We as preachers are often tempted to preach a 30 minute sit-com message. In those messages the great mysterious and sometimes surprising God is reduced to a simple understandable and always known…
Author: Sherman Haywood Cox II
Vanderbilt Trained Minister (MDiv), Univ. of Alabama Trained Software Developer (MS), Author, Blogger (https://soulpreaching.com), Husband, Son, Brother, Father.
The Importance of Relating Doctrine to Experience
Most preachers are susceptible to either obliterating the uniqueness of our Christian teaching in relating it to humanity, or ignoring the practicality of the doctrines by preaching it in a way that…
Addressing Your Blind Spots In The Pulpit
We all have blind spots in the pulpit. We all have a tendency to migrate to a few themes. I critically listened to a preacher the other day. This is one who…
Is Celebration Entertainment
One question that comes up over and over again is whether celebration is merely entertainment. I have addressed it before on this blog, but I think it deserves mentioning again. The argument…
Become the Message of Your Sermons
How does one grab the moment and preach effective sermons? Many of us who teach preachers spend a lot of time talking about sermonic preparation. We discuss how to effectively exegete a…
Agreement or Conversion? To What End is Our Preaching?
Are we attempting to bring agreement between the Gospel and those to whom we are preaching? Are we seeking to have people understand and state that what we are saying is valuable and even true? Or are we seeking for something more substantial? Or are we seeking, by the power of the Spirit, to actually change something?
How One Sermon Was Remembered
I was talking to a laymember the other day who was very excited about a sermon he had heard. The member gave me all four of the points of the sermon and…
Curiosity And the Preacher
The truly great preachers have a curiosity to life. They want to see how things work. They want to look beneath the surface. They are concerned about more than just skimming the…
Will The Preacher Shut Up?
H. Beecher Hicks, in Preaching Through the Storm, writes about three things that attempt to force the preacher into being quiet when they need to speak. Are you being silenced? The first…
Selling Sermons – Or Give Them Away Free?
If you sell your audio sermons that were recorded by your church or non-profit ministry, you might want to read this article. The article talks about the common practice of preaching your…
Stories in Sermons Don’t Always Work
A few weeks ago, I heard a sermon by a preacher who obviously had heard of the benefits of stories in effective sermons. However, a particular illustration had great difficulties for the…
Making Room for Celebration
The other day a preacher contacted me about a critique of his sermon. The sermon’s biggest drawback was the lack of a celebration, and yet the preacher was very animated and was…
Evaluating a Sermon Outline
There are multitudes of sermon outline sites. Some of them require you to pay for the outline, others are membership sites that give you access to thousands of outlines, and still others are completely free.
The Three Intertwining Stories to Exegete for Effective Sermons
On this site and in other places, we spend a lot of time discussing the need to exegete the scripture for effective preaching. This is a very important dimension in sermon preparation….