5 Qualities of Unforgettable Sermons

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Since several hundred pastors read my blog, every now and then I like to focus on those of us who are and talk a little shop.

For those of you who aren’t, you need to know that good preaching is much more difficult than it looks. Back in the day, I competed as a gymnast in high school. It involved learning extremely difficult maneuvers and making them look easy to everyone else.

Preaching is like that. It involves taking some concepts that, on many different levels, can be difficult to understand and making them simple, unforgettable, and compelling. Doing that takes a lot of work.

So now for the shop talk.

Pastors, most of us would be thrilled if we asked a member of our church what we preached on the previous Sunday and they remembered a point or two of the sermon. But I want to give you a challenge: don’t simply make it a goal to preach sermons your people can remember. Make it your goal to preach sermons your people can’t forget for the rest of their lives.

Here, very briefly, are five qualities of unforgettable sermons.

Biblical

Pastors, nobody cares what we think. At least they shouldn’t. They’re sitting in our pews to find out what God thinks and what God says. At least they should.

That means we must spend the time and energy to discover what the text actually says, what it means, and how it applies in our lives. Period.

I think of an unforgettable sermon as a “nodding sermon.” No, not nodding off to sleep, but nodding down and up again to compare the text with what is being preached. “Yep, that’s what it says,” should be our observation as the sermon progresses.

Nodding sermons are unforgettable sermons because every time our hearers read that text in the future, they will remember what we preached about it.

Spiritual

A sermon cannot and must not simply relate factual information. In our preparation we must spend time wrestling with God and with the truth we are studying. As pastors, we are seeking to present the truth of God’s Word as transformative because it has already transformed us. “This is what this means and this is what it has done to me.”

In the same way, our people have to wrestle with the truth that we have given them from God’s word just as we have. This is going to make them uncomfortable. It is also going to make our sermon unforgettable.

Intellectual

Pastors, please respect your congregants’ brains. Do this in two ways: with intellectual clarity and with intellectual integrity.

By intellectual clarity, I mean preach sermons that have a clear and succinct point to them. Can you summarize your sermon in one sentence? If not, you are not being clear. Do all of your sub points relate back to your main point and are they also complete sentences? If not, you are not being clear.

By intellectual integrity, I mean does your sermon address obvious issues raised by the text with meaningful answers? If not, you are not respecting your congregants’ brains. By answering obvious questions, we produce “aha” moments. And aha moments result in unforgettable sermons.

Emotional

Pastors, do your people feel what you feel in your sermons? Understanding the role of emotion – of feeling – in communication is critical. One of the primary ways of communicating feeling is recognizing the difference between illustrations that clarify and illustrations that apply.

Illustrations that clarify communicate factual information more clearly. For example, I began this post by using the illustration of a gymnast making difficult gymnastic moves look easy to illustrate how, even though preaching looks easy, it’s actually very difficult to do well.

But the problem with illustrations that clarify is that, while they communicate on an intellectual level, they do not communicate on an emotional level.

An illustration that applies, on the other hand, is a specific example of the point being made and it communicates emotion as well as intellectual content.

For example, a better illustration I could have used at the beginning of this post would have been the humiliation I felt after my very first sermon because I thought preaching is easy. My youth pastor asked me to prepare a sermon to preach to a church when we were on a mission trip. I thought, “Oh, this will be easy.” But I didn’t spend the time I should have in preparation and I failed miserably. Afterward, my youth pastor told me with disappointment written all over his face, “That was the worst sermon I ever heard!”

This illustration is an illustration that applies and it is much better than the gymnastic illustration because it communicates on an emotional level and gives a specific example of what happens when we think preaching is easy. The listener – or in this case, the reader – feels my pain and embarrassment. (At least, I hope you do.)

And when our people feel what we feel as we preach, that sermon becomes unforgettable.

Volitional

And finally, unforgettable sermons are sermons that address our will. They are invitations to change in some way. Have you trusted Christ as your savior? Is there a sin you need to confess and turn from? It might even be something like, have you ever considered adoption or foster care? Is God calling you into missions? It can be an infinite variety of calls to action, depending on the text being preached and the moving of the Spirit of God in you as the pastor and in your congregation.

When a sermon becomes a turning point in someone’s life, it inevitably becomes an unforgettable sermon.

And that is the best kind of sermon of all.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry

Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.

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and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.

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