Every coin has two distinct sides: heads and tails. If a coin didn’t have these two sides, it wouldn’t be a legitimate coin at all; it would be an unusable hunk of metal.

Similarly, your preaching is comprised of two distinct elements: your personal preparation and your delivery. The two bind together to produce teaching that the Holy Spirit can work through to create life change in your people. Without proper preparation, the message you present to your listeners will fall flat.

Yet without a strong delivery, even the most well-prepared message won’t connect. But when thorough preparation and well-executed delivery work in concert with one another, the result is an effective, memorable, potentially life-changing message.

Early in my ministry, I realized that even though I was spending hours upon hours studying the content for my messages, I wasn’t giving any thought to how I would deliver those messages.

What was the result?

Well, all too often it seemed as if I knew what I was talking about but no one else did. Even though I thoroughly understood my material and passionately wanted to translate it to my listeners, I hadn’t prepared myself to deliver it in a way that would best connect. I failed to get myself ready to effectively present what I had spent so much time studying.

If you had pinned me down and asked me why I wasn’t putting any effort into planning my delivery, I would have given you a very holy answer: I was depending on the Holy Spirit to give me what I needed to deliver the message when I stepped into the pulpit. But it didn’t take long for me to get off of my holy high horse and realize that I was using the Holy Spirit as an excuse.

Of course the Holy Spirit wanted to surround and inhabit my preaching – as he does yours – but that didn’t mean that I could shirk the responsibility to prepare my delivery. I couldn’t expect the Spirit to work miracles every week based on my lack of preparation. I finally realized that I could give the Holy Spirit room to work even more effectively through my messages if I would hold up my end of the deal and prepare for them fully.

Effective communication requires both prayerful, studious preparation AND careful planning for delivering the content in a way that connects. Again, these are two sides of the same coin. Your sermon preparation happens in your quiet place and in meetings with your team. It is focused on your seeking God and studying what he has for you to say.

On the other side of things, your message delivery (and the preparation for your delivery) is more outwardly focused. Delivery involves your voice, hand motions, eye contact and body language; it involves getting your hand out of your pocket and off of your face.

Delivery involves removing the distractingly bright orange pen from your shirt pocket; it involves choosing language that your people understand. Refining your delivery boils down to doing all you can to ensure that you are presenting God’s word as clearly as possible, unhindered by muddled concepts, forgotten points, mispronounced words, strange ticks and the like.

I have given a lot of thought to Paul’s ministry. I often re-read the passage from Colossians in which Paul asked the Colossian believers to pray that his preaching would be clear and effective. Wrap your mind around the power of that. The Apostle Paul himself – the same man who wrote two-thirds or more of the New Testament – is asking other people to pray for him as he prepares to proclaim the truth of God:

Pray that I will proclaim this message as clearly as I could. (Col. 4:4 NLT)

Paul’s request for prayer tells us a couple of things. One, he understood the power of prayer (both his own prayers and the prayers of others) as he prepared to preach. Two, Paul obviously gave intentional thought to how he communicated and – if the results of his ministry are any indication – did whatever needed to be done to make his message as effective as it could possibly be.

Shouldn’t you and I be willing to do the same?

Your partner in ministry,
Nelson

P.S. If you found this article helpful, please forward it to others.

I’d like to help you this week with one side of this coin — preaching preparation. You can dramatically cut down on your planning time during this busy season with my new Spring Sermon Sale. Features 32 of our best sermon series, up to 74% off, including 7 brand new titles!

Each resource includes message MP3s, sermon notes, transcripts, graphics, series documents and over 60 hours of sermon preparation by our teaching team.

Click here to choose your series and save BIG today!

© Nelson Searcy. All Rights Reserved.

About Nelson Searcy

Nelson Searcy is an experienced church growth strategist, pastor, church planter and coach, consulting with churches around the world. As founder of Church Leader Insights and the Renegade Pastors Network, he has personally trained more than 3,500 church leaders in over 45 denominations through live events, seminars and monthly coaching. Nelson is also the Founding and Lead Pastor of The Journey Church, with locations across New York City and in Boca Raton, FL. Nelson and his church routinely appear on lists such as “The 50 Most Influential Churches” and “The 25 Most Innovative Leaders.” He is the author of over 100 church growth resources and 18+ books, including The Renegade Pastor: Abandoning Average in Your Life, Ministry and The Difference Maker: Using Your Everyday Life for Eternal Impact, and At the Cross with the People Who Were There. He and his wife, Kelley, have one son, Alexander.