What Is Successful Preaching?

I know I can get a quick response if I preach to felt needs, but that doesn't mean I've preached successfully.
—Stuart Briscoe

Many years ago, during the Cold War, I traveled to Poland for several weeks of itinerant ministry. One winter day my sponsors drove me in the dead of night to the middle of nowhere. I walked into a dilapidated building crammed with one hundred young people. I realized it was a unique opportunity.

Through an interpreter I preached from John 15 on abiding in Christ. Ten minutes into my message, the lights went out. Pitch black.

My interpreter urged me to keep talking. Unable to see my notes or read my Bible, I continued. After I had preached in the dark for twenty minutes, the lights suddenly blinked on, and what I saw startled me: everyone was on their knees, and they remained there for the rest of my message.

The next day I commented on this to one man, and he said, “After you left, we stayed on our knees most of the night. Your teaching was new to us. We wanted to make sure we were abiding in Christ.”

Nights like that make you want to keep preaching!

It usually isn’t that easy to know whether preaching has been a “success.” Most of us preach each week to largely the same people, people accustomed to our speaking rhythms and themes, who perhaps take us for granted. Our people rarely tell us more than “I enjoyed the sermon, Pastor.”

But like any worker, we need to know if our aim is accurate, if our preaching is accomplishing its purpose.

We not only need it; most of us want this information. After shooting an arrow, we run to the target to see if we’ve hit the bull’s-eye. We cherish any objective measure of results: letters of appreciation, people coming forward after the sermon, extraordinary comments afterward.

A tricky business

Objective feedback, though needed, is unreliable. If I judged the success of my preaching by the standard of my night in Poland, I would be mostly disappointed. We rarely see our listeners so visibly moved.

Furthermore, most pastors who complete an annual denominational report sense the discrepancy between what numbers say about a church and what God is doing in people’s lives.

The question of whether our preaching has succeeded is clouded by many factors.

Who’s evaluating? Recently I preached a sermon on work. Conscious that a number of people in the congregation were out of work, I mentioned they should not feel useless. “While you get your unemployment benefits, you could work at church doing something significant.”

After the service a number of people thanked me for being sensitive to their situation and said they would like to be given something to do at church. But one woman objected to my “socialist attitudes.” She said she knew I was British, and Britain was socialist (Maggie Thatcher would have been surprised!). “You have no business dragging socialism into the American church!”

What scores 9.9 with one person, in one tradition, in one part of the country, in one church, may take a nose dive elsewhere.

Individual needs also skew a listener’s opinion. If a woman, devastated over her crumbling marriage, hears the sermon on “Why Be Committed to the Local Church,” she may consider the sermon self-serving propaganda. If the preacher happens to deliver the sermon “What to Do When Your Marriage Is Falling Apart,” she’ll regard it as the greatest thing since the Sermon on the Mount.

If we look at success from God’s point of view, some of the greatest sermons ever preached, by the prophets for example, have received a thumbs-down from the congregation. So who listens and how they listen make a huge difference.

What is good? After one sermon, a woman shook the pastor’s hand at the door and went on and on: “That sermon was one of the most wonderful I’ve ever heard!”

The pastor, being necessarily humble, said, “Oh, it really wasn’t me. It was all the Lord.”

“Oh no,” she replied, “it wasn’t that good.”

It’s hard to know what people mean when they tell us about our preaching. Getting a “Not bad” from a hypercritical person may mean “Wonderful!” From a tactful diplomat it may mean “Horrible!”

The seen and unseen. I preached at a chapel service at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and afterward a man with a European accent introduced himself to me. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again,” he said.

“When did we last meet?” I asked.

“Twenty-five years ago, I was a student in the Bible college where you taught the book of Romans. Ever since, I’ve wanted to tell you how much that meant to me. The book of Romans changed my life. In fact, I now teach Romans at a church in my native Slovakia.”

“Are you a pastor?” I asked.

“No.”

The man’s friend, standing beside him, interjected, “He is a leading nuclear physicist in Eastern Europe.”

I ministered in Indonesia recently, and a woman who runs an orphanage in Java said to me, “I should have written you long before, but I just want to tell you how much your preaching meant to me when I was a teenager in England.”

These two reports were happy exceptions, for I infrequently see the long-range impact of my sermons. We can’t see into the heart, where beliefs, values, priorities, and devotions change, so a pastor’s preaching may bring about significant spiritual breakthroughs that can’t be quantified in the year-end report.

Felt needs and real needs. I know I can get a quick response if I preach to felt needs, but that doesn’t mean I’ve preached successfully.

Needy people focus on symptoms, not diseases. A sermon on self-esteem may temporarily boost people’s self-confidence, but if we fail to give an antibiotic for the underlying problems—pride or lack of faith—it’s malpractice. Symptom-oriented sermons, like candy medicine, make people smile, but people go away as sick as ever.

I do address felt needs, but primarily as an entrée to people’s real needs, for that’s the seedbed of the most successful preaching.

Spiritual variables. God’s Word always achieves its intended purpose, but wielding it is not an exact science. In some ways we resemble farmers who intentionally burn parts of their fields; fire breaks out in unanticipated ways. Sometimes after a sermon bombed, someone will say I helped him or her tremendously. And sometimes we help people in spite of what we said or what they heard.

I once preached a sermon from the King James Version about the Lord being our “shield and buckler.” A woman wrote me saying she was greatly helped by my teaching on the Lord being her shield and butler. She was encouraged knowing that the Lord was standing at her shoulder ready to help!

We must never assume, then, that the sermon is ours to make or break. In the 1800s a famous organist traveled from town to town giving concerts. In each town he hired a boy to pump the organ during the concert. After one performance, he couldn't shake the boy, who followed him back to his hotel.

“Well, we had a great concert tonight, didn’t we?” said the boy.

“I had a great concert,” replied the maestro. “Go home!”

The next night, halfway through a fugue, the organ quit. The little boy stuck his head around the corner of the organ, grinned, and said, “We aren’t havin’ a very good concert tonight, are we?”

If God isn't pumping when we’re preaching, nothing happens.

Seven signs

How a sermon is received, then, is but one criterion of a successful sermon, and not a reliable one at that. Instead, I put more emphasis on how a sermon is prepared and preached. I look for seven signs in examining my sermons. If I’ve fulfilled most or all of these criteria in a sermon, I’ve gone a long way toward preaching a successful sermon.

Let me summarize them briefly, illustrating them with a sermon that did, in fact, receive a favorable congregational response: “What About Shaky Marriages?”

God-centered. My primary concern in preaching is to glorify God through his Son. That’s my concern even in practical sermons, like “What About Shaky Marriages?”

I bridged the practical and theological as I discussed the difference between the Greek words for love: “You can have all kinds of philia and eros and still not approach the love that makes marriage work best. The third word for love in Greek is agape. This word describes God’s love for us.” Later I said, “The Bible teaches that agape love is directly related to the work of the Holy Spirit.”

At the close of the message, I said, “The Spirit of God begins to shed his love in our hearts. There’s a fundamental spiritual dimension here that must never be shortchanged: the dedication to go on loving and being devoted to the One who is the source of all love.”

The sermon focused on a human problem—shaky marriages—but I still wanted to point to God as the source of marriage-healing love.

Biblically based. A successful sermon comes from God’s Word, not my or someone else’s experience, not another book or article. A biblical text cannot be a pretext: I can’t read the text, then ignore it for the rest of the message (the preaching equivalent of bait and switch).

With literature on marriage abounding, I could have easily based my marriage sermon on psychological principles. That would have helped people, I’m sure. But I wanted to go even deeper, so I based it on the characteristics of love described in 1 Corinthians 13. I took each quality of love—love is kind, love is patient, love rejoices in the right, and so on—and simply explained and applied it.

This doesn’t mean that all my sermons are verse-by-verse expositions. Still, I try to ground every point in a clear inference from the text.

People directed. I delivered a series of expository sermons on 1 Peter some time ago. After a year of that, one staff member commented, “You’re getting bogged down. People are losing interest.”

I had sensed the congregation’s interest flagging, but I had idealistically been thinking, This is God’s Word. It’s eternal truth. As long as I explain it and help people apply it, fruit will result.

When my colleague brought it to my attention, I realized I couldn't ignore the problem. If people are tired, bored, or distracted, my sermon will be hampered even if other factors are in my favor.

Over the years I’ve become increasingly aware that people were not made for the sermon but the sermon for people. Successful sermons help people with both eternal life and daily life, with both felt needs and real needs. They don’t deal just with ideas, principles, and Scriptures, but with people, emotions, problems, families, money, work.

Furthermore, I’ve found that from the beginning I must communicate clearly that the sermon is for them. If I give twenty minutes of exposition and then try to tack on an application, I will have lost most of my listeners. So right in the introduction, I usually tell people how the sermon will relate to their concerns.

In “What About Shaky Marriages?” I began like this:

Clint Eastwood made a movie called Heartbreak Ridge. I’m not a Clint Eastwood fan, but there is a side story in that movie where Eastwood—the 24-year-veteran marine gunnery sergeant, Congressional Medal of Honor winner—has lost his wife: she’s left him and doesn’t want anything to do with him. This big macho man is quite pathetic. He doesn’t know what to do, so he starts buying women’s magazines. You have a remarkable picture of Clint Eastwood reading women’s magazines to find out what on earth his wife really wants. The tragedy is that it’s perfectly obvious to everybody else but not to Clint. Marriages are shaky. People involved in shaky marriages don’t understand some very basic facts about marriage.

Intellectually competent. A successful sermon appeals to the mind by being logical and credible. It coherently interprets Scripture, and it develops in a way that makes sense to listeners.

To be intellectually competent, a sermon often must nuance thought and make subtle distinctions.

In my marriage sermon, in speaking on the phrase “Love is not jealous,” I said:

Now this poses a problem. We know that God is love, and we know that God is jealous. How can Paul say that love is not jealous?

There are different kinds of jealousy. There’s a holy jealousy committed to protecting that which is dear. I protect Jill. If people get after her, they don’t just deal with her; they deal with me. If they get on her case, that’s my case. If they criticize her for what she’s doing, or for what she doesn’t do, then I will handle that for her. (I’m getting ticked just thinking about it!) That is holy jealousy.

There is a jealousy that goes beyond protecting and becomes possessive. That possessiveness becomes a power that dominates the other person with little interest in the other’s well-being. In some marriages you'll find one partner or the other so committed to what they expect of the other person, they won't even listen to the other person's desires. Their jealousy has become destructive possessiveness. Love is not jealous.

Emotionally moving. Successful sermons address not only the mind but the heart.

In explaining the phrase “Love is not rude,” I said:

Rudeness despises people. Rudeness denigrates people. If it goes on long enough, rudeness destroys people.

You remember Archie Bunker. What angered me so much was Bunker's attitude toward his wife. He constantly called her “silly cow!” That woman, as portrayed in the program, was totally beaten. I don’t think he physically abused her, but she lived with constant verbal rudeness and denigration, which for all intents and purposes destroyed her. She had come to the conclusion that she was a silly cow. Bunker was clearly limited in his love for his wife. Love couldn’t possibly be rude.

Archie Bunker’s treatment of his wife would offend most listeners; it would strike at an emotional level, as it did me, and that's one reason I used him as an illustration.

Volitionally challenging. A successful sermon also appeals to the will. It doesn’t just spew information or inspire emotions; it calls people to live in a new way. How I put it was:

We are not to assume that agape love is simply the result of the Holy Spirit working on passive people: I stand around, and the Holy Spirit loves you through me. It doesn’t work like that. You will notice that the Bible also speaks of agape as a responsibility. This wonderful passage in 1 Corinthians 13 concludes with the words, “Follow the way of love.”

Unfortunately, whoever divided the Bible into chapters shoved that phrase into the next chapter, but after Paul talks about love, we are told to follow the way of love. The words translated “follow the way of” mean “to hunt or to pursue relentlessly”—to target a goal and fulfill it. Agape love is the result of the Holy Spirit operating within our lives, but it is also the result of making a commitment to target somebody with agape love and loving them relentlessly.

Practically comprehensible. A successful sermon is as clear and useful as the morning paper. My favorite Scripture about preaching is Nehemiah 8:8: “They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read” (niv). I’m best at “making it clear and giving the meaning” when I show how a biblical principle looks in daily life. Here’s how I did that in one passage of my marriage sermon:

When things go wrong in an intimate relationship, as they inevitably do, we carefully recall and rehearse what went wrong. If we continue to rehearse in our own minds what went wrong, we will find ourselves resenting what went wrong. Resentment builds until we are concerned about revenge. Sometimes we have to recognize that resenting and revenge seeking have absolutely nothing to do with what the Spirit of God wants to work in our lives: a willingness to forgive as Christ has forgiven us. Love does not keep records.

Growing continuously

The above criteria are not the end of it. Successful preaching cannot be reduced to a formula. It’s a dynamic process, and an essential part of the process is the preacher’s growth.

It’s easy to stop growing, of course. You’ve been churning out one or more sermons a week for years. It takes increasingly more work to make slight improvement. People respond well to your messages. The time may come when you say to yourself, I’ve got this thing nailed down, or This is as good as I’m going to get.

Some preachers resemble many NFL first-round draft choices, those naturally talented athletes who never reach their full potential. Success has always come easily, so they never had to exercise great discipline; they coast on their gifts.

Granted, in some facets of preaching, our growth will be limited or nil. I have never been comfortable preaching in large evangelistic settings where an “altar call” is expected, and I don’t give invitations at Elmbrook Church. That’s partly my personality; I am basically a shy, undemonstrative person who has never answered an altar call himself. I’ve been in situations where my hosts wanted me to give an invitation, and I tried, but I felt awkward.

But I work at growing in other areas. Warren Wiersbe observed in one interview that over the years my preaching has changed. It no longer is straight exposition, he said, but has become earthed where people live. Over the years I have worked hard at illustrating better.

I find continued growth comes best if I remember three things.

First, I want to build on my natural gifts. When Tom Landry, former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, saw running back Tony Dorsett play football for the first time, he turned to an assistant and said, “You don’t coach that. You draft it.” His point, of course, wasn’t to quit coaching a talented runner, but that the best results come from working with talent.

Some preachers are gifted at evangelistic preaching, others at teaching. Others are relational in the pulpit, counseling people en masse. Others are natural exhorters, who can effectively challenge listeners to greater obedience. Some prefer expository preaching, others topical. Whatever your strength, major in it.

Enhancing strengths, however, still leaves room for experimentation with new things, for stretching ourselves. We don’t know what we can do until we’ve tried.

In the sixties the last thing I wanted was to work with youth. “That’s not my strength,” I told people. “I can’t do it.” Eventually a friend more or less shamed me into helping him with a coffeehouse ministry to the teenagers of Britain.

My friend, a physician, had surveyed hundreds of school kids and found that they were interested in Jesus but totally disinterested in church. He said to me, “You have a gift for reaching kids with the gospel, but you aren’t even close to most of them because you preach in church settings. So if we are going to fish for people, you and I need to go where the fish are. They’re in the coffeehouses.”

He was right. I knew it, so we went. Eventually I developed my own ministry called Coffeebar Evangelism, and people wrote me from around the world, asking how they could do it. Speaking to youth became the focus of my ministry.

I also try to learn from other preachers. Copying others is a mistake, but comparing and contrasting can benefit us in several ways.

First, other preachers show us possibilities.

In my upbringing, most of the things that went on outside the church were considered “worldly.” I was interested in these off-limits subjects—sports, drama, and literature—but they played no role in my preaching. Then I heard Paul Rees, an evangelical leader of the last generation. He was not only interested and knowledgeable about such things; he talked about them in sermons. In him I heard a preacher who was not only interested in the culture but who found illustrations of biblical truth there.

Second, other preachers model preaching values. In my formative years as a preacher, I admired Alan Redpath and Stephen Olford for their fire. Their messages gripped them and me. John Stott’s preaching has always challenged me to be clear, to lay out the Word in orderly fashion. The sermons of G. Campbell Morgan, Charles Spurgeon, and John Wesley strike me with their high regard for Scripture and their passion to get the Word out to people.

Third, I weigh feedback heavily. While I don’t evaluate my own preaching in a structured way, I do pay close attention to what others tell me.

My wife, Jill, reminds me of my need to keep working at application, the weakest area of my preaching. That’s because I wrongly assume others are like me. I learn through principles; give me the principle, and I’ll figure out how to apply it. Jill reminds me that most listeners need specifics: “First you do this, second you do this, third you do that.”

Though the comments of others can sometimes be unnerving, I find safety in this process. When preachers veer onto a tangent or fall into a rut, it’s usually because they have secluded themselves from a trusted circle’s healthy feedback.

When I was a teenager, a man asked me, “How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” I replied.

“It’s time you were preaching.”

“I can’t preach.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

“Well then, you can’t possibly know you can’t do it.”

That’s how I got started in the pulpit. And since then, I’ve worked hard to preach effectively. But I’ve also learned to trust as well.

Farmers plow their lands, plant their seed, and then go home to bed, awaiting God’s germinating laws to work. Surgeons only cut; God heals. I must give my full energy to doing my part in the pulpit, but the ultimate success of my preaching rests in God.