Sharpen your voice. Strengthen your message.

Ben Merold walked into a bar to preach a sermon.

Not exactly how most homiletics professors would recommend you begin your ministry career. But there he was, pulpit replaced by a video machine, cocktail waitresses clattering around in the background. And when he got to the part about the Holy Spirit, everything went quiet. That’s Ben Merold for you. The Word had a way of showing up when he preached it.

I’ve been sitting with a transcript of a sermon Merold preached at the Lincoln Christian College alumni reunion on March 14, 1985. His text was 2 Timothy 1:3-7, and his theme was simple and devastating all at once: God has not given you a spirit of timidity. Whatever that shrinking, fearful, draw-back spirit is that you’re carrying around — you didn’t get it from God.

So where did you get it?

Merold unpacked three things God does give. A spirit of power — not the horsepower kind, but the kind that changes a life, rewires a mind, repairs a relationship. A spirit of love — not the feeling-based, falls-in-and-out variety that fills up divorce court waiting rooms, but the committed, volitional, I’m-showing-up-regardless kind. And finally, a spirit of self-discipline — what Merold called, borrowing from one translation, a smiling mind. Quiet. Steady. Unintimidated by panic or passion.

What strikes me most about this sermon, forty years on, is how thoroughly Merold believed that the Christian life was supposed to be upbeat. He said it plainly: he looked around at Christianity and got a little disgusted at all the people who were down. Joy is fruit of the Spirit. God expects us to express it.

Ben Merold passed away in November 2022 at the age of 96. He grew two churches from under 200 to over 3,000. He held more than 500 revivals. He wanted to be remembered as a church builder and a friend of the small church.

But listening to him preach, what I remember most is that smiling mind.

God gave you that. 

Use it.

Walter Neuenschwander didn’t want to be a preacher.

He wanted to drive a tractor. He wanted to take care of cows. And honestly? When he tells that story, something in it rings true for a lot of people who end up in ministry. The call came early and clear, and he ran from it anyway.

I got to sit down with Walter recently on the Better Preaching Podcast, and what struck me most wasn’t the dramatic Jonah moment where everything turned around (though that’s a great story, and you should listen to the episode). What struck me was something quieter. Something almost boring, in the best possible way.

When I asked Walter what advice he’d give to someone standing where he stood three or four years ago — preaching occasionally, not yet doing it week in and week out — he didn’t say anything flashy. He didn’t talk about charisma or delivery or finding your voice. He said: trust a routine.

Don’t be in a hurry. Start early. Plan ahead. Let the sermon breathe before you have to preach it.

That’s it. That’s the advice.

I’ve been around preaching my whole adult life, and I keep finding that the preachers who last,  the ones who grow, the ones whose congregations are genuinely fed week after week, they all have some version of this. A rhythm. A cadence. A way of living with the text before they have to stand in front of people and open their mouths.

Walter grew up sitting under Ron Fisher who, for decades, taught at Great Lakes Christian College and ministered at Northview Church of Christ. He was a legendary communicator who preached with one hand on the Bible and one hand on the newspaper. Fisher’s influence shaped a generation of ministers across mid-Michigan. And now Walter is doing the same thing at South Lansing Christian Church. Not because he set out to become a preacher, but because he finally stopped running.

God has a habit of doing that. Calling the reluctant. Developing the willing. And apparently, giving them a decent sermon routine in the process.

On a recent episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, Tyler McKenzie made a confession I suspect most of us preachers could make: comparison nearly stole his love for preaching.

Tyler grew up an athlete, and at first the competitive instinct served him well. He studied great preachers the way a young ballplayer studies Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing — Francis Chan’s passion, Andy Stanley’s conversational ease, Tim Keller’s gift for engaging skeptics. Tyler defends that kind of emulation, and so do I. There is no craft on earth where we wouldn’t tell a rookie to study the greats.

But somewhere along the way, emulation curdled into competition. “I want to be the best preacher of my generation,” he caught himself thinking. “The best preacher in my city.” And the joy began to leak out. He couldn’t walk off stage and savor being used by God. Instead, he cataloged the seven things to fix before the next service. He couldn’t listen to another man’s sermon without keeping score. Pride when he won. Envy when he lost. The man who became a preacher because he loved sermons, the guy who found deep connection to God through sermon preparation, could no longer enjoy delivering one.

Then Tyler told me about the decision that began to break those chains, and it surprised me. He started carrying a manuscript.

For his first seven or eight years, Tyler was a no-notes preacher. Eventually he admitted he wasn’t doing it because it made his preaching better. He was doing it because he liked what people said about it: “He just goes up there with his Bible and throws it down.” The missing café table most preachers set their notes on became a trophy. So, he humbled himself, wrote a manuscript, and carried it on stage — a small, visible act of surrender declaring this is not about what people think of me. This is about preaching the Word of God. Period.

It also gave him back three hours a week. Humility, it turns out, is efficient.

Teddy Roosevelt usually gets credit for saying “comparison is the thief of joy.” Whoever said it first, every preacher eventually proves it true. Here’s the question I’ve been chewing on since we put the episode in the can: What’s my no-notes? What’s the thing I do in the pulpit not because it serves the Word, but because it serves my reputation?

Find it. Name it. Lay it down.

The joy you get back is worth far more than the applause.

On a recent episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, I asked Tyler McKenzie a question with a twist. I usually ask guests what advice they’d give young preachers. But Tyler is forty, so I flipped it: what would you say to encourage the preacher who’s been at it for decades — the fifty-five-year-old, the guy staring down sixty?

I confess I had a personal stake in the answer. I’m fifty-nine.

Tyler gave me two words: longevity and locality.

Longevity is about trust. Tyler observed that preachers earn trust two ways. Talent earns it fast. Charisma burns hot. But that kind of trust is shallow, and it can be snuffed out as quickly as it flared. The other way is time. Twenty, thirty, forty years of showing up. Keeping your character. Doing the funerals, the hospital hallways, the hard conversations nobody saw. That trust runs deep, and it multiplies transformation. Then Tyler said the sentence every veteran preacher needs taped to his study wall: “Some of your best sermons may be your last sermons.” Not because your exegesis finally matured — though it has — but because your people are finally, fully listening. You’ve earned their ear. The leadership currency you spent decades accumulating was never meant to sit in the vault. Spend it.

Locality is longevity’s twin sister. Stay somewhere long enough and the place gets into you. You stop telling people where you’re from and start belonging where you are. You learn the city’s history, its wounds, its ways. And that knowledge preaches. Tyler tells his team, “Don’t write music for Spotify. Don’t write sermons for Instagram reels. Write sermons for the congregation in front of you.”

That one stung a little. We’re pulled toward the national and the viral. I can tell you who’s headlining the World Cup and recap last night’s collapse of the San Antonio Spurs in excruciating detail. But can I tell you my neighbor’s name? Can I name the felt needs of the people in the third pew? We pour attention into matters we cannot influence and starve the ones we can.

So, to my fellow village elders — Tyler assures me that’s a compliment — don’t coast. The decades behind you aren’t a résumé. They’re a runway.

Finish strong. Your best sermon might be your next one.

In 2006, Dave Stone stepped to the podium at the North American Christian Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. He had just become the lead minister at Southeast Christian Church following Bob Russell’s retirement, a transition that would have rattled most preachers into playing it safe. Stone didn’t play it safe. He preached from Ephesians 4 and asked a room full of church leaders a deceptively simple question: What is the greatest benefit of serving together?

He walked through three answers — unity, maturity, and testimony — and built the case that all three are real, but the last one matters most.

What makes this sermon worth revisiting nearly twenty years later isn’t the exegesis, though the exegesis is solid. It’s the storytelling. Stone understood something every preacher needs to learn: the right story doesn’t just illustrate the point. It becomes the point.

He told about his Uncle Greg, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, who went to a camp for developmentally challenged adults. A church member named John Miller volunteered as Greg’s counselor for four days, feeding him, dressing him, even rigging up a flotation device so Greg could swim for the first time in his life. At the end of the week, they asked Greg the standard question: What was your favorite part of camp? Greg raised his arm, pointed at John, and said one word: You.

That story does more theological work than a dozen propositional statements about humble service. And Stone knew it.

He closed with another story, this one from his own childhood. In 1967, his family was hit head-on by a hydroplaning car while on a trip in Illinois. His mother suffered a skull fracture. His father had twenty-one pieces of glass surgically removed from his eyes. Blind and alone in a strange town, the first visitor who took his father’s hand was an elder from a local Church of Christ. When Stone’s father mentioned that his congregation worshipped with instrumental music (a real fault line in the Restoration Movement) the elder said five words that carried the whole sermon home: That doesn’t matter. We just want to help a brother in Christ.

Stone admitted he’d forgotten that elder’s name. Then he landed the plane: I’ve forgotten the name on the back of his jersey, but I’m pretty certain what the name was on the front.

That’s how you close a sermon. You don’t explain the metaphor. You trust it.

Stone trusted it, and the room felt it.

During March Madness this year, I heard a commentator say something that stuck: Winners want to be coached. I wrote it down because I knew it applied to more than basketball.

A few days later, I sat down with Don Wilson for the Better Preaching Podcast, and he proved it. Don pastored Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria, Arizona, for over three decades, preaching to 25,000 people a week by the time he stepped away. Six live services on a weekend. No executive pastor for most of that run. And the thing that defined his preaching more than any of that was this: every Saturday, he walked off the stage after the four o’clock service, and four or five people followed him into a room and beat his sermon up.

That joke didn’t work. That illustration was too long. Why did you say it that way?

Then it was up to Don to decide what to change before the next service. He did this for years. Not because he was insecure, but because he wanted to get better.

Here’s the part that convicted me. Don said that in his post-ministry years, he’s worked with roughly five hundred pastors. Most of them say they want critique. But when you actually give it to them — when you ask hard questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing — most of them don’t want it at all.

I think he’s right. And I think I know why. Preaching is personal. You pour yourself into a message all week, you stand up and deliver it, and then someone tells you the story ran long or the conclusion fell flat. That hurts. But then again, growth usually hurts.

Don also said something about giving his wife to critique his preaching. He told me: I don’t need a wife who worships me. I need a wife who loves me. He meant that he needs someone honest enough to say, That came across a little judgmental, or You lost them in the middle. Not because she enjoyed saying it, but because he’d created the space for her to say it and she loved him enough to walk into that space.

The green room is comfortable. The critique room is where you get better. Most of us know which one we prefer.

We also know which one we really need.