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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 could be applied, but you want to get your listeners to see for themselves how it applies to their situation. I’ve discovered that it’s often best to simplify it in my mind. When I unnecessarily make the process of teaching application too complicated it tends to be unhelpful. So, I’ve simplified it down to three categories of how I give application. Keep in mind, these are just categories. There is a lot of freedom within each one, but I like to have the basic framework. In this episode, I'll share them with you.

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.

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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 calling us to build.

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 fit, or a metaphor that you fail to connect to your point. I’ve made all of these mistakes, and I want to help you avoid them! In this episode, we'll dive into the 4 must do’s of using illustrations to make your sermons come alive.

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.

Preachers do weird things. One weird thing we do is prepare our sermons alone. Every week you have to get up in front of a group of people and say words. Those words have to be engaging, powerful, motivating, encouraging, accurate, practical and spiritual all at the same time. Every. Single. Week. And you prepare alone. All by yourself. I think this started with Moses. He went up on a mountain and heard from God. He came down and told the people, “This is what God said.” We’ve never really changed the model. Preachers have been preparing sermons alone ever since. I used to prepare my sermons alone. I would read commentaries, watch sermons and research articles, but it was mostly just me, by myself. If you’re like most preachers, you prepare alone. But is there a better way? Could you benefit from bringing others into the process? The answer is yes, and in this episode, I'm going to show you how!

Being a pastor is unlike just about any other profession. Because of the holistic nature of the work, we tend to take on “pastor” as an identity and not just a profession. Add to that the spiritual component that we are not just providing a service to people, but showing them how life is supposed to be lived for God’s glory (no pressure). Most people don’t quite know what to do with us because we seem like non-persons to them. They don’t understand us, but we really wish they did. We don’t feel any different than anyone else, and sometimes we feel like explaining ourselves, but most of the time we just live with it. Pastor, I want to speak on your behalf today. I want to help you put into words what you might be feeling and wish people understood about you. In this episode, I’m sharing from my thoughts and experiences of being a pastor for fifteen years and working with thousands of pastors here at Preaching Donkey. You may not relate to everything I say, but I bet you’ll find some common frustrations and maybe (hopefully) feel understood.

If you're in ministry leadership, I don't have to tell you ministry is hard. You know it, you live it. There are unique challenges to church and ministry work. But, often we make ministry harder on ourselves than it needs to be. In this episode, I'm going to discuss a Carey Nieuwhof article where he shares five ways pastors make ministry harder than it needs to be. In this we'll discover ways we can avoid making ministry unnecessarily difficult for ourselves.

With each sermon you preach, you should be absolutely crystal clear what you want your people to take away from it. If you are murky about how they’ll be able to use your message, then you can be sure they’ll be clueless. As preachers who want to communicate well, clarity must be a top priority in every sermon. But it’s easy, and sometimes necessary, to focus most of your prep time on your content and not your listeners. This makes it so crucial to think through how your listeners will receive and use your message. In this episode, I want to give you three simple tests that will help you ensure that your sermon is ready to go in terms of its impact on your listeners and their ability to apply it.

TODAY through Monday we're offering BOTH Killer Sermons Academy and Preaching Jumpstart in The Ultimate Killer Sermons Bundle at $200 OFF when you use promo code: BLACKFRIDAY200 at checkout. This takes it from $497 to $297 this weekend only! The Ultimate Killer Sermons Bundle includes Killer Sermons Academy Platinum: our most comprehensive, flagship course on sermon preparation and delivery. It is a complete, end-to-end, proven system to consistently create and deliver messages that captivate and inspire your listeners toward life-change. With the bundle, you'll also get Preaching Jumpstart. This course is perfect if you are new to preaching or looking to develop a repeatable, effective process for preparing and preaching your sermons. It provides a complete, simplified process for writing and delivering life-changing sermons. Find out all the details here: https://www.preachingdonkey.com/offers/WMNRzMnP?coupon_code=BLACKFRIDAY200

It’s more important than ever before to work on gaining and keeping the attention of your listeners while you preach. Capturing and maintaining attention is one of the most difficult things a communicator must do. The reason we have to work harder to gain and keep attention has to do with what competes for the attention of our people every time we preach. Our listeners are so distracted, and we need to know what we’re up against. Some of these distractions are new, and some are as timeless as humanity, but they are all present every time you stand up to preach. In this episode, we'll dive into four things that compete for your people’s attention when you preach - and what to do about them.

So many pastors get burned out and fatigued because they lack balance. They are giving 100% of themselves 100% of the time. This is not sustainable and will lead to an inevitable crash landing. But there are two simple things you can do to keep yourself from burnout: Take a real day off; and have a real vacation. In this episode, we'll explore why it's so vital to guard your time off as a pastor, and even more importantly, we'll discover how to do it.

There are many things that can distract you while you preach. Distractions can easily interrupt your flow, make you lose your train of thought and potentially derail your message. It’s important to prepare for potential distractions ahead of time so that you're ready when they come. All preaching distractions fall into one of two categories: internal or external. Internal distractions exist inside your head. Your mind goes a million miles an hour while you preach. You think about a lot of things in the moment: -you can’t decide what your next word is going to be -you wonder how your message is coming across -you’re not sure if you’ve adequately made your point -you realized you’ve talked yourself into a corner -and on and on All of this goes on in your head while words are coming out of your mouth. It makes it difficult to stay focused on your message. These internal distractions come at you from your own thoughts. No one knows they’re happening except you. But there’s another type of distraction that is just as disruptive. External distractions come from something other than you, and they are largely out of your control. They vary from a crying baby to someone leaving during your message to someone coming in late to someone with an insidious cough. What can you do about distractions when you preach? Whether they are internal or external, is there a way to overcome distractions? While some distractions can’t be avoided, they can be managed. In this episode, we're going to explore five ways to overcome preaching distractions.

Sermon preparation can be vexing. It's important to put in the necessary hard work and deliver a sermon that is worthy of a listen. But when I write about the importance of working hard at sermon preparation, well-meaning people sometimes respond with this argument: "Just let the Holy Spirit guide you! No need for all this work." It is their desire to protect the purity of the process and not tarnish it with technique. They see preaching as this otherworldly exercise that the Holy Spirit superintends. In their view, the work of the Holy Spirit is thwarted when the preacher makes an effort to improve his preaching. In this episode, we'll look at why this is a misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit's role in sermon prep.