sermon prep

These days a large portion of my week has to do with what happens on Sunday mornings. Everything from prior Sunday service evaluation meetings to upcoming creative team meetings to the actual sermon preparation time, and finally to the sermon rehearsal time.
Here's what I've discovered. The larger our church becomes, the more important it is for Sunday mornings (as well as every other area) to continue to improve. Like it or not people expect better quality everything from a larger church.

Here's what I want to tackle in this post. What do I feel the keys to quality sermons are. So here are my thoughts.

I think if you want to find out what the ingredients are to a great sermon we need to look at the best communicator ever, Jesus. Jesus delivered His messages different than others. In Mark 1:22 it says that when Jesus taught, the people were amazed because He taught with authority. If you study Jesus communication style, you will see that Jesus was a storyteller, he used creativity, props, illustrations, and whatever else was necessary to drive home a truth.
He also was a big believer in life application, so His teaching consisted of about 30% Information, and 70% Application.

Whenever I am preparing a message I ask myself 2 important questions; What do I want them to KNOW?,and What do i want them to DO?
Alot of Pastors are good at the first part---What do I want them to KNOW? Some Pastors are just disseminators of a lot of information. They can tell you what something means in the original Greek, but they can't help you figure out how to apply that information so that it impacts your life on Monday.
People don't want to get out of bed on Sunday morning and come to church to gain more information. If they wanted to do that, they could stay home and read the newspaper!
People come to church because they want God to touch their life. Which means that a sermon must include information, but it also should include a heavy dose of application. James reminds us to not just be hearers of the word only, but be doers.

Here's what I believe sermons would look like if they were mathematical equations:

Information + Application = TRANSFORMATION

Really the desired outcome of a message should be transformation.

So here's the takeaway. Let's learn to communicate the message of truth, like our model, Jesus Christ!