A Preaching Brief for 2026

Preaching is Important Enough for Prioritized Effort

Monday, December 29, 2025

Tom Landry, the legendary Dallas Cowboys football coach, said, “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is decidedly how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” Nick Saban said a similar thing: “Most people have a vision - they can define what it takes to accomplish the vision - but can they execute it?” His point was simple, but pivotal. A goal without a workable process is a deadly, outcomes-based way of thinking. It amounts to a dream, but it is certainly not actionable or achievable.

My question for the preacher of the gospel is, do you have a plan for achieving excellence in the pulpit? No preacher can be perfect, but every preacher can plan and work toward excellence. Personally, I would love to do my best preaching in 2026. I have a plan for the year that I will share with you, hoping you will develop your own and commit to the process of sound preparation. I am only offering some suggestions concerning the things we can control. We cannot summon great acts of Providence at our behest, but we can and should labor by faith, hoping for the blessed privilege of experiencing the fruitful hand of God on our preaching. I will challenge you to (1) marry conviction with passion, (2) develop a systematic plan for sermon preparation, and (3) systematize your outside reading for the year.

Marry Conviction with Passion

Every preacher should determine to avoid the wasteland of delivering doctrine-free, conversational homilies. We are not giving TED talks or self-help speeches, nor are we offering dry, liturgical dissertations. We are preachers of “the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ” (Ep. 3:8), intended to “make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery…to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God” (vv. 9-10). Obviously, baked into these words is the expectation that our preaching should naturally be characterized by conviction and passion. Naturally, because there would be no way for a man of God to search out these rich truths, believe them, and then deliver them without heart; nor would it be possible to have a passionate boldness for ideological expressions that we hardly believe. 

It is here, at the union of conviction and passion, that eloquence is produced. The greatest sermons ever preached were the fruit of someone holding forth from the thralldom of inspired faith. Nonchalance never moves people. The disinterested communication of incidentals is hardly worthy of the stinging rebuff that comes with courageous ministry. Only conviction merits passionate delivery. When we experience this combination, eloquence emerges.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Every idea is an incitement…eloquence may set fire to reason.” We all desire a certain degree of eloquence if eloquence is properly understood. We want to be set on fire with truth, but eloquence for the sake of eloquence alone is ostentatious, a kind of off-putting, verbal éclat. If Plautus was correct when he said, “Courage easily finds its own eloquence,” then the shortest route to speaking with fluency and elegance is knowing the truth and actually believing it. Biblical boldness is the confidence that what we have to say will result in everlasting benefit to those who receive it in faith.

Few people have united the concepts of conviction and passion like R. L. Dabney in his great work, Evangelical Eloquence, where he said, eloquence is “the emission of the soul’s energy through speech.” When advocating for eloquence, we are not suggesting that better preaching will involve “the single eye to self-display,” but rather, the emission of truth from one energized in soul by God’s eternal purposes and precepts. Conviction is not a synonym for stubbornness. It is one thing to hold a conviction, but quite another for a conviction to hold us! To be held by conviction is to be thoroughly convinced of its truth. This kind of certainty is only found at the wellspring of diligent study and thoughtful meditation. When we labor in the study, conviction is produced, perspicuity is cultivated by necessity, and naturally, eloquence is born. Direct expression becomes forceful and thereby, eloquent, for without persuasion, without the alteration of the will, no true eloquence has been composed - only orations of display.

Therefore, let us enter the study each week with a determination to so understand the intricacies of the text that it will set us ablaze with boldness, zeal, and holy anticipation. There is no reason to preach any other way. While ignorance and affectation are poor adaptations for the preacher, so is the deadening effects of faux intellectualism.

Develop a Systematic Plan

As a Bible college student, I was required to read The Disciplined Life by Richard S. Taylor, in which he listed five character traits that generate effectiveness. He said the prize goes to the neat, thoughtful, systematic, thrifty, and punctual. I firmly believe that a systematic approach to preaching is a great tool for being better than average every time you rise to preach! Do you have a regular approach, or do you leave the greatest work of New Testament ministry to the whims of circumstance and random inspiration? I am convinced the conviction and passion we seek is to be discovered in routine labor in the study and seldom (if ever), anywhere else.

Here is a simple plan that would work, with your own personal adjustments:

Monday - Select a passage

By select, I mean determine which portion of text in your current preaching schedule (if through a book, section, or selection of themes) you will expound. If you are not preaching through a book or section of scripture, and you have a “topic” to address, you still must have a text that will be your sermon; otherwise, you are simply using the Bible to make a religious speech. We are commanded to “preach the word.” I know of no passage that admonishes the pastor to wrestle with spiritual mysteries in search of some nebulous topic every single week. This is a recipe for mysticism and imbalance. Here is a foolproof formula: preach the Bible and insist that your text is your sermon. If you choose “the wrong text” and preach it faithfully, you will come out much better than if you spend Saturday in search of the ultimate “nugget” that will “preach.” The sermon is the text, not the outline. An outline, regardless of how masterful the alliteration, is a poor sermon if the text is not the star of the show.

Tuesday - Learn the passage

G. Campbell Morgan was said to have advocated for reading one’s text 50 times before preaching it. At this point, you are not plumbing the depths of your textual theology yet, but familiarizing yourself with the actual content of the passage, including customs, geography, characters, theological words, and chronology. Doing the mundane work of getting this information into your head will make the heavy lifting of exposition much easier later in the week.

Wednesday - Organize the passage 

Every passage of scripture has its own outline or layout. When you see the flow of the text with all the transitions and inspired conclusions and admonitions, you actually have the sermon right under your nose. Examine a plethora of outlines from authors in history as they relate to your text. You will often disabuse yourself of unfortunate misapprehension without having read a word of commentary by simply grasping the overall picture of the text.

Thursday - Study the passage

This is where you answer the questions: What is the big idea / central theme of this passage? What is the reader expected to do or believe? What will my sermonic proposition be? How and why should the congregation do this or believe this? These answers come as you study the text carefully, seeking to understand what the author of the text (both the Holy Spirit and the human author) intended us to receive from it. Once you have reached the extent of your own knowledge, reading a multitude of commentaries will then make a great contribution to the work you have already done. As Spurgeon said, “He who will not use the brains of others proves he has no brains of his own.” 

Friday - Write the sermon

Whether you preach without notes, with a scant outline, or from a detailed manuscript, in order to preach well, diligent preparation is necessary. There is nothing spiritual or faithful about preaching without preparation. We are commanded to prepare (2 Tim. 2:15). For most mortals, the distance between discoveries in the study and communicating said discoveries in the pulpit in a cogent fashion is significant. This is why most preachers use notes. I would highly recommend that most preachers do the work of writing manuscripts for their sermons. You go much further in preparing how you will communicate the passage, and you have the added benefit of compiling a vast personal legacy of expositional labor. Be kind to your future self by making your work accessible in the future. Even if you write a manuscript or something close, you don’t have to attempt to preach directly from it, but your preparation is more thorough, and your ability to preach from a basic outline is improved dramatically.

Saturday - Rehearse the sermon

By rehearse, I certainly do not suggest that some performative measures be taken. I recommend you go through the sermon a few times to build your recall and suss out any remaining deficiencies. Talking it out goes a long way toward turning a dry dissertation into a sermon that will actually connect. Francis Bacon famously said, “Reading makes a broad mind, writing a precise mind, and speaking makes a ready mind.” 

Discussing preaching from a systematic, even artisanal viewpoint often brings on the charge that the Holy Spirit is being left out of the process, which is ridiculous. It is not spiritual to be unprepared. It is not holy to make things up on the fly. It is not studied or “apt to teach” when superficial and awkwardly homespun. Rather, it is a dereliction of duty. You do not have to use any of these suggestions. You must, however, if you plan to preach well, plan to plan and work the plan.

Plan Your Outside Reading

Honestly, every preacher must read as if his life depends upon it, because your life as a preacher depends upon it. My friend, Pastor Jim Alter, says that preachers declaring, “I don’t have time to read,” is like saying, “I don’t wear deodorant.” You don’t have to tell us. We already know. Slow reading is fine. Using a dictionary, every page, is great. Not reading is a failure. It is intellectual arrogance to say, in essence, “I don’t need the thoughts of 2,000 years of church history. I don’t need great minds influencing my stellar takes on scripture.”

The fear that reading leads to apostasy is ridiculous. A preacher who cannot read without declension is a novice. Facts lead to more information, and insights lead to greater understanding. It is impossible to grapple with eternal truth, to plumb the unsearchable riches of Christ and communicate what you find with clarity and meaning if you are not continually reading. Read only those that you completely trust if you must, but read, you must.

The average reader, at a minimum, can read 200 words per minute (probably more for even slow readers). At this rate, reading only 30 uninterrupted minutes per day, a slow reader could read 10 - 15, 300-page-books per year. If you read on the same subject for a year, concentrating your effort on carefully selected material, you could make great strides as a thinker and teacher. You could also tackle a few large sets in a year. This kind of “outside reading” can transform the substance of one’s preaching in so many ways.

Reading Tips

Read systematically. Reading systematically is the act of reading books with understanding them as your aim. One of the best things to read about reading is How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler. In this book, he suggests you read the index, chapter headings, and divisions carefully first. You proceed by reading with the stated purpose or thesis of the book in mind. If the subject is seminal, consider the footnotes and bibliography for your own further reading.

Read Actively. It is massively helpful to make notes as you read. If I am reading a book that is not a special or antique edition, I will make notes with page numbers in the front and back of the book, highlighting as I read. Books that are particularly helpful often look like they’ve been attacked. This might be blasphemous to some bibliophiles, but active reading is a game-changer. You will remember so much more of what you read. Rehearse what you learn, share it with others, and say it out loud. Use it, or lose it.

Read Intentionally. You have to schedule time to read. Busyness is no excuse for failure in this area. Productive reading is vital. A good guideline is to read one hour a day, one day per week, and one week per year. This does not count your weekly sermonic preparation. This kind of intentional emphasis will keep you sharp and informed - ready for whatever you plan to do as a preaching pastor. Every preacher has areas of specialization. Continue developing those strengths by planning what you will read and why. You have to be informed, which means you will know that something is the case. You will need to be enlightened, which means knowing what something is all about. Adler quoted Montaigne, who spoke of abecedarian ignorance and doctrinal ignorance. Neither is acceptable for a man of God.

Nothing will change your preaching like good reading. Nothing. Francis Bacon said, "Some books are to be tasted, some chewed, and others swallowed and digested." In any case, read, read, read, as if your life as a preacher depends upon it.

I offer these three suggestions as a mere provocation to better things in preaching. Consider how you might (1) marry conviction with passion, (2) develop a systematic plan for sermon preparation, and (3) systematize your outside reading for the year.