to, “So in light of that, go and do ________.”

This is the handle people are looking for to apply the sermon. Do we need to spell it out for people? Yes. Some people will get it on their own and may even get a next step from the Holy Spirit you don’t give them, and that is great, but most people are waiting for you to answer the “now what” question. Like #4, if you can’t tell them a next step, the sermon isn’t ready to preach.

If you can’t tell them a clear next step, the sermon isn’t ready to preach.

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When Pastoring is Hard (And 3 Ways to Survive)

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pastoring

Every job is hard. Teaching in a school. Working in a bank. Being a cashier at In n Out. Driving a trash truck is hard.

Pastoring is hard.

Some things that make pastoring hard make other jobs hard and some things are unique to pastoring.

Here are some things that make pastoring hard:

  • When someone stabs you in the back.
  • Counseling someone and then watching them do the exact opposite and wreck their lives.
  • Having a staff member lie to you.
  • Encountering Christians and leaders who are not kingdom minded.
  • When someone stop giving, stops serving, stops buying in to the vision.
  • When expectations for you, your spouse and your kids are unattainable.
  • When giving goes down and you need to make hard choices.
  • When you make a hard choice people don’t understand and criticize.
  • You spend 20 hours on a sermon only to get an email Sunday afternoon with all the things someone didn’t like about it.
  • You spend 20 hours on a sermon and it flops.
  • You baptize someone who falls back into old patterns.
  • Celebrating the victory over addiction with someone only to get a text the next day telling you they fell back into it.
  • When you take someone through church discipline and they relationship remains broken.
  • Watching a couple go through a divorce.
  • Satan showing up at your house.
  • Spiritual attacks on your wife and kids.
  • When someone talks about you (the pastor) to your wife or child.
  • When someone talks about your wife behind her back.
  • When someone you’ve poured into as a developing leader says, “I’m leaving and taking people with me (behind your back).”
  • When people ask why you aren’t supporting the ministry or person they think you should support and get angry about it.
  • Watching a person in your church listen or read someone who is preaching lies and false doctrine.

In those moments, here are some ways to move forward and handle it:

  1. This moment won’t last forever. Go to bed and wake up because tomorrow is a new day. Will some of these issues still be unresolved tomorrow? Sure. But at least you will be rested and thinking more clearly. They won’t last forever. Some of the moments that have been the hardest for me, several weeks or months later are no longer on my radar.
  2. Leadership is hard, get over it. If leadership wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. You were called to it. You signed up for it. It is hard, but that is what make leadership so glorious and amazing.
  3. You answer to Jesus. Yes, you have accountability and structures. Yes, you answer to an elder team, but ultimately, you answer to Jesus. He’s the one who called you, the Holy Spirit empowers you. You answer to them. This doesn’t mean you get high and mighty, it just means you remember where you ultimately end up, standing in front of Jesus.
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When Eating Becomes a Sin

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food

I get asked a lot about losing the weight I have and keeping it off. Losing 130 pounds was really hard, but keeping it off and is incredibly difficult. I’ll often get asked about eating habits as that is where most people get hung up.

One of the things that rarely gets talked about is that eating can be a sin, an idol. The reality is, we are told our bodies are the temple of the holy spirit and we are to take care of them (1 Corinthians 6:19). Most Christians use this verse to say drinking and smoking are wrong while eating their next 2,000 calorie church potluck meal.

The reality is that eating is a sin when:

  • We do it mindlessly.
  • We do it when life feels out of control.
  • We do it to feel better or find comfort (ever hear someone talk about comfort food?).
  • Or, when we eat too little to be prettier or skinnier.

So what do you do?

The first thing you must do is understand why you eat. What drives you to food. It is not that you are hungry, we often eat when we aren’t hungry or continuing eating when we are full, so there is more to it than that. If you never uncover why you eat, you will continue to eat in a sinful way by finding your god in food.

Because overeating or not eating enough is a sin and can be an addiction, you have to approach the way you would someone who is addicted to porn, shopping, drugs or working too much.

When you approach those sins, you make a plan, create some accountability around them to keep you from falling into those patterns. It is the same with food.

Here are some ideas:

  • Get an accountability partner for exercising or eating.
  • Don’t buy the snacks that are bad for you. If it isn’t there, you can’t eat it.
  • Make a meal plan so you eat well. If you make a last minute meal it is rarely good for you. If you go out to eat, always know what you will eat before you arrive. Looking at the menu causes you to eat more than you should or food you shouldn’t.
  • Drink at least 100 ounces of water a day. Water fills you up and helps to clean out your system which helps to move things through better. Also, if you drink that much you eat less. If you drink this much water, you are less likely to drink soda. I’ve read cutting soda out of your diet can drop 10 pounds in less than 2 weeks.
  • Eat higher protein meals which will lead to less hunger in between meals. I eat 5 eggs every morning and am rarely hungry before lunch. Not snacking makes a huge difference.
  • Start slow. The big mistake most people make is to jump from what they are doing to eating like Bob Harper tells you to eat on the biggest loser. While that’s great if you can do that, it is often unrealistic. Take small steps and then add to it. It took me 18 months to lose 130 pounds but I went slow and have kept it off for almost 4 years now.