Preaching aims to take the “mysteries of the kingdom” and make them understandable. God wrote the New Testament in Koine Greek to show us the importance of using everyday language to communicate His truth. John Wesley would share his sermons with the servant girls before preaching them to his people. D. L. Moody counsels preachers to “find the dumbest person in the audience” and preach to them.  

There’s an old story about a country preacher who found a box in his wife’s closet containing three eggs and 13 dollars. He asked his wife the reason for the box and its contents. 

She responded: “Every time you preach a bad sermon, I put an egg in the box.” Thinking that three bad sermons were not too bad of an average, the preacher asked, “Why the 13 dollars?” She said, “Well, every time there are 12 eggs in the box, I sell the dozen for a dollar.” 

No preacher plans to “lay an egg,” as they say. But the truth of the matter is that many of our sermons fail. They do not accomplish what sermons should or what we wish them to achieve.  

Lloyd M. Perry’s Biblical Preaching for Today’s World contains a section that caught my attention as a young preacher. It’s titled “Why Do Some Speeches Fail?” In it, he sets forth a list of reasons that I have adopted for a lecture I gave regularly to my seminary students entitled, “Ten Reasons Why Sermons Fail” (Lloyd M. Perry, Biblical Preaching for Today’s World (Moody Press, 1973, pp. 174-176). Though not exhaustive, here are four reasons among the top ten that our sermons may fail as we preach to our churches throughout our ministry.

1. The preacher fails to distinguish between an essay and a sermon

A general malady has crept into our pulpits where preaching pastors preach from a manuscript instead of preaching extemporaneously. The major error is that they write for the eye, not the ear. The distinctions are immense. When we write, we write for the eye and take in the mind’s ability to focus on long arguments and sentences. The reader can also review or recap as he reads. When we preach, we preach for the ear and the eye, but we focus the eye on the person, not the manuscript. The best preaching is when we focus our eyes on our audience, not on our manuscripts—when conversing with our hearers personally and directly. This is called “extemporaneous preaching” and is the most effective way of communicating. 

Learn to preach in this manner, and your sermons will rarely fail.

2. The preacher elaborates the obvious

Sermons that contain information the people already know or that is apparent in a casual reading of the text will result in boredom and loss of interest. It leaves the audience with no desire to return. 

Some preachers try to solve the problem by elaborating with more words and cross-references. Wordiness without meaningful content is, as the saying goes, “A lot of noise, a lot of thunder, but no rain.”  

There are a few ways we can make our sermons more interesting. Look for ways to get to the meat of the text and the sermon, to go beyond the obvious but not beyond the text. This calls for the hard work of interpretation and research of the passage. 

The more we know about the passage, the more excited we will be about it and the more interesting we will make it for the audience. We can also vary the mode of reasoning in the sermon and the use of structure. 

A certain “sameness” will develop in our sermon structure and delivery if we are not careful. Remember that “variety is the spice of life.”

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