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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 sermon that is not related to our main point. There are a few fundamental questions that you must ask of your sermon. You must ask if your main point is true, important, and needed by your particular congregation. If that is the case, then your point should help you decide what parts of the scripture to illuminate and which parts you must set aside for another occasion.
I was speaking to a preacher who had two or three powerful points derived from the text that he was trying to shoehorn into his sermon. But every attempt to put these points into the sermon took away from the larger point of the sermon. In those cases, we either must change our sermon’s point to this new emerging point, or set aside these true, valid, and even powerful points.
My point is that all of our points must be true, but truth is not enough. It must be both relevant and related to the point of your sermon. If you give three unrelated points to your people, some may remember one, most will remember none as they try to piece these “multiple sermons” into a whole when there is no whole.
So preachers, this means that some of your good material will have to wait until later. It mans that some of your shouting material won’t fit. It means that preaching one solid sermon elucidating one solid point that the people can take with them in their daily lives and that will foster change and transformation to ultimately make us better citizens of the in-breaking Kingdom of God takes precedence over other things.
In short, find your point. Make sure everything illuminates that point. And then preach that point. Use that great piece of exegesis when it is relevant to your main sermonic point.
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