I Preached a Bad Sermon…

It’s a famous story in our church’s Elder history. A group of Elders and their wives were enjoying a beautiful meal together and wonderfully edifying conversation around the table, just as desert was served. My first bite of apple pie seemed unusually cold and clammy, but I didn’t want to cut into the discussion, so I picked at it with my fork and waited. A second, smaller bite was weirder still, so I slipped in the words, “Hey what’s wrong with this pie?” Others chimed in echoing the uncertainty, noting various features that departed from typical apple pie. Not warm, not crispy, no flake, apples hard, etc. Turns out a raw apple pie had been pulled from the fridge, cut, and served without anyone realizing it. What was more amazing was the comment of one Elder as he forked the final bite of his piece into his mouth. “Tastes great to me,” he smiled. We have laughed about that story for years, but it brings to mind a reality every pastor faces in sermon analysis. Hungry people devour whatever you put in front of them and are often not in a place to give good feedback about the meal the preacher has fed them.

At our recent Harvest University, I preached the final message of the conference on Psalm 90. I took a four-week series that I had preached late in the summer and condensed it into a single message. Like most messages that fail, the errors were in the preparation and could not be saved by delivery. I am taking time to share this with you in hopes that you will learn to give and receive better sermon evaluation, toward the goal of fewer bad sermons.

I had too much content.

The biggest failure was the original thought that I could make a four-part series into a sermon. There was some great stuff on the eternality of God and the brevity of man. Couldn’t I just hit the highlights and do a fly-by of the whole Psalm? “Yes,” if I made a new sermon carefully. “No,” if I tried to grab the best part of each of four sermons. The strength of separate individual sermon parts don’t make a good sermon any more than you can grab the best element from each of your last four birthday dinners and make one great meal. What I did was like a taco with rosemary potatoes, a banana smoothie, and crème brulée. Bad sermon.

It was like four tiny sermon touches, not one powerful sermon impact.

It seems ludicrous that a mechanic would try to repair a broken-down car with a motorcycle carburetor and an ATV braking system. Good sermon parts don’t make a whole. Many messages fail because a hurried prep has us grasping for impactful content that doesn’t complement the entire sermon. Every spoke must connect with the same hub. Every point or ‘move’ in the sermon must advance the big idea of the biblical passage. The series I drew from had four big ideas, and for that reason my failed sermon ‘fly by’ had four big ideas—which is not a sermon at all. More of a movie-trailer actually. Sermons can’t play like an advertisement for a whole series. Impact flows from clarity, which begins and ends with careful economy in selection of words and ideas.

I couldn’t edit on the fly.

Most plane crashes happen within a mile of the airport. In spite of air traffic control, incredible instruments, and many hours of training, some problems evade notice until you are in flight. Most of us know the frustration of taking too long to land the plane, or getting blown way off course by a bad takeoff. I knew I was in trouble in this sermon as I hit my transition from sermon 1 to sermon 2. I tried to fix it extemporaneously and made it worse. The big concepts of God’s eternality and man’s brevity had taken whole sermons to explain, and as my abbreviations missed the mark, I added a couple of on-the-spot stories that were poorly told, and by the end of those, I couldn’t even see the runway anymore. When you know you’re off course it is almost impossible to keep preaching and pull it back. I can make small adjustments on the fly, but I can’t fix a major prep flaw mid-sermon while I preach. That doesn’t mean I didn’t try. Little adjustments maintained the hope of a safe landing for a time, but as I often tell our young preachers, “a mist in the pulpit is a fog in the pew” (not original). The preacher needs massive, iron-clad clarity to pound a single biblical nail home to the hearts of his hearers. Most preaching failures are preparation failures and mid-course corrections won’t fix the problem.

Audiences don’t lie.

Not everyone in the pulpit is gifted by God to preach. Preaching is far more than dispensing content; it is a real-time engagement with a congregation. I can’t see everyone I preach to, with a large room and being multi-site, but I can see enough to take a poll every few minutes as I preach. One of the surest signs of a non-preacher is a lack of audience awareness. What helps a gifted preacher improve through the years is his awareness of when the people are bored, when the people are confused, and when the people ‘have it’ and are ready to move on. Watching the faces of those you are communicating with should educate you about what is funny and what is definitely not. Getting audience feedback is the surest way of knowing when you are missing the mark. Preachers who always preach badly don’t seem to know it. Good, growing preachers don’t just give messages, they get a message back from their hearers and heed it in next week’s preparation. A conference like Harvest University is unusually enthusiastic. I had them for moments here and there in this message, but I didn’t have them the whole time and I knew it.

Feedback is almost never helpful or on point.

In a post-conference email to our Pastors, I mentioned my intention of writing this blog. I was past the point of pleading for mercy and simply wanted to clue them in to this upcoming post. I should have seen that several would write back imploring my reconsideration, insisting the message was appreciated, inciting an appeal of my ‘bad sermon’ verdict. This kind of feedback, though sincere, can be death to your development as a preacher.  Of course God ‘used it,’ it’s His Word, duh? ???? The fact that your sermon, as long as it isn’t preached from the Koran, ‘will not return void’ should not obscure your awareness of a bad message. We have all played the part of Balaam’s donkey, but that doesn’t mean we should wear the costume each week in anticipation of the Holy Spirit rescuing our bad sermon. Most people are not even thinking at the complex level of our communication craft. Don’t be influenced by positive feedback from encouraging people who remind you of places where the sermon had flashes of light, when you know that was just the explosion when you hit the bottom of the canyon. Real preachers know the truth, swallow the frustration and embarrassment, and determine not to make the same mistakes again. I praise God for every sermon encouragement through the years, but it just isn’t helpful very often in shaping your craft. Get with some critical thinkers when you know you preached a bad one. Pick apart your flow of thought and where you lost the majority of your hearers, in order to increase your clarity and impact next time you get the privilege to preach.

Growing preachers always know the truth.

Nobody wants to flip upside down in the ditch in front of their friends at the bicycle race, and preachers don’t want to knock over the pulpit in front of their peers and fall into the audience. Through the years I have tried to feel the pain of bad sermons deeply as a motivator not to make the same mistakes again. You have to get through it, but you know you’re crashing and burning. Feel it, remember it, detail what you won’t do again. It should never be an easy thing with a preacher of God’s Word to miss the mark and fail to be at your very best. As a young preacher I wallowed all week and, looking back, that helped me for a time. I don’t punish myself as much any more, but I never excuse a bad sermon and you shouldn’t either. What went wrong? Where did I fail in my thinking? How can I make sure that doesn’t happen again? Our job is too important to allow excuses or settle for less than our best, which God demands and our people deserve.

Most sermon failures are present before you get to church.

Finally, because most feedback comes directly from the hearers and compliments tend to highlight matters that made your delivery interesting, you can begin to lose sight of where a great sermon really happens. Almost every sermon rises or falls in your preparation. Careful thought, clear outlining, prayerful seeking for a compelling message that goes beyond Bible explanation, hours of imaginative thought about content that illustrates the biblical wisdom, deep reflection for insight and application of God’s Word—these are some ingredients of powerful preaching. When you close your Bible and rise from your study the matter is mostly settled right then. In time you learn to stay at it until you know you ‘have it.’ Less and less you will get up thinking you are ready when you are not.  More and more you will see God honor your hard work in His Word . . .

But, every so often you will preach a dud . . .  If you are devoted to your task through the years, most people will choke down the occasional piece of frozen pie and hardly notice your error, but don’t let that fact confuse what you know to be true. Take your lumps, embrace the humility, and get back to work in the strength of what you learned.

I am preaching in Genesis 28-31 this week and can’t wait. Where are you in God’s Word?