The sermon is written. But before I hit “print,” I reread it out loud several times, making adjustments as necessary, tweaking, and editing with the primary thought, “Would I be able to stay awake through this, or would I be bored?” To avoid a boring sermon, I check to make sure that it is Christo-centric (aka textual), that I have found and am ready to pound the main the point, that I have tapped into the emotions of the characters or author of the text and also into my feelings and those of the listeners using heart-gripping language and heart-warming story. What’s left? Preach it! By that I mean proclaim it, tell it, deliver it.

Delivery needs to reflect your passion. “But I’m a quiet guy.” “I’m an introvert.” “I’m thoughtful and never boisterous.” Fine. Be who you are, but don’t your tone, inflection, and pace change when you are at the lectern reading John 4:25-26, the nervous tremor in the Samaritan woman’s voice and the pause before reading Jesus’ statement, “I, the one speaking to you, I am he”? How about the anguish in Matthew 26:39 and Matthew 27:46? The pause and tenderness in “Mary” of John 20:16 is another example. If that’s how you read publicly (and I hope you do), your preaching delivery needs to match that. Of course, reading or preaching that falls into the ditch of overly dramatic is unnecessary and for many listeners irritating. You don’t need to do falsetto impressions of female voices, nor do you need to blow out an eardrum or explode a hearing device with the shout, “Crucify him!” Also, the warning from your homiletics professor still stands, “Please, no Kanzelton!” You are not a stage actor. You are a preacher. But you are a passionate preacher whom the Lord Jesus has crushed with the Jeremiah 23:29 hammer and pulled back to life with Jeremiah 31:3 healing.

Delivery needs to reflect your passion. Let your face show it. I have seen a preacher deliver sweet promises of comfort during a funeral sermon while scowling. That made no sense. I have seen a preacher grinning instead of grimacing when shooting the accuser’s arrows. That made no sense. I have seen preachers deadpan through an entire sermon. I think you have to be trying to pull that off, either that or you were untouched by the text. I have heard preachers sing-song their way through their sermon, each sentence beginning with a slight crescendo and trailing to a nearly inaudible decrescendo. That lulls me into mind-drift. I have heard preachers make it through their sermon with just enough of a pause to catch a breath between sentences but with not one bit of change of pace. Stop once in a while to let the point you made sink in. Then wait a beat longer… before moving on. Increase your speed a touch in an exciting story, then slow down to say what God did. You are not an orator, but you are a passionate preacher.

Delivery needs to reflect your passion. That includes body language and gestures. Very early in my pastoral ministry, a veteran pastor was a visitor in worship. After worship, he made his way to the sacristy, thanked me for my sermon, then said, “You gesture too much.” That knocked the wind out of my sails but also made me reflect. There were no videos or archived YouTube evidences of my preaching for me to check. Could it be true? All I could do was take his kind, helpful comment to heart and think about my gestures as I memorized my next sermon. To this day, once in a while, I find myself at the beginning or somewhere mid-sermon preaching with arms and hands relaxed, unmoving at my side. Watch yourself on video. Are your hand gestures distracting to the audience? Do you use the same hand-pointing-down to the manuscript every time you are making a big point? Do you wave both hands in a circle every time you are asking a question? How about body language? I have witnessed a gifted preacher deliver a well-prepared and well-thought-out sermon, who caused me to be distracted from what he was saying by shifting his weight from foot to foot, side to side, back and forth, back and forth for most of his message.

Delivery needs to reflect your passion, so DON’T read it. Reading and looking up once in a while is not preaching. It is reading. I once asked a dear friend to serve as guest preacher. A fine sermon. But after worship I asked, “How many times do you think you looked down in those twenty-one minutes?” He paused, pondered, and replied, “About twelve.” I said, “It was seventy-two.” Then we talked a bit about memorizing because face to face is preaching. We need to see the faces of the hearers and catch their reactions. If our preaching is hunt-and-peck, looking for the kernel of the next sentence or paragraph, we break eye contact and give people a reason to think, “This must not be that important.” If you can’t memorize a twenty-minute sermon, then preach for eighteen minutes. If you can’t do eighteen, make it sixteen… my Abrahamitic plea will continue… if not sixteen, then fourteen. If shorter sermons will help you memorize, then write shorter sermons, until you get the hang of memorizing well week by week and find that it’s not as hard as you have thought. Then add.

“I don’t preach my manuscript. What I’ve written is a springboard for my thoughts. I rehearse those general thoughts a few times and preach from my heart.” Maybe you do, but what about all the effort to write the way you talk with special attention to the language you use (see a previous article)? Personally, I’m sticking with the comment from a colleague, “If it’s worth writing, it’s worth saying.”

“But I’ve never been good at memorizing.” My response to that has been and still is, “Practice.” You can get better at memorizing. Here are some tips:

• Even if my sermons are inductive, there are still major sections or “parts.” I organize the paragraphs in each sections with A, B, C, etc. and count the paragraphs. More often than not the sequence of 1-2-2 or 2-1-2 reminds me of a zone defense in basketball, which helps me remember the sermon’s structure. Then I circle one word in each paragraph and memorize those words/phrases. A mnemonic device based on the first letter of each circled word helps.
• Then I go to the beginning and read each paragraph several times until I can do it from memory. After about one third of the sermon is in my head, I take a break, do something else, then go back at it, surprising myself with how much of the first third is there, and do the same with the next third. I prefer to have my sermon memorized by Friday afternoon. That keeps Saturday free for weekly household chores and weddings.
• Practice your memorization skills and exercise your brain-muscle by memorizing other things like Bible passages, psalms, hymns, the catechism.

In all of this, preach the good news from your heart so that all will say, “You are a passionate preacher!”