Forty years have passed since my first sermon. How often have I had to ask myself, “How is it possible to have done this thousands of times and still not do it properly?”

Yes, I know how to talk myself out of that mood. “It’s faithfulness, not skill, that really matters.” “How you feel has nothing to do with it!” “Remember, you’re sowing seed.” “It’s ultimately the Lord who preaches the Word into people’s hearts, not you.” All true. Yet we are responsible to make progress as preachers. (1 Tim. 4:13, 15 is an instructive and searching word in this respect.)

All of this led me while traveling one day to reflect on this: What ten commandments or rule of preaching-life do I wish someone had written for me, providing direction, shape, and ground rules that might have helped me keep going in the right direction and gaining momentum in ministry along the way?

I offer these not as an infallible or inexhaustible guide but as the fruit of a few minutes’ quiet reflection on a plane journey.

1. Know your Bible better. Often at the end of a Lord’s Day or conference, the thought strikes me again: “If only you knew your Bible better, you would have been a lot more help to the people.”

As both an observer and a practitioner of preaching, I am troubled and perplexed by hearing men with wonderful ability and charisma who seem to be incapable of simply preaching the Scriptures. Somehow the Word has not first invaded and gripped them.

The widow of a dear friend once told me that her husband wore out his Bible during the last year of his life. “He devoured it like a novel,” she said. Be a Bible devourer!

2. Be a man of prayer. Not only should I pray before I prepare, but my preparation itself is a communion with God in and through His Word. The apostles knew they needed to devote themselves “to prayer and the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). Paul often requested prayer for himself (see Col. 4:3; 1 Thes. 5:25; 2 Thes. 3:1).

Alas for me if I don’t see the need for prayer or for encouraging and teaching my people to see its importance. I may do well . . . but not with eternal fruit.

3. Don’t lose sight of Christ. Me? Yes, me. This is an important principle in too many dimensions to fully expound here. One must suffice: Know, and therefore preach, “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). That text is far easier to preach as the first sermon in a ministry than as the final sermon.

What do I mean? Perhaps the point can be put sharply, even provocatively in this way: Exposition did not die on the cross for us; nor did biblical theology, nor even systematic theology or hermeneutics or whatever else we who handle the exposition of Scripture deem important. I have heard all of these in preaching . . . without a center in the person of the Lord Jesus.

Paradoxically, not even systematic preaching through one of the Gospels guarantees preaching centered on Christ crucified. Too often, preaching on the Gospels takes what I whimsically think of as the “Where’s Waldo?” approach. The underlying question in the sermon is, “Where are you to be found in this story?” (Are you Martha or Mary? James? John? Peter? The grateful leper?) The question “Where, who, and what is Jesus in this story?” tends to be marginalized.

The truth is, it’s far easier to preach about Mary, Martha, James, John, or Peter than it is about Christ. It’s far easier to preach even about the darkness of sin and the human heart than to preach Christ.

Plus, my bookshelves are groaning with literature on the good life, the family life, the Spirit-filled life, the parenting life, the damaged self life . . . but most of us have only a few inches of shelf space on the person and work of Christ Himself.

4. Be deeply Trinitarian. My concern here arises from a sense that Bible-believing preachers (as well as others) continue to think of the Trinity as the most speculative and therefore the least practical of all doctrines.

After all, what can one “do” as a result of hearing preaching that emphasizes God as Trinity? Well, at least inwardly if not outwardly, we can fall down in prostrate worship that the God whose being is so ineffable, so incomprehensible to our mental math, seeks fellowship with us!

John’s gospel suggests to us that one our Lord’s deepest burdens during His last hours with His disciples was to help them understand that God’s being, as Trinity, is the heart of what makes the gospel both possible and actual. Knowing Him as such forms the very lifeblood of the life of faith (see chapters 13–17). Read Paul with this in mind, and it becomes obvious how profoundly woven into the warp and woof of his gospel is his understanding of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Our people need to know that, through the Spirit, their fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. Would they know that from your preaching?

5. Use your imagination. All good preaching involves the use of the imagination. No great preacher has ever lacked imagination. Scripture itself suggests that there are many different kinds of imagination—hence the different genre in which the Word of God is expressed (poetry, historical narrative, dialogue, monologue, history, vision, and so on). No two biblical authors had identical imaginations. (It is doubtful if Ezekiel could have written Proverbs!)

Imagination in preaching means being able to understand the truth well enough to translate it into another kind of language in order to present the same truth in a way that enables others to see it, understand its significance, and feel its power. Imagination does so in a way that gets under the skin; breaks through the barriers; grips the mind, will, and affections so they not only understand the words used but feel their truth and power.

What is the secret here? Surely it is learning to preach the Word to yourself, from its context into your context; to make the truth concrete in the realities of our lives. This is why the old masters used to speak about sermons going from their lips with power only when they had first come to their own hearts with power.

6. Speak much of sin and grace. Sin and grace should be the downbeat and the upbeat that run through all of our exposition. But there are some cautions:

Preaching on sin must unmask the presence of sin, and undeceive about the nature of sin, as well as underline the danger of sin. However, this is not the same thing as hammering a congregation against the back wall of the sanctuary with a tirade!

Doubtless, people need warnings against the evils of contemporary society (abortion, apostasy in the visible church, etc.). But we can’t build a ministry, or healthy Christians, on a diet of scathing against the world. Rather, we do this by seeing the Scriptures expose the sin in our own hearts and root out the poison that remains there—and then helping our people to do the same “by the open statement of the truth” ( 2 Cor. 4:2).

There is only one safe way to do this. Spiritual surgery must be done within the context of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Only by seeing our sin do we come to see the need for and the wonder of grace.

But exposing sin is not the same thing as unveiling and applying grace. We must be familiar with the exponents of its multifaceted power, and know how to apply it to a variety of spiritual conditions.

Truthfully, exposing sin is easier than applying grace; for, alas, we are more intimate with the former than we are with the latter. Therein lies our weakness.

7. Use the “plain style.” Paul commended the simple use of language as one of the characteristics of all preaching (2 Cor. 6:7; 2 Cor. 4:2). C. S. Lewis’s counsel on writing applies equally to preaching:

Use language that makes clear what you really mean; prefer plain words that are direct to long words that are vague. Avoid abstract words when you can use concrete. Don’t use adjectives to tell us how you want us to feel—make us feel that by what you say! Don’t use words that are too big for their subject. Don’t use “infinitely” when you mean “very,” otherwise you will have no word left when you really do mean infinite!

 

In a similar vein, here is J. C. Ryle’s counsel: “Have a clear knowledge of what you want to say. Use simple words. Employ a simple sentence structure. Preach as though you had asthma! Be direct. Make sure you illustrate what you are talking about.”

A brilliant surgeon may be able to perform his operation with poor instruments; so can the Holy Spirit. But since in preaching we are nurses in the operating room, our basic responsibility is to have clean, sharp, sterile scalpels for the Spirit to do His surgery.

8. Find your own voice. “Voice” here is used in the sense of personal style. We ought not to become clones. Some men never grow as preachers because the “preaching suit” they borrowed does not actually fit them or their gifts. We may tie ourselves in knots and endanger our own unique giftedness by trying to use someone else’s paradigm, style, or personality as a mold into which to squeeze ourselves. We become less than our true selves in Christ.

The marriage of our personality with another’s style can be a recipe for dull and lifeless preaching, so it’s worth continually taking the time to assess our strengths and weaknesses.

9. Learn how to transition. Many of us are weary of the pandemic of “how-to-ness” we find in much contemporary preaching. It’s often little better than psychology (however helpful) with a little Christian polish, and in the last analysis becomes self- and success-oriented rather than sin- and grace-oriented.

But many are stronger on doctrine than on exegesis, and often stronger on soul-searching than on spiritual upbuilding. We need to learn how to expound the Scriptures in such a way that the very exposition empowers in our hearers the transitions from old patterns of life in Adam to new patterns of life in Christ.

How do we do this? We must learn to bring out teaching from the text itself on how transformation takes place and how the power of truth itself sanctifies (John 17:17). This usually demands that we stay down in the text longer, more inquisitively than we sometimes do. The ministry that accomplishes this will be a ministry people are drawn to, even if they can’t articulate or explain why it’s so different and helpful.

10. Love your people. John Newton wrote that his congregation would take almost anything from him, however painful, because they knew “I mean to do them good.”

This is a litmus test for ministry. It means that my preparation is a more sacred enterprise than simply satisfying my own love of study. It means that my preaching will have characteristics about it, difficult to define but nevertheless sensed by my hearers, that reflect the apostolic principle: “We were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess. 2:8).