If you keep “glorifying God through faithful and clear communication of your text” as the goal of your preaching, then trimming down your sermon can become just another act of faithfulness and worship.

For me, the hardest part of preparing a teaching or sermon is figuring out what information to leave out. Cutting down a sermon is incredibly difficult. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that it is very hard to find actual guidance on how to trim down a sermon. There are dozens of great resources for how to write better sermons, how to outline, how to write sermon application. But I have found very little concrete guidance for how to discern what parts of a sermon to keep, and what to edit out.
The Problem of Over-stuffed Sermons
There is an unfortunate tendency to equate a good, Biblical sermon with how many details a preacher or teacher gives. This tendency leads to what I will call “over-stuffed” sermons. These are sermons that are Biblical, sound, but try to communicate too much information in the allotted time slot. Sermons that are over-stuffed end up becoming less clear to the congregation. Listeners spend so much time trying to keep track of the many details you are giving rather than meditating on the main point of the text.
Now, I want to make an important distinction before going on. As a Bible-teacher or preacher, you must go into a great level of detail in your analysis when preparing a sermon. In your Bible study leading up to a preaching or teaching, you must dig into any and all details contained in your text. You must cross-reference, outline, look up the original languages, make observation after observation, and more if you want to get to the meaning of the text you are teaching. However, the art of preaching is in discerning which details to actually present to your congregation in a Sunday morning sermon. In other words, when you go from your study to the pulpit, you must trim down your sermon to only the most important textual details. If you simply go up and preach your detailed Bible study notes, chances are you are preaching and over-stuffed sermon.
The Solution: Trim Down Your Sermon to the Essential Details
In my experience, sermon length is generally driven by how many details you end up communicating in your sermon. How many points and sub-points do you have? How many words do you define from the pulpit? What cross-references do you include? Historical anecdotes? Illustrations? Applications? Therefore, to trim down a sermon, you must discern which of these details are essential to communicate, and which are secondary. The essential details should end up in your final sermon. Secondary details, on the other hand, you can trim out of your sermon to fit your allotted time and to ensure your congregation does not get lost in an over-stuffed teaching.
This seems obvious so far. But the question is how do you trim down a sermon? How can you discern which details are essential and which are secondary? Most of the time when I have asked for guidance on trimming down a sermon, I have gotten some form of “there is an art to it” or “I’m not that great at it myself, so I’m a bad example.” While it is certainly difficult to make universal rules, there is a helpful process you can go through to at least help you discern what details are essential and which are not. The process is simple: go through each section, point, detail, or cross reference in the first draft of your manuscript, and ask the following four questions (in order):
1. Does this detail give information that is mostly repeated elsewhere in the sermon?
I call this the “redundancy” test. Repetition is important in communication, but if you go to 10 cross-references in a sermon which all make the same point, maybe you can cut 8-9 of those cross-references and save yourself (and your listeners) some time. If a sermon point, observation, or application is too similar to information previously given in your sermon, you should probably cut it. Redundant details are by definition secondary and non-essential.
Read More
Related Posts:

One can begin with the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” Some might wonder how memorization of such a short passage could be beneficial. Any passage memorized comes from a context and each text stored in the memory can be the key to remembering the content of its chapter. Why did Jesus weep? Because he was suffering emotionally for the loss of his friend Lazarus and mourning for his family. It is the verse that is soon followed by the eschatological miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. 

Bible memorization should be promoted within Presbyterian and Reformed Christianity in conjunction with the existing emphasis on catechesis. Catechisms are emphasized so that children and novices in the faith can learn the system of doctrine taught in the Bible. It is clearly advisable to catechize for grounding in the faith, but could it be that the Reformed shy from Bible memorization because it is often affiliated with the biblicism of some churches and other ministries within Evangelicalism? Given that the driving sola of the Reformation was Scriptura, it is appropriate to reconsider the association of catechesis with Bible memorization. Some direction is provided from the household of the Lion of Princeton, the Warfields of Grasmere, Kentucky.
Commenting in his brief biographical memorial for his brother Benjamin B. Warfield, Ethelbert D. Warfield said,
He was so certain that he was to follow a scientific career that he strenuously objected to studying Greek. But youthful objections had little effect in a household where the shorter catechism was ordinarily completed in the sixth year, followed at once by the proofs from the Scriptures, and then by the larger catechism, with an appropriate amount of Scripture memorized in regular course each Sabbath afternoon (Works, 1:vi)
The teaching tools used by William and Mary Warfield with their children were the Shorter and Larger Catechisms, along with the sometimes-tenuously related Scripture proofs found in the Shorter. Since Ethelbert specifically says he and his brother memorized Scripture, then it would appear catechesis involved the boys sitting in the parlor with a parent using the question-and-answer format to teach the boys. The question is, what does Ethelbert mean by “completed” with reference to the catechisms? If the Warfield children had memorized the catechisms, it would seem Ethelbert would have said so. Of course, as they were directed through the questions and answers with repetition, they became sufficiently familiar with them to remember their content. Memorizing the Bible was part of every catechetical session as both catechisms and proofs of the shorter were worked through. If this practice was used by two covenant sons that matured to become premier educators, scholars, and exemplars of the faith, then Bible memorization should be emphasized with catechesis to ground believers in the faith. Unfortunately, it would be interesting to have the list of verses memorized by the Warfield boys, but one could not be located (see Notes).
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the longest book of the Bible, with its topic being the Word of God. It just so happens that in the English Standard Version the psalm begins eight pages short of dead center of the whole Bible (not a study Bible). It is also organized by means of an acrostic that follows the Hebrew alphabet. The first section begins with aleph, the second section beth, and so on. Throughout the lengthy psalm are found mentions of meditation, the heart, and loving the Law of God. At the beginning of beth are these verses.
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word. With my whole heart have I sought thee: O let me not wander from thy commandments. Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. (KJV)
For one to walk uprightly and follow God’s revealed perfect written will, Scripture must be a part of life not only through personal, family, and church worship, but also stored within by memorization. Repetition is the mother of memory and sometimes by default verses are memorized through repeated use, such as the Aaronic blessing found in Numbers 6:24-26 that is often used for concluding worship services in churches that still have benedictions.
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lifts up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
This wonderful passage stored in the memory by repetition or study prepares worshippers for the week as they hear of grace and peace.
Moving to Matthew 4:1-11 in the New Testament, the Scriptures were central to Jesus’ victory over temptation in the wilderness. For each of the three temptations presented by Satan, Jesus responded using passages from Deuteronomy each of which is prefaced by “It is written.”
Read More
Related Posts:

One of his most recent and most destructive assaults on us all is via the trans activists. Transgenderism is a diabolical war on reality, biology, truth and people, and it is mainly a full frontal attack on our kids.

The more I think about it, the more diabolical things appear to be. We do not just have bad philosophies and bad ideologies and bad social policies and bad political agendas. We have satanic philosophies and satanic ideologies and satanic social policies and satanic political agendas. The god of this world is fully behind them all.
The truth is, Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy, as Jesus made clear in John 1:10. Name your poison: abortion on demand, the war on marriage and family, the scourge of drugs, the porn plague, the radical woke agenda items, and so on. They all cause tremendous harm and often death.
The devil does his evil work in so many ways, and children are especially in his sights. One of his most recent and most destructive assaults on us all is via the trans activists. Transgenderism is a diabolical war on reality, biology, truth and people, and it is mainly a full frontal attack on our kids.
But like just about anything that the enemy uses to cause carnage and havoc, plenty of clueless and carnal Christians will happily go right along with it. Thus we have pro-abortion “Christians,” pro-homosexuality “Christians,” and pro-trans “Christians”.
In my book, any Christian who supports and promotes the trans militancy in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘love’ is simply playing into the enemy’s hands. They have no clue what biblical love means, and they have no clue what Scripture actually teaches.
Simply put, if you love someone, you do NOT want them to go through invasive and irreversible surgeries and procedures that will leave them damaged for life. There is nothing loving about that. And even playing the pronouns game is unloving. Telling lies and denying reality is not how we help anyone.
Truth telling is what these confused and hurting people need—not falsehoods. Back in 2019 I penned a piece on why we should not buy the trans pronoun nonsense. Among other things, I quoted professor Robert Gagnon:
I am stunned that any leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, much less the President, would be contending that faithful Christians should practice so-called “pronoun hospitality” in addressing “transgender” persons by their delusional pretend sex. The idea that Jesus or Paul would have referred to a man as a woman or a woman as a man in anything other than satire and derision for abhorrent behavior is absurd revisionism in the extreme.
It is not an act of “hospitality” or “respect” to the offender but rather (1) a scandal to the weak and young in the church and a rightful violation of conscience for many that will lead many to stumble to their ruin; (2) an accommodation to sin that God finds utterly abhorrent; and (3) a complicity in the offender’s self-dishonoring, self-degrading, and self-demeaning behavior that does him no favor because it can get him (or her) excluded from the kingdom of God. Am I being obtuse here?
What’s next? Treating as a married couple an incestuous union involving a man and his mother, allegedly as a show of hospitality and honoring of their own perspective? Is that what they think Paul would have done at Corinth? Treating the man and his stepmother as “husband” and “wife” so as to extend “hospitality” and “respect”? What kind of revisionist lunacy is this?
I can’t believe that there is no serious push-back on this in the Southern Baptist Convention….I don’t really see what the point is of the SBC having an inerrancy doctrine if it leads to leaders encouraging their congregations to call men women and women men, which in God’s eyes would be blaspheming his work as Creator. I would expect this kind of nonsense from the PCUSA, not the SBC. I am in utter disbelief. Is this something that Al Mohler would approve of? And if not, has he said anything against it? And if not, why not?
Read More
Related Posts: