On Crafting a Good Sermon: Qualities & Pieces

As I approach my 60th year of life, I find myself more aware of things I’ve learned that I should try to pass on to future generations. One of those skillsets is how to craft a good sermon. I still have room for improvement, but I do have an approach to sermon-crafting and delivery that a fair number of preachers could learn something from.

A little context: I heard more than a thousand sermons by the time I finished grade school. In high school, we were required to take notes, so I probably outlined a couple hundred during those years (Sunday AM, PM, Wednesday PM and youth group; plus two school chapels a week; plus occasional week-long special meetings, youth rallies, and the like). Because God was already stirring my interest in doing pulpit work myself someday, I was usually not just outlining those sermons, but analyzing them.

Those years as a sermon-hearer had a profound impact on how I came to view the art of preaching later, during college and seminary, and then in my dozen years of preaching at least twice a week as a pastor.

My opinions on preaching are only opinions, but they aren’t baseless.

The overall qualities of good sermon

1. Biblically sound. You can deliver a stirring message without this, but it’s ultimately a fail if you aren’t truly bringing the Word to people.
2. Cohesive. A good sermon forms a whole. It has focus. You’ll need to organize it with that in mind.
3. Personal. We are commanded to preach rather than simply read Scripture. The message must be important to you personally and delivered in a way that shows it’s important to you personally.
4. Paced. Humans are physical beings and need all the help they can get to stay engaged, thinking and feeling with the truth you are delivering. Sermons need tension and release, rise and fall, flow.
5. Transparent. Believers are best edified when they not only see your assertions, but why you are making them, how they derive from the text.
6. Relevant. Sermons need to help listeners see how right beliefs, desires, and actions contrast with the wrong beliefs, desires, and actions we encounter in our surroundings, in ourselves, and from the Evil One (“the world, the flesh, and the Devil”).

The purpose of this incomplete list is to root the bits and pieces of good sermons in a deeper understanding. The particulars of the sermon need to be organic. They need to grow out of deeper understandings of what preaching is, why we do it, and maybe most of all, what listeners are like and what listening to a sermon is like.

The pieces of a good sermon

Not everybody can or should build sermons this way. I’ve heard good sermons that were clearly not put together in any way resembling this. I’ve also heard many sermons that would have been better if they had.

None of this approach to sermon-crafting is entirely my own invention. Along with my own experiences, lots of books and lectures and informal advice have fed into it. I’m not going to footnote sources here because I, frankly, don’t know where the various pieces of it all came from. This is a “messy synthesis.”

So, here’s a list of the pieces I put together in every full-length sermon I preach, and also in most shorter “sermonettes.”

1. Transitions
2. Points
3. Text hooks
4. Tensioners
5. Cross references
6. Illustrations
7. Applications

When I craft a sermon, I develop and position each of these features. For efficiency’s sake, I tend to structure the pieces following a similar pattern every time. It’s a good idea to intentionally mix that up sometimes, though.

In this installment, I’ll overview the first three of the seven. Hopefully, I’ll be able to delve into the rest and go deeper into the structure and prep process in the future.

Transitions

Part of pacing and coherence is having planned sentences that function as ramps to and from main sections of the message. This includes the introduction and conclusion. Intro and conclusion are transitions, but they also need a well crafted main transition sentence (from intro to your first main division/part) and a closer—the very last thing you’ll say before “let’s pray” or whatever is next.

I am still not very good at that final sentence. Often what feels right during the build feels completely off when I get there in delivery. This means something went wrong. Well, something always goes wrong—usually several things. That doesn’t ruin the message.

Transitions also include a thought-out sentence at the end of each major section, leading into the next—or at the beginning of the next section, linking back to the previous. Think on-ramp, interchanges, off-ramp.

Points

Most people receive information better if it comes at them in an organized way, so a good sermon has points—main ideas you want to convey, and the ideas that support or develop them (“sub-points”). I do not use traditionally enumerated outlines. They distract me. My sermon notes have no roman numerals, letters, etc. I do usually have ordinary Arabic numbers on my top level points. That helps me keep the shape of the message as a whole in my head throughout the delivery.

This raises an important topic: One key to effective delivery is being able to see the shape of your entire message in your mind’s eye easily, and pretty much constantly, through the whole delivery process. You should always know basically where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going. If that’s extremely difficult or impossible, your outline is probably too complicated, or lacks parallelism (more on that later, hopefully).

Text hooks

Because I always preach the text (or texts), this element is essential to my method. Looking back at the five features of a good sermon I listed earlier, this one serves ‘biblically sound,’ and ‘transparent.’ Text hooks don’t guarantee these two outcomes, but they sure improve your odds!

What is a text hook? Say I’m preaching on Psalm 19 and the main sections of my message are something like this:

1. The world has a glorious Creator (Psa 19:1-6)
2. The world has a glorious Lawgiver (Psa 19:7-11)
3. The world has a glorious Redeemer (Psa 19:12-14)

You can see text references already in these points. This is a good habit to get into in your sermon notes, but these are not yet text hooks.

A text hook is an intentional invitation to listeners to look at specific words and phrases in their Bibles.

To explain, I’ll need to list subpoints also. Let’s say under #1 I have these:

• The truth of God’s glory is there for all to see Psalm 19:1, 4
• The truth of God’s glory is there all the time Psalm 19:2
• Etc.

In this example, the first subpoint calls for two text hooks. I might say something like this:

The truth of God’s glory is there in creation for all to see. Look at verse 1. Where is God’s glory seen? …[“the heavens…sky”]… We see more in verse 4… [“all the earth… end of the world”]

When I reach “The truth of God’s glory is there all the time,” I might say…

There are some time words here in verse 2… [read them]

In my notes, exact words and phrases from the text are there with the point I’m making, to remind me to text-hook (and also to keep my brain on track—or get it back on track!). They are color coded, always in red.

A text hook can be worded a wide variety of ways.

• Now something unexpected happens in v.11…
• (Before stating the point) Verse 16 helps us understand another factor…
• Do you see any repetition in verse 9?
• You’ll see an important word in verse 7…
• You may have noticed a phrase in verse 22 that we don’t normally hear in conversation. We need to pause and understand what it means…
• (and many more!)

Some of you are thinking, “This is pretty obvious, Aaron.” Maybe so, but many preachers go to great lengths in the study to derive their assertions from the text, then rarely (or never) guide the congregation to see how their points relate to the text during delivery.

I recommend crafting the sermon in such a way that text hooks are integral to how it looks on paper and how you will deliver it.

Sermons built this way flow better, reduce opportunities for listeners to get lost in your delivery, and get listeners more physically involved in the work of listening. You are helping them physically see what you’re talking about and cognitively engage with what they’re seeing and hearing.

Trust me, it helps!