Have you ever prepared a sermon, but when it came time to preach it, you felt led to preach something else?

Or you felt led to change up entire parts of the sermon?

It happens to all of us, and it's wise to be ready for those moments.

There are a number of considerations to deal with, in this episode, I'm going to share seven with you. Seven things to keep in mind if you are going to switch things up last minute.

One of your jobs as a preacher is to teach your listeners how to live out the truths you preach from Scripture.

Preaching, of necessity, requires application. We’re preaching for life-change. We’re preaching to make the written word become the living word in people’s daily lives.

But the application part of the sermon is often the most difficult to execute well. I once listened to a sermon where the preacher concluded with a list of 13 ways to apply the message. Thirteen ways! Most people struggle to remember thirteen different truths from one sermon, much less apply them. He was well-meaning, but the buckshot approach just doesn’t work.

With that said, drilling down on just one application seems too narrow. You have a varied audience with varied needs. The text has one meaning, and hopefully your message can be summed up in one big idea, but the way the text can be applied to someone’s life is innumerable. You can’t list every possible way it...

This week I attended the Exponential Conference in Orlando, FL. This is one of the largest church leadership conferences in the world with over 5,000 pastors and church leaders in attendance.

I observed some trends in the capital 'C' church that I found to be incredibly encouraging.

In this episode, I'm going to share those three observations with you and what we, as church leaders, can learn from them and apply to our own contexts.

Years ago my church hosted a conference to encourage and equip our lay leaders and staff.

One of the speakers at the event impacted me with her engaging presentation.

She spoke for nearly an hour training our leaders how to do ministry effectively in our context.

About halfway through her presentation I had filled my page with notes and was eager for more.

I started to think about what made the experience so captivating. Turns out, she had four key traits of irresistible speakers. In this episode, I'll share the four traits with you and show you how you can use each of them in your next sermon.

Years ago I met with a pastor in my area who led a thriving church that he had planted the in 2003. At the time, it had grown from three families to 2,500 people in attendance.

He spent an hour sharing a lot of fantastic insights about casting vision, setting direction, and bringing people along on mission to reach the community.

But of all the insights he shared, one still sticks with me to this day. I want to share it with you:

"Tell your church what they are and eventually they’ll become that."

These words rang inside my head as he explained that his job as a pastor is to set the expectation high and let his church know he believes that’s who they are. Eventually, they will become that.

Great leaders set high expectations and truly believe their church is capable of meeting them.

I've found this to be true over and over again. In this episode, we will explore this concept and discover how to speak TO our church ABOUT our church to build the kind of church God is...

For more than a week, there has been an ongoing, unplanned revival on the campus of Asbury University in Kentucky.

It's been the talk of social media and thousands have even have made the trip to be part of it.

In this episode, I want to draw out three lessons that we, as pastors can learn from this historic event.

Do you ever get stuck in a sermon prep rut?

I know I do.

Sometimes the sermon comes together like a beautifully crafted work of art.

But other times I struggle to get any thoughts to come together.

It’s hard to break out of sermon prep stuck-ness, but I’ve learned a few things that help me overcome these stuck times, and I want to share them with you.

In this episode, we cover 16 things you can do this week to get unstuck in your sermon prep.

As a preacher you want to make your ideas come alive. When you labor preparing a message and perfectly craft your points you’re not thinking, "I’m sure this will be altogether unremarkable, but I’ll give it a try!"

No, you’re thinking, "How can I make them see this and feel it and be changed by it?"

We all want this because, what good is it if you make a great point, but no one feels it? If no one does anything with it?

An effective illustration is the secret sauce that makes your listeners grab onto your ideas on an emotional level. A good illustration will reach out and grab your listeners and pull them into your content. It will make them care.

But how do you use illustrations for the maximum impact? You can have a killer illustration that you misuse and have it fall flat. You can give a great illustration at the wrong time and have it lose its punch. You can have an amazing story that you tell poorly, or an interesting analogy that doesn’t quite...

There is almost nothing more important to sermon preparation than your outline.

It is the structure upon which your sermon is built. Without an outline that takes people on a compelling, purposeful journey your sermon will seem aimless.

If your sermon is aimless, people will not give it their attention.

In this episode, I'm going to show you my four-step sermon outlining method. It will give you a framework for building sermons that take people on a meaningful path toward life-change.

Every church I've served has had multiple services, but no one ever took the time to explain best practices for maintaining energy levels while preaching all of them.

Maybe they thought everyone was born knowing this stuff?

Well, I am going to share so that there will be something in the world regarding this topic. ;)

In this episode, I'm going to share my 7-step survival guide to preaching multiple services.