SEVEN KEY ELEMENTS ON PREACHING

From Fred Craddock’s Book, Preaching

1. We are preachers.  Our message is brought with faith, which makes us believable; passion, which makes us persuasive; authority, which gives us the right to speak; and grace, which reminds us we are the listener as well as the speaker.

1. We will preach what people want to say, if they only knew the desires of their hearts, and had themselves the ability to speak those desires.  We will provide people with what they are looking for – insight.  The listener wants to make discoveries in our message.

1. God’s self-disclosure has not been obvious to everyone.  God has broken the silence not with a shout, but in a whisper; that is to say, in ways not all have heard.  He is nothing, if not subtle.  Matthew tells us, however, that our job is to shout that whisper.  Matthew 10:27:  What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the housetops.

The preacher knows that the public proclamation always carries a whisper in its bosom, for one never forgets how faith has its beginnings.  After all, we are not barkers at a sideshow or peddlers of the gospel.  Even in times of impatience and exasperation, the point is not to get something off the chest but into the heart.  To preach then, is to shout a whisper.  The whisper we shout should be able to be summarized in a single pregnant sentence.

1. We are to leave the listener with no sense of having been put down; with self-worth affirmed or restored, with God’s love and grace seen as available realities, with conviction that repentance and trust are acceptable to God, with an awareness of other persons, and with more hunger for covenanted life.

1. In good preaching, stories are the point.  A story caries in its bosom the whole message, not just the illumination of a message which had already been related in another but less clear way.  The story is the picture.  The story is the text.  (Prodigal Son).  That parable was his sermon.  That parable was his statement on righteousness and forgiveness.  Those listeners who habitually think of stories or anecdotes as illustrative of something, and therefore expect discussion either to precede or to follow such material often find themselves left alone with their thoughts and decisions when studying the stories of Jesus.  They have a hard time accepting that with Jesus, often the story is it.

1. As for the presentation of the sermon itself, the most consistently effective delivery is a result of re-experiencing the message as it is being spoken.  The sermon preaches itself through the minister.  All who preach in this way acknowledge that the price paid is the physical and emotional toll it takes.  By entering into the message, however, all is natural, from gestures to intonation to humor to heart.

1. Who can conceive of any greater motivation for preaching our very best than this:  there is at least one person in the sanctuary listening, one person who, because of this sermon, may have a clearer vision, a brighter hope, a deeper faith, a fuller love.  And that person is the preacher.