Making Your Sermon Interesting and Memorable

By David L. Allen

“Some people preach for an hour and it seems like twenty minutes, and some preach for twenty minutes and it seems like an hour. I wonder what is the difference? I think I’ve spent my life trying to answer that question.” So said the Dean of Evangelical homileticians, Haddon Robinson.

It goes without saying that all sermons need to be biblically based, hermeneutically sound, exegetically accurate, theologically straight, and Christ-centered. But once this foundation is adequately laid, preachers must work hard to make sermons interesting.

1985 was a watershed year if for no other reason than for the first time more videos were checked out of public libraries than books. But that is ancient history. Today, the digital and media world has exploded. We preach amidst an alphabet of voices our people are listening to: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, ESPN, etc.

“We deal in lead, friend,” is my favorite line spoken by Steve McQueen to the villain Calvera (Eli Wallach) in the great Western movie “The Magnificent Seven.” If you want your sermons to be interesting, you better learn how to deal in words. If A. M. Fairbairn’s dictum: “he can be no theologian who is not first a philologian” is true, then he can be no preacher who is not first a philologian—a lover of words. Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. It can also mean the difference between life and death. With words, Hitler inflamed a nation to hatred and Churchill stirred a nation to victory.

Gardiner Taylor, considered the Dean of African American preaching, once said: “There are words that caress, words that lash and cut, words that lift, and words that have a glow in them. The great poets know this. T. S. Eliot somewhere speaks of his work as ‘a raid on the inarticulate.’ Preaching is a raid on the inarticulate and the inexpressible.”

We preachers can ill afford to preach in black and white when everybody else listens in color. Interesting and memorable preaching learns how to turn the ear into an eye. Stop dribbling on dully and trade in your regularly alliterated outlines and your shop-worn verbal coinage for crispness and creativity of thought and expression. Never forget—you will not accidentally be interesting in your preaching!