Application, Introductions, and Conclusions

Jesus says in Matthew 7:24 and 26, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock…Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.” Now how is this going to connect to what we are talking about today? Because the bulk of what we are talking about today involves application. Jesus wants us to apply His Words, to apply Scripture to our lives and to the lives of our listeners. Now for some preachers, application is the easy part of the sermon process. The thought is that if you give your people something to do, you’ve done your job. For others, application is often the hardest part of the sermon because you can have this great theological passage and you’ve done all your homework, you’ve studied all the materials, but then for whatever reason, you just can’t seem to find a way to wrap it up with a nice little bow and send the people home with something to work on. To be honest, application was probably the area of sermon writing that I struggled with the most over the years and I’m still not a pro at it, but compare the application of a 2025 Brady sermon with the application of a 2019 Brady sermon, and you will hopefully see some improvement. Today we are writing the sermon. Not in full, every sermon writer is going to be different. The way that I write a sermon may not be the way that you will write a sermon but the preparation that goes into writing it will hopefully be similar. There are 4 areas of the sermon that we are going to talk about today: the introduction of the sermon, the body of the sermon, the conclusion of the sermon, and then the conclusion of the sermon. What we will talk about today is what needs to be present in these 4 areas in order to turn a bad sermon into a good sermon and a good sermon into a great sermon. Then at the end we will see how all of that relates to application. Throughout the entire process of writing and delivering the sermon, our focus should be on the the glory of God and the transformation of our listeners. Everything from the construction to the delivery of the sermon should focus on glorifying God and transforming the listener. Stephen Olford writes, “Preaching does not accomplish its objective if it fails to change character and conduct! Preaching must have as its goal not only the impartation of truth, but also the transformation of life.” Like Paul, we are to preach Christ crucified and raised from the dead because it is only through Jesus Christ that life transformation can actually happen. We aren’t aiming for moral improvement, we are aiming for changed lives. So, with all that being said, let’s start by talking about sermon introductions.

Sermon Introductions

Let me mention 2 things about sermon introductions before we get into the meat of it. First, when I said earlier that application was the thing that I struggled with the most early on, I think that has now been replaced with writing sermon introductions. Sometimes I feel like I don’t get to the point quickly with them, sometimes I think they are too long or even too distracting, and sometimes I just feel like I spend way too much of the preparation time on trying to make a decent introduction. The second thing I will say that is a little different than what other pastors might say is that after you outline your passage, write the introduction first. Some will say that you want to write the body and then go back and write the introduction. You can certainly do that and I think there is a benefit in doing that. The reason I write my introductions first is because I think that it helps me to mentally prepare for what is going to come later on. It sort of acts as a reminder of what I need to cover in the rest of the sermon because it is in the introduction where you will tell the audience what the main point of the sermon is. If they remember the introduction, they will hopefully remember the point of what the next 30-50 minutes will be. So how do we write an introduction? What needs to be present in the introduction? I think one of the most important reminders that we can have is that the purpose of the introduction is to introduce the sermon and not preach it. Your introduction is the blueprint of the building that will follow. It shows your people what is to come and what they have to look forward to without throwing it all at them at once. So keep your introductions short. Daniel Akin writes, “Keep your introduction brief. Far too many sermons falter at this point. An introduction should never be longer than the body of your message.” In a 50 minute sermon, have maybe 3-5 minute introduction. If you have 30 minutes, maybe 2-3 minutes. There is also the negative side of keeping it brief where if it is too brief, people will wonder what that little blurb before the Scripture was. It can almost be distracting from the rest of the sermon because it feels so disjointed. Over time, the more you preach, the better you will be at fine tuning the length of the introduction to the length of the sermon. When we go into our introductions, we need to go into them with a set purpose. What do we want our introductions to accomplish? Adrian Rogers, used a 4 word formula when putting together his introductions: Hey! You! Look! Do! He said that the intro needs to get the attention of the listeners by catching the essence of the sermon in a big idea. He said that the introduction needs to show the listeners that there is something in this that is directed to them. He said that the introduction needs to give some information about what is going to come in the sermon. Maybe if you are preaching on the beatitudes, you briefly define what is meant by a beatitude as you go into a deeper discussion of it in the body of the sermon. Then finally, tell them what they are expected to do as a result of hearing the sermon. In some ways, you sprinkle in a little application even as early as the introduction. This gets the gears rolling in the minds of the listener of, “I know that there is something in this that is directed towards me that I will need to address or choose to ignore.” When we prepare our introductions, we prepare them to first gain the interest of the audience. When I go into the pulpit, I have almost the entertainers mind set. I need them to be able to see that I recognize that it is my privilege to be before them and not the other way around. I need them to see that I want to earn their interest and give them a reason to be invested. If you lose their attention or fail to get it in the first couple minutes, you are fighting an uphill battle for the next 45. The next purpose of the introduction is to introduce the text that you are going to be preaching on. This could be something as simple as inviting the reader to open up to the particular passage that you will be preaching on. Maybe in a few sentences say what the passage is about but don’t forget, they are going to have the entire sermon to learn what the passage is about so don’t overload on the content as you introduce the text. Your introduction is going to be the summary of not just the Biblical text, it is also going to be the summary of the entire sermon. So ask the question of, “What do I want my people to know from the get go?” So, what are some qualities that make for good introductions? Jim Shaddix and Jerry Vines give 6 and one of them we have sort of already talked about. The first is brevity. Vines puts it like this: the introduction is a porch, not the house. Its the place where you greet your listeners but you don’t stay on the porch the whole time. The second quality is to use a variety of introductions. If all of your introductions sound the same, people lose interest. Maybe have one week start with a good illustration or use an event that is happening in the world to bring people in. Connected with this is using appropriate introductions. If the text is a more somber text, use a more somber introduction. If you are preaching the crucifixion of Christ or a lament, have the introduction match the mood of the text. They also recommend that you establish relevancy with the hearers in the introduction. If you can connect with the hearts of the listeners in the first few minutes, you’ll have them for the sermon. Then finally our introductions should create tension and conviction. Tension in the sense that our sermons should introduce an issue that leaves the audience wondering how it can be resolved. Conviction because they need to know that we are interested in them, we care about them, and this is something that they need to know. The introduction is where we show our people that this is a matter really of life and death. The introduction can make or break the message so make it a good one. Charles Spurgeon said, “You must attract the fish to your hook, and if they do not come you should blame the fisherman and not the fish. Compel them to stand still awhile and hear what God, the Lord, would speak to their souls.” Once you tell them what you are going to tell them, it’s time to tell them.

Writing a Sermon

How do we write a sermon? Just quickly by a show of hands, how many of you have written a sermon before? It’s not easy right? I would say that while I write sermons a lot better and quicker than I used to, depending on my teaching load, I would say that at least 3 days a week, I’m working on sermons. It’s actually hard to explain how long I take preparing my sermons because the work really isn’t done until it’s preached. To give you an idea of what my process looks like, let’s say it is Monday morning and I’m preaching Sunday. Monday will be filled with studying the text, diving into commentaries and other resources, and this will be hours of doing this. If I like a quote that someone has, I’ll throw it into logos on my sermon builder and sometimes I’ll use it, other times I won’t. Monday is nowhere near finished with the sermon and very rarely will anything be written on Monday but the introduction and I’ll plot out the main point. Tuesday is usually sermon writing day. My goal by the end of the day is to have as much of it done as possible so that on Wednesday, I can make sermon slides and teaching notes but that still doesn’t mean it’s done. On Thursday I go back through and I look for where I can simplify certain things, I actually look on Thursday on how to make it shorter, at least shorter on paper. On Saturday night, I take my iPad and I go through it again and I’ll add things, subtract things, even as early as Sunday morning, I’m editing and by the time I go up to preach, I may even have things in my mind that I’ll add in on the fly or take out if I have to. So the sermon writing process really isn’t finished, at least for me, until lunch time Sunday morning. Now none of this happens without an outline. If we want to write strong, coherent sermons, we need to outline what the sermon will say. Jim Shaddix writes, “Without a clear, logical outline the sermon loses much of its power. With it, persuasiveness increases by providing intelligent guidance for reasonable action and appealing to the logical thought processes of the mind.” The outline is what is going to keep you from preaching multiple different sermons at the same time. When I was in college, my professor had us write out outlines and referred to it as the hook, look, and took. You would hook them in with the introduction, you would look in with them to the text, and then you ask what did that take away from the sermon in the conclusion. How do you develop the outline? By first identifying what the main point of your sermon is going to be. Tony Merida writes, “After developing the main point of the sermon, the expositor should develop an outline that reflects the meaning of the text, supports the MPS (Main point of the sermon), and is suitable for the given audience.” Now remember what I said about a month ago when it comes to finding the main point in the sermon. We sometimes think that our sermons need to have multiple points to be a good sermon but remember, I said that really all our sermons should have one predominant point. On that one main point, you can have a series of sub points but those sub points exist to connect to the main point. Sub points should not be mini sermons. Sub points support the main point of the sermon. When you discover the main point of the text and the main point of the sermon, you could almost do a mini outline where everything is connected by the word therefore. Because the main point is A, therefore B and therefore C. To put it into action, let’s take a chapter like Romans 3. What is the main point of Romans 3? That there is none righteous. Neither Jews nor Greek, none are righteous. How would we put that into an A therefore B statement? All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and there are none that are righteous, therefore everyone lies in need of a Savior, therefore man must be saved by faith, therefore if it is by faith, it cannot be achieved by works. There’s the outline. Obviously you add into it and you will build out a manuscript from it but you start with the main point that all of mankind is unrighteous and in need of a Savior. What points do you use to reinforce that? Well you show the fallen condition of man, you can use Romans 3:9-18 to drive this home, you establish the need and you allow people to recognize that this describes everyone, not just the exceptionally wicked, and then you make the Christ-centered connection that only Christ can save you but all of that is connected to one point. Once you have it outlined, you can start to write in the rest of the sermon. When you are writing your sermon, ask the questions of, “What does the text say? What needs to be explained in the text? What does the audience need to take away from this text? How do I connect this to the next point?” Bryan Chapell says that when writing out outlines, we can use what he calls the FORM method: He says, “Every outline should be Faithful to the Text, Obvious from the text, Related to a fallen condition focus, and Moving toward a climax.” Once you’ve outlined, I would recommend writing a sermon manuscript. This is where you write out the entire sermon. This means that you are also writing out your transition statements. Write out how you are going to move from sub point A to sub point B because when you don’t write out your transitions, things risk sounding real clunky. Don’t lose the listener when moving from one point to another. So I write out my entire sermon. This doesn’t mean that I read it word for word when I preach it but I’m comfortable with it. I’m not a great public speaker so I want to have all the tools that I can to be comfortable while preaching. Could I preach without notes? Sure! I used to teach Sunday school at my old church with just a note card but I didn’t feel comfortable doing that in a sermon. Now just because you write a sermon manuscript doesn’t mean that you have to preach the manuscript. Like I said, I don’t preach my manuscript word for word but I still use it. You can transfer that manuscript into preaching notes but I think that there is a benefit to taking an entire manuscript up to preach. Another element of writing a manuscript is being mindful of how it will sound to the audience. The written word will sound different when the sermon is preached. H.B. Charles writes, “Write for the ear. Speak in plain terms. Avoid unnecessary technical jargon. Use helpful word pictures. Help them to see what you are saying.” The preacher is not preaching to be read, he is preaching to be heard. What may sound good on paper may not sound as good when it is said out loud. Now one of the risks of manuscripts is that you will risk reading more than preaching. It can be easy to just look down and read notes and call it preaching and some people can do that very well. One of the great leaders of the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards preached from a manuscript and it was said that he would read from his notes and that was pretty much the extent of the flair but you and I aren’t Jonathan Edwards. I’ll usually read through my entire manuscript out loud just to make sure that what I’m saying sounds natural. It can be easy for me to put my academic hat on and write a sermon like I would write a paper but my paper doesn’t sound great out loud. Preach to be heard. If you write something out and you are getting tongue tied, find a way to simplify it. I would also say to have your own voice in the pulpit. When I was first starting, I was listening to a lot of Matt Chandler and David Platt so a lot of my early sermons sound a lot like Matt Chandler and David Platt. When I got older, I was listening to a lot of Steve Lawson and Tim Keller, and when I listen back on some of those sermons, I can actually tell which of those 2 guys I had listened to the most that week because you could hear it in my delivery. God didn’t give someone else to preach the sermon you are writing so write it in your voice. This is sort of just a quick addition, when you preach, preach like you want to be up there. Remember Lloyd-Jones said that our preaching is logic on fire. It is both light and heat. If you are on fire in the pulpit, people will come and watch you burn. Deliver the message like you mean it. Deliver the message knowing that lives depend on it. Preach with passion but don’t preach solely for an emotional response. Do you really love that you get the opportunity to open up the Word of the Lord to people? Like this is exciting. I don’t feel closer to heaven than when I get to preach. One last thing on the body? How long should the manuscript be? Well one thing that I love about Logos is that it tells me roughly how long it will take me to preach if I preach word for word from my manuscript. If you are a newer preacher, anticipate preaching faster than you normally talk. If you think you have enough content for 25 minutes, anticipate preaching for 15-20. I’m at the point now where if I see 45 minutes on my Logos software, I anticipate that it will be closer to 55 minutes because I will add things in, take things out, and believe it or not, I actually talk slower now than I did years ago. With that, quick warning, if you go up to preach and you feel like you are getting done real early, don’t try to just kill time. If the plane is ready to land, land the plane. No need to keep doing circles just because you arrived at your destination quicker than you had planned. Rabbit trails and extra time can be a dangerous thing in anyones hands. Also, there are times where you want to end the sermon early. You may find yourself while you are preaching finding that the congregation is really vibing well with the second point and you still have a third to go. Could it be that the Holy Spirit wants you to stay right there and focus on that? Nothing wrong with not going through the whole manuscript if you get the sense that maybe it was too heavy for the congregation or if the Lord is really using what you have.

Sermon Conclusions

Let’s move on to writing conclusions. This won’t be quite as long as the last two points that we have covered. Write your conclusion after you have written the introduction and body. No point in writing about what you have already told people if you haven’t written down what you are going to tell people. The conclusion acts as the bow on top of the present. When you are writing conclusions, remember that you aren’t going back to preach the whole sermon. You can tell the people what you just told them but the conclusion really serves as the time of response. The conclusion provides the congregation an opportunity to respond to what has been taught and to think on how to act on it. Tony Merida writes, “The preaching of the Word demands a response. We should always be calling people to repentance and faith. It is not manipulation if you are persuading them to act on God’s Word. Persuade with integrity based upon the authority of God’s truth.” In your conclusions, you are presenting to the people that they all have a decision to make. You are forcing them to make a decision. All preaching should be what Dr. Shaddix would refer to as decisional preaching. The listener will either decide to apply what has been taught in the sermon or the listener will decide to reject it. In a sense, you are turning the sermon over into the hands of the congregation and saying, “Here is what you know, here is how we must respond, what are you going to do?” As you write your conclusion, remember that these are the last words that your audience is going to hear. What is it that you want them to hang on to in those last couple minutes? This is the final moment to drive home what the main point of the text and sermon is. So does your conclusion match everything that came before it? The conclusion is not the place to introduce new material. Dr. Akin says, “A conclusion is basically the climax of the sermon. It is the final act of a redemptive drama or discourse. Everything in the message has been moving toward this moment of truth, this time of divine decision-making.” In our conclusions we should try as much as we can to go back to the issue that we bring up in the introduction. Last week when I preached on 1 Peter 1:22-2:3, my introduction was on how parents want to see their kids grow up big and strong and in my conclusion I referred back to that, and I even used that exact same phrase of “Grow up big and strong” to connect it all together. When you get to your conclusion, you want to make sure that there aren’t any lose ends. Have you preached a full message or is there something floating out there that you didn’t address? If there is a loose end, go back to the body and revise it. In your conclusions, leave the people wanting more but make sure that with the entire sermon that you have covered the appetite. Finally one of the most important things you can do with a conclusion is actually conclude the sermon. How many times have you heard a preacher say, “Last point, in conclusion, one more thing” and like the Energizer bunny just keep going? Don’t even bother announcing that it is the conclusion. People will know that you’re there if you have done it well. As you conclude you are calling for decisions and you are calling for action so knowing the great responsibility that we have, make the most of those last few precious moments. John Broadus said, “The last sentence, of whatever it may consist, ought to be appropriate and impressive, but its style ought not to be elaborate or ambitious. It is a very solemn moment. Do not be thinking of your reputation, good brother, but of your responsibility, and of your hearer’s salvation.” So now that we have gotten to our conclusion, let’s talk application.

Christ-Centered Applications

A lot of preachers starting out think that when it comes to application, it can only come at the conclusion or towards the end of the sermon. They think that you need doctrine first and application second but good sermons are going to have application throughout the entire sermon. As you preach, tell the people what they need to know but also tell them why they need to know it. Great exposition is not devoid of great application. In order for application to be great, the exposition has to be great. Scott Pace writes, “The nature of our role as preachers is to communicate biblical truth clearly and effectively. The measure of our faithfulness will not only depend on our exegetical skill, but it will also be measured by the manner in which we explain and apply the text.” Don’t separate exposition from application. Think of it in this way, when Jesus fed the 5,000, He addressed spiritual and physical needs. He taught the people and then He fed the people. Expository preaching is like that. It addresses the great spiritual needs but then it also addresses what the people were experiencing. I guess before we go to much further, we need to talk about what is meant by application? Application is the action that we want people to take in response of the Biblical text. Application is the making of a Biblical truth so pressing to our listeners that they understand how it should affect the way that they live and the way that the approach God and the Scriptures. In some ways, application is the bringing alive of the spiritual principles that we see in the text and the acting out of those principles. Now some passages of Scripture will be fairly simple to apply. I think of something like the Sermon on the Mount and it is all doctrine and all application. I think of 1 Peter 3:15 “but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence;” and the application of that is going to be heavy on apologetics and presenting the truths of the Gospel with gentleness and reverence. Every passage you preach will have an application. Remember what Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16 “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” In your application you can ask if behaviors or people need to be corrected or if reproof needs to happen. How do we get to application? I think the fallen condition focus is going to be a tremendous help for if we struggle to find how to apply a certain text. The fallen condition within the text will often reveal what application is needed in the sermon. It should not be assumed by the preacher that every listener will recognize the application naturally. What may be clear to the preacher is not always clear to the listener. There are even times where the application is super clear and the listener doesn’t always pick up on it. Not too long ago my wife’s best friend came to town and I was preaching and I don’t even remember what it was that I was preaching on but when my wife asked how she liked the sermon, her friend said that it was good but she wasn’t sure how it could connect to her life. Then when Lora asked her what she was going through back home with her church life, the sermon addressed that very thing! Sure it could very easily have been me that did a bad job at relaying that information but it is another reminder that not every single person is going to immediately recognize the application to their own lives unless you tell them. The preacher must make it plain to the listener what the application of the text should be. Bryan Chapell writes, “Application focuses the impact of an entire sermon on the transformation(s) God requires in his people as a consequence of his word.” The purpose of application within the sermon is to drive believers in their sanctification and to apply the Word of God in the lives of the listener. So let’s do a little bit of practice on a text that a lot of people would say is not only a hard text to preach but also a hard text to apply. At the end of Genesis 9, we see Noah passed out drunk in his tent. His son Ham comes into the tent, sees Noah naked, and goes to tell his brothers. His brothers decide to take a garment, walk in backwards, and lay it on their father. Once Noah wakes up from his drunken stupor, he curses his youngest son but blesses Shem and Japheth. Now what is the application of that passage? Don’t get drunk? Wear clothes? Respect your elders? Is that the main point that this passage teaches? Is that the lesson that God wants us to apply in our lives? We might be able to get that application out of it but that’s not what the main point should be. Don’t you think a better application of this passage would be that even after the flood more or less wipes out sin, it doesn’t take long for the cycle to begin again. As long as sinful men live on the earth, sin will happen. The application for this passage can be something along the lines of, “Noah was a righteous man that still battled with sin in a fallen world. As long as you are on this earth, you must wage war against sin.” Then you can talk about how Christ redeems from sin and gives you the Holy Spirit and the Word of God in your fight against sin. Something like that. Our application should still be Christ-centered. Application is difficult because we can often be so eager to find something to apply to our audience that we risk butchering what the text actually says. Haddon Robinson once wrote, “More heresy is preached in application than in Bible exegesis. In application we attempt to take what we believe is the truth of the eternal God, given in a particular time, place, and situation, and apply it to people in the modern world, who live in another time, another place, and a very different situation. That is harder than it appears.” What Robinson means here is that people are often so eager to give people stuff to do that they totally butcher or neglect the passage. If we are to be faithful expositors, we can’t apply things from the text that are never in the text. A good safeguard to make sure that our application is staying true to the text is seeing if it can connect to the fallen condition focus. If the application has no connection to it, chances are it is an unfaithful application. This doesn’t mean that application will never address moral behaviors. There are times when the application should address drunkenness, where it should address parenting, where it should address baptism and support missions but this won’t be in every single passage. Like I’ve said before, not every sermon is going to be a sermon on church membership. In our application, we are showing that there is a legitimate reason for our exposition. Bryan Chapell puts it like this, “Application justifies exposition. If there is no apparent reason for listeners to absorb exegetical insights, historical facts, and biographical details, then a preacher cannot expect what seems inapplicable to be appreciated. No doctor will have much success saying to patients, ‘Take these pills.’ without explaining why. Application explains why listeners should take a sermon’s expositional pills. Through application a preacher implicitly encourages parishioners to listen to a message’s explanation because it establishes the basis, reasonableness, and necessity of particular responses.” Our exposition should be so crafted that our people are able to see why they need this text in their lives and since they are like children that don’t really know any better, we need to tell them why they need to take it. In our Christ-centered applications, our applications need to answer 4 questions. It needs to instruct us on what we are to do and it needs to be specific. It needs to tell us where in our lives we can apply the application. Ask the question of, “what situation is this addressing?” The application tells us why we need to apply this in our lives. How are we to be motivated to go out and do the work that we have been called to do? Finally we need to know how to do what is being asked of us. Just think, you can give an amazing sermon on a particular topic and passage of Scripture, you can feel the energy in the room of people recognizing that something needs to happen but it all falls flat because you never tell them how to do it. Chapell gives this example, “When preachers tell their congregations to love their neighbors as themselves but do not point to the enabling Spirit of God, then people can easily assume that this love is something they can stimulate in themselves. Preachers may assume that people will always seek God’s enabling power to fulfill his requirements, but this is a naive expectation. If preachers can neglect to mention divine dependence, why should they be surprised when people forget to seek divine enablement?” So does our application answer the what? Where? Why? and How questions? If you ignore those questions, application is incomplete and fails to equip God’s people for the service that He has for them. In our application, our preaching calls for holiness. We aren’t aiming for behavioral change, we are aiming for salvation and sanctification. Spurgeon said, “True Gospel preaching does not decry holy living; nay, it sets up the highest possible standard and declares the way to reach it.” When we preach, are we presenting God as holy and righteous to our people and are we showing them the way by which they can reach Him? Are we showing them how it is only through Christ that man can be right with God and it is only through the Holy Spirit working through their lives that they can achieve what God has called them to do? If you aren’t making them aware of how they must respond, who will? And with that, we will come to a close. I know that this has been a lot of information thrown at you and I already know that there are several things that I would say or do differently if I was to teach something like this again but I do want to thank you all again for helping to make this possible. In just a second, I’ll have you guys fill out the questionnaire that you were given before the class started and be as honest as possible. If there are some comments that you want to put on the back that might be helpful to me as I write my last couple chapters about what you enjoyed or what could have been better, I would appreciate that as well. If you are interested in learning more about preaching, I also have a handout on some great preaching books that you can pick up. Let’s pray and then if you all have any questions we will go through them. If not, I’ll let you all fill out the questionnaire and we will be done.