The outline is an overview of your strategy for communicating the biblical idea relevantly to the hearts of your listeners.

Preaching is not simply study a passage, write a message and deliver it. We need to be meticulous in our study, but selective in our sermon.

Fear is a feature of life in this fallen world. Fear Jesus, for he is more powerful and significant than any evil.

I want to make more of my time as far as reading is concerned. A lot of that motivation has come from taking a couple of hours to organise my shelves.

A lot of ministry happens on fairly short notice. The weekly rhythm keeps ticking like a metronome, and it tends to get interrupted by emergencies.

Performance is unsustainable. At the same time, effective communication is worth some conscious and prayerful attention.

He knows we are sinful when He calls us. He has a far greater work for us to do and knows that He will need to do great work in us.

May we preach so that our listeners walk away pondering the character, the heart, the goodness, the grace of God.

We need to include humility in our hermeneutics as a foundational attitude. The Bible is not subject to us, we are subject to it.

We have shifted from authorities being respected, to not being respected, to being distrusted and even opposed.

The weekly emotional roller-coaster of preaching often has more low points than adrenaline highs.

Perhaps our frustrating experiences are confirmation that our ministry is actually going according to plan.

Much of ministry can feel like the agony of labour. But let’s remember the good times too. There is nothing as rewarding as seeing lives changed.

When trouble comes, the preacher gets to point people to God’s Word to find the comfort and to stir the response of faith that is needed.

Dig in the text you have, honour the author by doing so, and give your listeners the best you can from this passage.

Let’s resolve, prayerfully and passionately, to always seek to really preach the passage we claim to be preaching.

No matter how well you can communicate or how clever you are, you cannot make the Bible say something better than God made it say.

There are lots of things to be aware of between the beginning of the service and the sermon itself.

There may be some elements of a good movie that might teach us a thing or two about good preaching.

Sermon preparation may be a struggle, even a battle at times, but every moment is a privilege.

It is not possible to avoid every negative motive all the time, but we must beware lest any of these start to fester within and then characterise our ministry.

Does our preaching feel stilted? Do we sound slightly wooden, hesitant?

Here are some concerning features of that strange authority that may be helpful to ponder.

When we preach, we should aim to use appropriate force for each goal we are trying to achieve.

The Bible has to be in charge of the message, its main idea, its flow of thought, its relevance, its goals.