10 Tips for Your Christmas Sermon

Here's a helpful article by Chuck Lawless on how to deliver your Christmas message in a way that will better engage your audience. You'll appreciate these 10 helpful ideas for a season where sermonizers are tempted to rest on tradition at the cost of impact.

Here's the first three of ten:

1. Renew your own sense of wonder first. It seems to me that we celebrate Santa Claus more than we celebrate Jesus. Let your telling the Christmas story naturally erupt from your heart.

2. Don’t simply repeat your sermons of the past. It’s too easy to simply repeat something from yesterday. Get back to the Word, dig in and ask God for a refreshed look at the Word.

3. Get some prayer warriors to pray as you tell the story. The fact that you know the story well doesn’t mean you should pray less; no, it should challenge you to pray more so you don’t tell the story in your own power.

Preaching To Non-Believers

I'm not sure how I missed this post back in January when it was originally posted, but this is a really helpful article on how to better engage with non-believers through preaching. The four steps are listed below and the entire article is here.

1. Acknowledge and welcome the non-believers in attendance.
2. Assume the non-believers in attendance need help in approaching the Bible. 
3. Challenge non-believers to engage the Bible by acknowledging the oddity of Christian belief and practice.
4. Use cultural commonalities to point out worldview inconsistencies.