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Most pastors spend most of their time thinking through the content of their sermons. This makes sense because it matters a lot. It won’t matter how you say it if you have nothing worth saying.

It also makes sense because this is how seminaries train pastors to preach, focusing on content, research, and looking through commentaries and word studies. But what happens is that most sermons then sound like and feel like seminary lectures.

Teaching and doctrine are important, but teaching is different from preaching. Preaching is about movement, change, transformation, and applying the truth of the content to our lives. Jesus said as much at the end of the sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:24 – 27).

But how can you do that as a preacher week in and week out?

Here are some (not exhaustive) simple things you can do:

How to engage your audience.
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Work hard. This might seem obvious, but I think it needs to be said. Work hard at your craft. 

Too many preachers are lazy and think, “well the bible says God’s word won’t return void” so I can mail it in. An older pastor told me over 20 years ago, “Someone pays the price for a sermon. Either the pastor in preparation or the church that has to listen to it.” 

Someone pays the price for a sermon. Either the pastor in preparation or the church that has to listen to it.
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As John Maxwell says, “As a speaker, you bear the responsibility for keeping your audience excited and engaged.” 

Greet people. Most pastors fail to realize when the sermon and connection begin. We often think it is in our intro, but it is way before that moment. Connecting with your church happens during the worship, the moments leading up to the sermon, and before the service as you walk around and greet people. This is a crucial moment for connecting with your audience.

Your sermon begins long before you get on stage.
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Be yourself. Philip Brooks said, “Preaching is truth communicated through personality.” So, be you. Your church, your ministry hired you. They asked you to preach. They didn’t ask someone else; they asked you. If they wanted someone else, they’d listen to them. 

So be the best version of yourself. 

This took years for me to get to. I sit on a stool at a table. I usually teach through books of the bible, verse-by-verse, but I care deeply about the application. I tell our team, if you don’t want to sit down on a stool like I do, don’t. Be you. 

Someone once pulled me aside after a service and said, “Josh, your sermons are like relatable TED talks.” Now, they meant it as a criticism; honestly, it stung a bit. But as I thought about it, I realized, it was a great compliment because she figured out what kind of preacher I am. 

Do you know who you are as a preacher? Have you figured out how to leverage your personality and unique voice? Are you a professor, motivational preacher, an evangelist?

If you’re building a teaching team, this matters a lot. I’m an Enneagram 8, so my talks are about action and movement. So, for our church to have a healthy variety, I need to ensure other personalities are present. 

Preaching is truth communicated through personality. -Philip Brooks
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Stories. Stories can help you to prove a point and create emotion and connection. Stories help your audience relate to you. 

Stories are also crucial to building tension. 

Tension. Tension is what holds people’s attention. Yancey Arrington says, “Tension is like glue: it keeps us stuck to the story.” 

Too many speakers want to stand up and say, “Here’s the problem, here’s the answer, and now I’m going to spend 30 minutes talking about the answer.” 

Instead, saying things like “we’ll come back to that” or giving a question or situation and letting it hang there. Doing that keeps people with you. 

Questions. Ask questions. You can do this at the start of your message, throughout it. Asking questions is a great way for people to reconsider your words.  You can make it rhetorical by saying, “Have you ever wondered” or “Maybe you’ve wondered…” 

Share your questions. What do you struggle with when it comes to faith and doubt? This can show your vulnerability and humanity. 

Interaction goes a long way to connecting with an audience during a sermon or presentation.
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Visuals. Any time you can use a visual or a prop, do it. If a passage uses an object or visual, use it. If you’re talking about a lunch box from when you were a kid, get it. If you’re talking about a movie, show the poster. Put up a picture if you are talking about a place in Scripture. 

Steve Jobs was a genius at this, and this can go a long way to keeping your people engaged and helping them remember the message long after you’re done. 

Interaction. Interaction can be hard depending on the size of your group, but if you can do it, do it. Interaction pulls everyone in if you can have people turn to their neighbor and say something, that brings everyone together. 

Pause. A perfectly timed pause, a change of pace in your tone or energy, brings people in. 

If you pause, people pay attention. 

A pause can emphasize what you just said. 

A pause can help people to catch up with you. 

Humor. If you are funny, humor can be a huge asset to you. If you aren’t, it can bomb your presentation. I’m not funny like a comedian, and my humor can be drier when speaking. So sometimes, your audience needs to learn your humor to get it. 

Your heart. Open up and give people your heart. Do people believe that you believe what you are saying? Do they feel your passion for the text and the topic? Do they feel like you care about them? One of the most overlooked aspects of preaching is how a pastor can shepherd his whole church through preaching.

11 ways to be a more engaging preacher.
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Will these things guarantee a great sermon and connection? Only sometimes. Sometimes you do everything right, and things fall flat, and when it soars, the only reason is the Spirit of God. But I do believe that God moves through the gifts he’s given us and our best efforts and prayers. 

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Here are 6 posts I came across this week that challenged my thinking or helped me as a leader, husband and father (and athlete this week). I hope they help you too:

1. 10 Rules for Beating Stress by Travis Bradberry
2. 10 Rules for Upping Your Speaking Game by Nick Morgan
3. What Happened When I Stopped Using Screens after 11 p.m. by Alex Cavoulacos
4. 8 Ways to Slow Down & De-Stress Your Busy Life by John Rampton
5. 5 Things Great Leaders Know about Emotions by Carey Nieuwhof
6. 5 Reasons Church Announcements Cause Problems by Thom Rainer

The post 10 Ways to Beat Stress & 5 Other Ideas To Help You Grow as a Leader appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

When it comes to anything in life, whether it is marriage, parenting, leadership, or work, someone pays the price.

In marriage you can either pay the price at the beginning, working through all the junk you brought into your marriage; or you can pay it later when you are unhappy and married or divorced.

As a single you can pay the price to stay pure and wait until you get married to have sex. Or you can pay the price after you get married as you work through what it meant to give your body away before you got married. Or your spouse will have to deal with that thought.

The same is true for preaching.

Either the pastor pays the price in preparation, studying, praying, planning, reading, and listening to God; or his church pays the price when they have to listen to him stand up there completely unprepared, unsure of what his big idea is, as he wanders through his sermon aimlessly like the nation of Israel did on their way to the Promised Land.

Too many pastors make their church pay the price.

I was talking with a few pastors the other day who told me, “It’s Wednesday, I’ve got a title.” If all you have on Wednesday is a title, you are not paying the price for your sermon.

In preaching, someone pays a price, the church for listening or the pastor in prep.
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Paying the price means you plan a preaching calendar, you think through where you are going as a church. You study, you pray through the text asking God to reveal to you what it is about, what your church needs to hear. You read commentaries and other books, you look into the context to better communicate the text.

Preaching every week is easily the biggest weight I carry and the biggest joy I experience.

On Saturday night I lie in bed thinking through my talk and the text for Sunday. At this point in my preparation I almost have the text I’m preaching on memorized and have thought through the ins and outs. I am now thinking more about who will be there, how I will communicate it. I begin praying for those I think of and those whom I don’t know, those who are coming to Revolution as a last ditch effort on God. This is the weight of preaching. If you do not feel this, I don’t think you should preach. Why? When you stand up to preach you are literally reaching into Hell and pulling people who are on the path to Hell (Matthew 7:13 – 14). I realize that is a paraphrase, but that is the spiritual battle of preaching. That is what’s at stake.

Sunday night I lie awake worrying if I said everything I should’ve said. Did God want me to say something else? Was I clear? I pray for those who made decisions, whether to get baptized, start following Jesus, or any number of next steps we talk through on a Sunday. I pray for the spiritual protection of those who made decisions. I know that night will be a very difficult night as Satan and his angels will be going to work on those individuals.

Pastors, do you pray for those who are coming and for those who make decisions? This is the price of preaching. This is the price of pastoring.

If you are not willing to pay it, then do something else. Lives are at stake. Souls are at stake. Marriages are at stake. Families are at stake. Eternities are at stake.

Pay the price.

The post How to Make Your Next Sermon Great appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

I remember talking to a mentor once, and she asked, “Josh, do you enjoy success?”

Honestly, the question stopped me in my tracks, and I didn’t say anything for awhile.

The truth is, as a leader I am trained to fix things. I am wired to find things that are not working and make them start working or stop them. To find something that is going well and make it great.

As soon as something is fixed or working well, we go looking for the next thing to fix. Who has time to sit back and enjoy success?

But let me ask you, “How do you handle success? Do you enjoy success?”

How do you handle success?
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Have you thought about that as a church leader?

Many times in life we wallow in things that aren’t working. This didn’t go our way. We didn’t get a raise or a promotion. We prayed for this, and instead that happened. It is easy to become pessimistic.

It is easy to fix things. It makes us feel active and important, like we are needed.

Most leaders do not know how to enjoy something. We are always so focused on future things and projects that we fail to see what is right in front of us.

If something just succeeded for you, take a moment and enjoy it. You worked hard for that to happen. You set goals, made sacrifices and it worked. Gather your team together and enjoy it.

The post How do You Handle Success? appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

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The post Circles of Relationships appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

It happens in all relationships. There are times when things are going great and communication seems effortless, and there are other times that communication feels like a boulder you are trying to push up the hill.

There are reasons for both the easy and great times and the difficult times. While we may think the effortless just magically happens, it doesn’t. The couples that communicate well do specific things and don’t do specific things.

What are they?

If I had to sum it up, I’d say there are five reasons (there may be more) that your spouse doesn’t listen to you or ignores you. While many people may read this and think of just one gender in a relationship, my guess is that in most marriages both people are doing these. Remember, if a relationship is struggling, it is because of both people. No one bears 100% of the blame. It’s the same in communication.

5 reasons your spouse ignores you.
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1. You nag them about the same thing. Have you ever heard someone say, “I feel like a broken record saying the same thing all the time?” That’s because you are, and you get tuned out. Many times if you nag someone enough, they’ll stop listening. Especially if you nag them about something, and when it doesn’t happen you do it yourself. Do you know what you’ve just told your spouse? If you don’t do it, I’ll eventually get around to it. I’ll be angry, ignore you, give you mean looks, but I’ll do it.

How many times should you say something to your spouse about doing something? It depends on what it is.

I would say that if you have to repeat yourself, the issue is not what you are repeating yourself about but that your spouse is not listening to you. Deal with that, not the garage being a mess or clothes being left out. That is no longer the issue; it’s just what revealed the issue.

2. You bottle up your feelings. One reason a spouse ignores the other is because one doesn’t express themselves. They can’t help but ignore you because you don’t say anything, you don’t share anything, you don’t let them in.

This is easy for me to do. I’m a mental processor, and Katie is a verbal processor. When I’m convicted about something, bothered by something or someone, I think on it. If I see an issue in my life or job that needs to be fixed, I think about it and work it out in my head. Katie is the opposite of that. This can lead to her not feeling like I let her into my life or share what is going on. I’ve had to learn to start processing things out loud, but she’s also had to learn to ask questions.

The sad thing is when couples think that whatever the issue is, it will be fixed by one person doing something. You are a couple. It will take both of you.

In the same way, if you are upset about something and your spouse asks you what is wrong, don’t say, “Nothing.” Or, “You should know.” Maybe they should know, but they don’t.

Many times one of the battles that women and men have has to do with women wanting to express their feelings about something and their husband wanting to fix it. A woman asked Katie once, “How did you get Josh to stop fixing things when you talk to him?” Katie chuckled and said, “Before I tell him something, I let him know my expectation. Do I want him to listen, give feedback or fix it. Then he does.”

I know what you’re thinking. I should just know, and so should your spouse. But they don’t, and I don’t. Yet we make it hard, almost playing games with our spouse, and then we wonder why they ignore us.

3. You talk about your marriage to all your friends instead of your spouse. Too many couples are venting to their friends instead of to their spouse. Now I think you should have a friend or friends that you confide in. Someone when you are at the end of your rope you can call and vent to. However, this friend should be a real friend and not a cheerleader in your corner for your cause. The worst thing you can say to your spouse in an argument is, “I was talking to ____ and they agree with me.” You just brought another person into your marriage, and now your spouse is playing defense.

These friends that you confide in, they need to challenge you and your sin. Yes, they can affirm that your spouse dropped the ball because that may be the case, but it wasn’t all their fault, no matter how much you think it is.

Talk to your spouse more than to your friends about your marriage.
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4. You feel like it is no use talking. This is when you stop trying. I’ll admit this is easy to do when marriage feels hard. It feels easier to not say anything, to not try. What’s the use? The moment you feel this coming on, that is a sign to press in. The moment you think about taking a break or pulling back, not saying something, that is when you need to push into the relationship.

5. You want peace more than intimacy. One of the reasons people don’t express themselves in a marriage is because peace is easier than intimacy.

A downfall in marriage: Peace is easier than intimacy.
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When any couple chooses peace over intimacy, they have chosen a lesser marriage. Is it easier in the moment? Yes, but in the long run it will suffer. This can come from legitimate fear of an argument, a fear of being rejected or something else. Often when peace is chosen over intimacy, it is because of something in our past that is still broken. Maybe you grew up with a shouter and you don’t want that, so you learned silence fends that off. But silence also doesn’t bring closeness in a relationship.

Ever feel like your spouse is ignoring you?
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Let me close with this. Often what your spouse is ignoring in a conversation is not the issue. You want to make it the issue, but it is only what is revealing the issue, that they ignore you. That you aren’t connecting to them when you talk. Focus on that.

Related articles

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• How to Make it to ‘Til Death do us Part’
• What Should Christians Think about Sex?

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The post Your Goal for Parenting Makes all the Difference appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

People disappoint us on a daily basis.

You disappoint people.

For most people, we look past it, shrug and keep moving.

Something different happens though when it is our spouse.

What do you do when your spouse disappoints you?
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Maybe it is the high expectation we have of them, our hope that they won’t disappoint us, it might be because they are closer to us than anyone us that it hurts more or simply that we are jaded and hurt because of “all the disappointments.”

When it happens (and it will happen), you have some choices to make and the choices you make will have an enormous impact on your marriage, your kids and your view of your spouse.

Here are some things to keep in mind when your spouse disappoints you:

Here are 6 things to keep in mind when your spouse disappoints you.
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1. Protect your heart. It is easy when you are hurt or disappointed to become bitter and cold towards your spouse. If they’ve hurt you, cheated or made a poor decision that has led to financially hardship, it is easy to hold this over their head. Are you justified to be angry? Yes. Do you need to automatically trust them if they apologize? No. You don’t need to keep them at arms length (you may need to depending on what happened), but if you aren’t careful you will become bitter and resentful which makes reconciliation almost impossible. Protect your heart from this.

If you aren’t careful you will become bitter and resentful which makes reconciliation almost impossible.
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2. Look at your sin. When you are disappointed, it is easy to think it is 100% the fault of the other person. Very rarely is an issue in a marriage 100% the sin of one person. Both people have a part. Yes, one is more to blame than the other, but both made the issue happen or allowed the issue to keep going because of not having a hard conversation or looking at the issue. When you are disappointed, look at what you did to cause the issue.

3. Understand why you are disappointed. As you think about your disappointment, be sure to ask why you are disappointed. Often, our disappointments come from an unsaid expectation, how our spouse reminds us of a parent who hurt us, or an ex. This doesn’t mean we let our spouse off the hook, but until you identify why you are disappointed, you may be putting your spouse up against a standard they can never reach or judging them on something you never told them about.

The silent marriage killer: unsaid expectations.
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4. Is your expectation realistic? As you think about your fault in something and why you are disappointed, it is important to ask if you have communicated your expectations to your spouse and if they are realistic. Often, our anger, hurt and disappointment comes from an unrealistic expectations. The only people who can honestly answer if your expectation is realistic or if your disappointment is justified is you and your spouse. Your friends can’t. It’s just you two.

Often in marriage, our anger, hurt and disappointment comes from an unrealistic expectations.
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5. Be honest with your spouse. When someone vents to me about their spouse, my first question is, “have you told them this?” Almost always, the answer is no. Or, “they don’t listen.” Or, “they wouldn’t listen.” Until you’ve told your spouse honestly how you are feeling, you shouldn’t be spouting it to anyone else or all over Facebook. You don’t know what they’ll do with the information you’ll give them. You might be right and they’ll completely blow it off. They may surprise you. They may have no idea how they are hurting you or not showing you love. When I’ve asked Katie what she needs as our kids have gotten older, her answers have often surprised me. Very rarely what shows her love is what I thought would show her love. So tell them. Your spouse is not a mind reader, just tell them.

One thing that many couples struggle with is the wife wants to share about something and have her husband just listen. The husband wants to give her feedback and how to fix it. This often leaves couples frustrated. A few years ago a woman asked Katie what she does in this situation. Her response: “I tell Josh what I want before I tell him. I’ll say ‘I just need you to listen right now.’ Or ‘I want your help in figuring this out.'” This gives me a clear expectation of what she wants in this situation. I know, I know. That isn’t romantic or I should just know many women might say. But it avoids unnecessary hurt and fights.

Your spouse is not a mind reader, stop thinking they’ll “just get it.”
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6. Give your spouse a chance to respond & change. Once you’ve been honest with your spouse, give them a chance to make some changes. I often think a good rule of thumb when it comes to how many chances you give your spouse to change is how many you’d like to get if the roles were reversed. Again, this is the hard choice you’ll have to make, not your friends or Facebook.

At the end of it all, the most important thing to remember with this or any other issue in your marriage is to always fight for and pursue oneness. You will get hurt and disappointed, that’s one thing you signed up for in marriage or any relationship. The ones who survive are the ones who fight for oneness.

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Recently, I watched the author platform conference online. This was a series of interviews with authors, bloggers, marketers and other experts to help writers, speakers and bloggers be as effective as possible.

Below are the lessons from each interview that I watched:

Jonah Berger

1. Create a connection with your book. Give something to people so that they make a concrete connection to what you are saying. At book events, he gave out tissues with the word Contagious: Why Things Catch On on them for his book and made the connection of “wouldn’t your like your ideas to be as contagious as the cold?”

Chris Brogan

1. Be married to the outcome more than you are to the idea. This will allow you to enjoy the content you create.
2. When it comes to branding, people think about people. The person sticks in the mind of people if you know who the person is.

Chad Cannon

1. Books that sell come from authors that hustle.
2. An author needs to provide value to the audience outside of their book.

Chris Ducker

1. Writing a book is not like writing a blog post. Editing is by far the hardest part of writing a book.
2. Just be you. Your readers and listeners will know if you are being real or not.

John Lee Dumas

1. Failures happen when people don’t listen to their intuition. Successes happen when we do listen to our intuition.

Carmine Gallo

1. Ideas are the currency of the 21st century and you are only as successful as your ideas.
2. Most speakers fail because they don’t have their message down, they don’t know their story.
3. The difference between a great speaker and a good speaker is the great speaker is always looking to improve.
4. The 3 components to any great presentation: Emotional, novel and memorable.

Jeff Goins

1. Activity always follows identity.
2. Offline relationships still do matter in the midst of our social media worlds.

Chris Guillebeau

1. A lot of people can launch a book well, but successful authors need to think about how to make it successful in 3, 6, and 12 months.

Derek Halpern

1. The best way to promote yourself is to help others, to give a benefit to someone else.
2. Content is not just about what you say, but how you say it.

Michael Hyatt

1. Know your audience, who they are, what their needs are, and what questions they have.

There was some incredibly helpful things in these videos.

The post How to be a Better Writer appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

Let’s be honest for a minute, at some point in your marriage you are going to hit a hard season. It could be caused by a busy schedule, a child is born, difficulty getting pregnant, some kind of sickness, debt or bills, health of in-laws, drama with some kind of family member or friend, loss of job, the list is endless.

But how do you know if it is a hard season and not something else?

Here are some things that are true of a hard season: lack of intimacy and sex, lack of communication, long silences between you and your spouse, constant arguing, a lot of misunderstandings or miscommunications, or just the feeling that you are ships passing through the night.

The reality is, at some point you will feel like this, you may even feel like it right now. So what do you do?

7 ways to survive a hard season in marriage.
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Here are 7 ways to not only survive a hard season, but to come out of it stronger:

1. Identify why you are in this season. Both spouses know when they are in this season. Men would like to ignore it, bulldoze through it or just fix it to move forward. Sometimes you need to spend more time talking about something to fix it, sometimes it is so obvious that you can quickly fix it and move on.
2. Talk through what got you to this season. Don’t just identify that life is hard, that your marriage is in a tough spot. Identify how you got there. Is it overscheduling? Do you need to cut back at work? Do you need to pick up the pace on date night? Do you need to communicate more? Do you need to have more sex in your marriage?
3. Apologize for any sin on your part. Make things right. If you are in a hard season as a couple, both of you sinned. Almost every problem in marriage has sin from both spouses, don’t just point fingers at the other. Own your sin, apologize and make it right.
4. Figure out the weaknesses in your marriage that need to become strengths. You may have gotten to a hard season because you aren’t organized, don’t have a plan to get out of debt or you aren’t doing well to get everything done at work so you are overworking. Find a couple, find a person who is can help. Someone who is smarter than you at your weakness and ask for help. I think when we look for coaches, we often look for someone who can help us with everything, that is foolish. If it is finances, get with someone who has no debt and is doing great with their finances and say, “help me.”
5. Get rid of what got you to this place. Recently, Katie and I walked through a hard season that came from adding kids to our family, my job expanding and getting busier and I was saying yes to too many things. We pulled back on some activities as a family, made some changes to how we do our schedule and cut some things out. This is hard, but you have to let go of or change what got you to this season. You may need to not sign up for an activity, back out of the PTA or say no to a promotion at work. Why? Your marriage needs you to.
6. Outlast the season. If you are in a hard season that simply means you are married. Too many couples look at a hard season and want to throw in the towel, don’t. Your marriage means too much, the ripple affects to how your marriage goes are enormous. Don’t believe me? Talk to a friend who grew up in a broken home and ask them how that has impacted their life. Fight for your marriage.
7. Plan to not repeat this season. No one plans to have a tough season in marriage, but it happens. It often happens because we lose our bearings, we let sin enter our hearts or we don’t have a plan to protect our marriage. Have a plan to protect your marriage: how will you stay out of debt? How will you protect a weekly date night? How will you keep communication and sex a priority in your marriage? If you don’t talk through this step, you will end up repeating a hard season and they are much harder the second time around because you will feel even more defeated and helpless than you already do.

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