Sharpen your voice. Strengthen your message.

On a recent Better Preaching Podcast episode, I asked Mark Christian for his parting word to preachers. He didn’t hesitate: “Let the text win. Let it win in you. Stand underneath it before you ever stand behind the pulpit.”

I haven’t been able to shake that line.

Let’s be honest; most of us don’t approach the text to lose. But we do approach the text to mine it. We come armed with an outline, a sermon slot, a series title already on the church app, and we start interrogating the passage to get it to confess what we need it to say by Sunday. The text becomes a witness we’ve subpoenaed. We’re the attorney. We ask the questions. We decide which answers make the cut.

That’s not preaching. That’s prosecuting.

Letting the text win is a different posture entirely. It means showing up on Tuesday without a predetermined verdict. It means reading slowly enough so the text has time to read you back. It means allowing the passage to ruin your first three ideas before it gives you the right one. It means getting uncomfortable in your own conscience before you ever figure out how to make your congregation uncomfortable in theirs.

You can’t fake this. Your people can tell the difference between a preacher who has wrestled with the text and a preacher who has merely researched it. The wrestled preacher limps a little. There’s a weight in his voice that commentary software cannot manufacture. He isn’t delivering information. He’s delivering testimony.

Here’s the ordering Mark got exactly right: underneath, then behind. If you haven’t stood underneath the text all week, you have no business standing behind the pulpit on Sunday. The pulpit doesn’t confer authority on your words. The text does. And the text only confers that authority on preachers who have been willing, privately, to be defeated by it.

This week, let it win. Let it corner you. Let it convict you before it comforts your people. Let it strip you of the clever turn of phrase you already had written in the margin. Let it hand you a harder word than you were hoping for.

Then, and only then, stand up and preach.

On a recent episode of the Better Preaching Podcast, my guest Mark Christian said something that’s been rattling in my head ever since: “It takes a whole lot more talent to be at a church of 125 than it does to be at a church of over 3,000.”

Mark pastors one of the largest churches in Missouri, but before that he was the pastor of a small church in central Michigan. So, he isn’t romanticizing small-church ministry from the cheap seats. He’s earned the right to say it. Then he went further. He pictured a line forming at heaven’s gates, and the VIP treatment going not to preachers with podcasts and platforms, but to the faithful pastor who served nineteen years in a farm community nobody noticed.

That image stopped me cold. It looks a lot like my dad.

When I was a junior at Great Lakes Christian College, Dad became a freshman. He sold the family farm in his forties and spent the rest of his life as a bivocational preacher in small churches across North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. He called me once, discouraged, thinking about quitting. I asked how many attended the church when he arrived. Twenty. And now? Sixty. He had tripled the church in five years, doing the counseling, the marrying, the burying. And he thought he was failing.

He wasn’t. He just didn’t have a platform to tell him otherwise.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: a platform is a terrible feedback mechanism. It rewards what photographs well. It has nothing to say about the hospital visit at 2 a.m., the marriage you prayed back from the brink, the funeral where you were the only clergy anyone in that family had ever known, or the teenager who kept showing up because you learned his name. A platform doesn’t measure faithfulness; it only measures reach.

If you’re preaching this Sunday to forty people in a town of four hundred, hear this: the percentage of your community you’re reaching would embarrass most metropolitan megachurches. You are not waiting to be called into ministry. You are already in it.

Summon the heroes. They look like you.

Early in ministry, I mistook volume for fruit. If the room was full, the sermon must have worked. If the stage was bigger, the calling must be clearer. It took me years to see I had the equation backwards.

Mark Christian drew a helpful distinction in a recent conversation on the Better Preaching Podcast: there is performative preaching, and there is pastoral preaching. Performative preaching walks onto a stage, earns the right to say a big thing, and says it well. It has its place. Camp messages, conferences, funerals for people you barely knew. Someone has to stand up and speak. We need preachers who can do that. But most of us aren’t called to live there.

Pastoral preaching is the slow work of opening the same Scriptures to the same people over a long stretch of years. It is not lesser work. It is harder in a different way. You can’t hide behind cleverness when the people in the pew watched you make coffee at their mother’s funeral. You can’t fake authority with a congregation that knows your kids’ names and has seen you on your worst Monday. You have to actually pastor, and the pulpit becomes less a performance stage and more a kitchen table where the family gathers to hear from the Book.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the preacher who stays gets something the traveling evangelist never will. You see the sermon land and then watch it grow. You preach on forgiveness in May and sit across from a reconciled father and daughter in October. You preach on generosity in November and watch the benevolence fund fill up by January. You preach a hard word on pride, and three families thank you for it six months later. That feedback loop shapes your preaching in ways no homiletics textbook can.

If you’re in year two or year twelve, and you’re tempted to think the real preaching is happening somewhere else, don’t believe it. Stay. Preach the text. Love the people. Let the Holy Spirit do the slow work.

There are preachers, and then there are preachers. Wayne B. Smith was the second kind.

Wayne helped start Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1956 and served as her senior minister until 1995 — growing the congregation from 152 to 3,700 weekly worshipers. He was, by nearly all accounts, the most popular preacher in the Restoration Movement. They called him “the Bob Hope of the Ministry.” He laughed easily, cried easily, and delivered Kentucky Fried Chicken to poor families at ten o’clock at night. I don’t know another man who wrapped the gospel in a bucket of chicken and made it feel perfectly natural.

But beneath the humor was a man dead serious about one thing: the pulpit.

In 1977, Wayne Smith served as president of the North American Christian Convention. When it was his turn to stand before his fellow ministers and say something worth saying, he chose as his text 2 Timothy 4:1-8, and his message was simply this — Preach the Word.

He structured the sermon around three great themes: the Summons, the Subject, and the Source.

The summons were urgent. He asked the crowd what had happened to the kind of preaching they heard on the Day of Pentecost — the kind that moved across a pagan empire like wildfire. He told the story of men visiting Billy Sunday and asking the secret of his preaching power. Sunday took them to the hotel window, looked down at the people on the sidewalk, and said three times — They are going to Hell. Wayne’s conclusion was simple: “Woe unto me if I preach not the Gospel.“

The subject was Christ — always Christ. He put it plainly: some men say we need a new message, but if that’s true, then we need a new Bible. The message is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The bedrock foundation, the heart and soul of the apostles’ message, was the Son of God — the crucified, buried, resurrected, ascending, reigning, returning Redeemer.

And the source was the Word. Wayne used the image of a healing spring around which a whole town had been built — until the day someone asked where the spring was, and no one could remember. His warning to preachers was clear: under our superstructures and our success, some of us have lost the spring.

Wayne remained faithful to the end, encouraging a gathering of ministers the very day before he died in 2016.

He preached what he believed. He believed what he preached. And he told the rest of us to do the same.

Woe unto us if we don’t.

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been preaching for a while now, and I still walk away from some Sundays thinking, Well, that could have gone better.

There’s no shame in that. In fact, I’d worry about the guy who walks off the platform every week thinking he knocked it clean out of the park. Overconfidence in the pulpit is a little like overconfidence behind the wheel of a tractor — sooner or later, you’re going to end up in a ditch.

I sat down recently with Patrick Lightfoot, lead pastor at Traverse Christian Church in Windsor, Colorado, and something he said stuck with me. He talks about “stage time” — the practice of actually getting up on the platform mid-week and preaching the sermon out loud before Sunday arrives. Not reading it over in your recliner. Not muttering through it in the shower. Actually standing where you stand and speak the words into an empty room.

He calls it “putting in the reps.”

I love that. Because preaching is a craft, and crafts require practice. You don’t sit in the bleachers and become a ball player. You don’t read books about farming and develop a feel for the land. You have to get your hands dirty.

Patrick also talked about watching yourself preach — playing back the recordings and sitting through the awkward “ums” and the rushed transitions and the conclusions that sort of just… trail off. He admits it’s uncomfortable. Of course it is. Nobody enjoys watching themselves on video. I watched one of my sermons once and became briefly convinced that I needed a new career. But that discomfort is where growth hides.

What strikes me most about Patrick’s approach is the discipline underneath the Spirit-dependence. He doesn’t treat those two things as opposites. He plans sermon series a year in advance and still makes room for the Holy Spirit to redirect. He rehearses thoroughly and still steps to the pulpit trusting God, not his notes.

That’s the balance, isn’t it? Preparation isn’t a lack of faith. It’s faithfulness.

Francis Chan puts it in the form of three questions: Am I worried about what God thinks? Do I genuinely love these people? Am I depending on the Holy Spirit?

Patrick has those written on a notecard and tucked in his Bible. They’re a better pre-sermon checklist than anything I could come up with, so I plan to put them in my Bible.

The congregation sitting in front of you every Sunday deserves a preacher who has done the work — and who has also gotten out of the way enough to let God do His.

Put in the reps. Then trust the One who makes them count.

BONUS CONTENT: Here are Francis Chan’s seven questions Patrick Lightfoot mentioned in his recent podcast appearance. Print them off and tuck them in your Bible and see if they don’t shape your preaching.

1. Am I worried about what people think of my message or what God thinks?—Teach with Fear.

2. Do I genuinely love these people? — Teach with Love 

3. Am I accurately presenting this passage? — Teach with Accuracy

4. Am I depending on the Holy Spirit’s power or my own cleverness? — Teach with Power

5. Have I applied this message to my own life? — Teach with Integrity 

6. Will this message draw attention to me or to God? — Teach with Humility 

7. Do the people really need this message? — Teach with Urgency

Becoming Missionaries in a Multigenerational World

This is the fifth and final principle in my series on preaching contextualized sermons to different generational cohorts. I want to conclude by reminding preachers of their role as cultural missionaries. To preach effectively to all generations, pastors must commit to ongoing cultural exegesis, studying and understanding different generations deeply.

Cultural Exegesis Defined

Just as biblical exegesis involves diligent interpretation of Scripture, cultural exegesis involves careful study of the cultural landscape—its values, language, and worldview. This requires humility, intentionality, and a willingness to learn from generational cohorts rather than merely instruct them.

Why Cultural Exegesis is Essential

With most pastors being a generation or two older than many of their congregants, bridging the cultural gap is not optional but necessary. Many younger and emerging generations can feel like generational immigrants to their churches, and pastors function as missionaries bridging these cultural gaps.

Approaches to Cultural Exegesis

• Listen attentively: Pay attention to stories and experiences, identifying with the feelings and emotions that accompany them. This builds empathy and understanding.
• Engage with current cultural trends and technologies: You don’t have to like the tectonic cultural shifts around you, but you do need to understand them.
• Participate in younger generations’ spaces: Both online and offline. An older preacher once said, “If you want to reach sinners, you gotta sit in the smoking section, because that’s where the sinners are.” Understanding the spaces they inhabit is key.
• Reflect on cultural influences on faith and behavior: Not all cultural shifts are negative. Today’s younger generations are often engaged in Matthew 25 concerns like food insufficiency, caring for the impoverished, and helping those who lack basic healthcare.

The Impact of Cultural Insight

Pastors who invest in cultural exegesis can craft sermons that resonate deeply while honoring scriptural integrity. This balance fosters trust and spiritual growth, ultimately enabling the church to fulfill its mission of making disciples across generations.