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How to Arrange Your Sermon in the Most Persuasive Way Possible
Logical Progression
Ancient experts on persuasion, such as Quintilian, spent considerable time training up-and-coming speakers. In particular, Quintilian explained the persuasive roles that confirmation, concession, and refutation play. Confirmation refers to the logical arguments that support a claim. Concession refers to the need to point out opposing views. And refutation refers to making counterarguments to persuade listeners to reject those views.1
The preacher who aims at persuasion would do well to employ similar strategies. These are not simply three tasks we do in order but three kinds of tasks we engage in as we move through the text in proclamation. Think of your task in the body of your sermon as riffing on these ancient tactics. To be persuasive, the body of your sermon must involve logical progression, naming obstacles, and well-reasoned counterarguments.
The work of confirming the main point of your sermon isn’t easy. It takes logic that arranges a series of smaller, progressively unfolding arguments. So what will help?
Persuasive Preaching
David R. Helm, Jeremy Meeks
This 9Marks book offers practical tips on public speaking that pastors can apply in their sermons to bring clarity, spark interest, and demonstrate care for their audiences.
Lined-up and well-spaced points. First, let’s return to the analogy of stepping stones. It is far easier to convince your listeners of your main point when the subpoints designed to take your sermon from beginning to end are arranged well—that is, when they are lined up and well spaced.
Often the body of a sermon fails to persuade listeners due to one of two errors in this regard. First, it fails when the leap we ask our listeners to make from one homiletical rock to another is too far. As a result, many of our people fall into the water and are swept up in a current of confusion because they couldn’t follow our logic. Second, the body of a sermon fails when it contains so many rocks that our listeners get confused as to where we are, where we have been, and where we are headed next.
While no perfect formula exists for arrangement, something is inherently pleasing about providing two or three stepping stones in each sermon. On occasion, expositing a text may require or even benefit from more stepping stones, but beware of having too many. Logical progression breaks down when the preacher announces, “Now, the seventh thing you need to see is . . .” Listeners simply don’t have that bandwidth. It is difficult to retain that many steps of logical progression. On this point, Quintilian agreed: “We must be specially careful to avoid excessive minuteness and any suggestion of articulated structure in our partition. If our divisions are too small, they cease to be limbs and become fragments, and consequently detract not a little from the authority of our speech.”2
Mirroring. Second, logical progression is helped when the smaller arguments within the sermon mirror the literary structure of the biblical passage. It should not surprise us to learn that the odds of convincing listeners of the sermon’s main point increase when the arrangement of the sermon reflects the organization of the passage—put simply, when the logic, shape, tone, and emphasis of our talk reflect the logic, shape, tone, and emphasis of the biblical text.
That said (and this is important), don’t think that mirroring the passage with your presentation means that each sermon must proceed from the opening verse of your text to the closing verse. Not every sermon that aims to persuade listeners must proceed in linear fashion. And there’s a good reason for this—namely, not every biblical text sets out to prove its point in linear fashion. Rather, some texts are structured to convince via comparison or chiasm. So while some texts put the main point up front, others do not. And as a result, they may be better handled by an arrangement that starts in the middle of the passage or even at the end.
To illustrate this important caveat, consider the analogy of the mirror. At times, convincing your listeners of the main point may require producing a homiletical structure that handles your text the way a mirror in a fun house presents a different view of yourself. This mirror might arrange everything around the midsection or around the head and feet, placing everything else in subordination to that part.
So the persuasive preacher has a degree of flexibility in the arrangement of his material. That said, the arrangement should always serve the main point of the passage and show a logical correspondence between the text and the homiletical subsections put forward as stepping stones.
Transitions. A third help when arranging the body of your message through a series of smaller arguments is to pay close attention to your transitional statements. These statements move your listener from one stepping stone to another.
If our goal is persuasion, then each rock we ask listeners to jump to next must make sense. We will confuse people if the next point we move to doesn’t show progression. How do we go about doing this? What makes for a good transition?
Transitional sentences work best when they reveal a causal relationship—that is, when they reveal how one point of the sermon leads to the next. To accomplish this, they may employ words such as but, therefore, or since rather than and, then, or next. To illustrate what this looks like, let’s return to 1 Corinthians 1:26–31. In our example sermon, transitional lines that show logical progression from one point to the next might look like this:
Homiletical rock #1: Whom God chooses
Transition: But why would God choose people like this— people like us?
Homiletical rock #2: Why God chooses them
Transition: Since God is good, being chosen by God brings benefits.
Homiletical rock #3: The benefits of being chosen by God
The importance of showing the causal relationships between subpoints cannot be overstated. Each stepping stone in the sermon must be allowed to make its own unique contribution to the main point. And each movement in the message must show an awareness of its relationship to the other movements so that the very order of movements logically proves the conclusion.
Unfortunately, many expositors today simply don’t know that each subsection is meant to serve the overall main point. Nor have preachers spent enough time considering the relationships between the movements of their messages. As a result, much of what passes for preaching today is little more than three-point messages that are really three separate sermons.
We hope for the day when an army of persuasive preachers will have worked out the causal relationships between their subsections and main points. The arrival of that day will come as preachers demonstrate—by their transitions—persuasive logical progression in their sermons.
Making sense in ways that feel true. We offer one final help for logical progression. If the preacher fails to explain the text in ways that not only make sense but also feel true, then nothing else really matters. Our goal should be to leave our people thinking, What he is saying from this text has the ring of truth to it. We must show them how our arguments accord with Scripture and with what God has created their consciences to recognize as wise and good. Craft what you say to accomplish this end.
Remember that your task is not simply explanatory. Don’t succumb to the false idea that head knowledge is all that preachers are after. We are trying to do more than help our people understand how the Bible fits together. We are out for our listeners’ minds and hearts. We want their emotions and behaviors to be governed by the truth of biblical texts.
When you have made the text make sense in ways that feel true, you also need to apply the text to the hearts and minds of your listeners. After that, your time in a particular subpoint of your sermon is done. It is then time to jump to the next stepping stone.
For a few pages now, we have been thinking deeply about the role that logical progression plays in the body of the sermon. And we have been helped by learning that the smaller arguments in our sermons will be more persuasive when they are properly lined up and well spaced, when they closely mirror the biblical text, when they show causal relationships through well-stated transitions, and when they make sense in ways that feel true.
Naming Obstacles
You are now ready to tackle a second aspect that must be present in the body of your sermon. After all, confirming your point through logical progression alone does not suffice. You must also name obstacles that must be overcome. You must address those pesky objections and questions that are already in the minds of your listeners. If unaddressed, these obstacles might keep people from believing your argument.
What is naming obstacles? It’s conceding the weight of an opposing point. This may sound perilous to persuasive preaching. Yet there are many legitimate questions, concerns, and convictions that believers and unbelievers have when they come across a biblical text. The challenge of naming obstacles is that we must not only acknowledge them but also be willing at some level to admit their weight and apparent difficulty.
What should the persuasive preacher concede? Two broad categories guide us. You should concede as much as you think is profitable (given your audience and argument) and as much as you can successfully refute.
So how do you determine what will be profitable to your audience? First, read the sermon passage with a few people in the congregation as you prepare for Sunday and ask them what questions, concerns, and objections they have. Second, try to read the text from other people’s points of view. What would trouble a Christian listener? What would trouble a nonChristian listener? How does this text challenge today’s conventional wisdom? What in the text would make someone flinch, draw back, or say, “I don’t think I buy this”? Any of the above questions might offer an opportunity for concession. As you name obstacles, wary listeners feel heard and seen. As a result, they become willing to give you some room to explain how they might reach a different conclusion than the one they came in holding.
For example, with our 1 Corinthians text, it isn’t hard to imagine a few possible obstacles. The struggling believer might object, Can it really be true that I get all this in Jesus? The unbeliever who hears of all the riches found in Christ might think, How is it good news that God does the choosing?
So as you prepare your next sermon, think carefully about the role that naming obstacles plays for persuasion. And make sure to give voice to the concerns of your wary listeners.
When the persuasive preacher takes objections seriously and addresses concerns thoughtfully, he is loving his listeners.
Well-Reasoned Counterarguments
That said, naming obstacles is not enough. The persuasive preacher must also navigate and refute them. A well-reasoned counterargument proves an objection to be untrue, misguided, or outweighed by other considerations. For example, concerning the obstacles mentioned above to our 1 Corinthians 1 text, a well-reasoned counterargument for the struggling believer might point out that the blessings of God in Christ are true for all who are in him by faith, not just for those who feel assured that these blessings are true.
And they are true for everyone in Christ because the blessings are based on God’s choosing, not on our sense of worthiness. And what might a well-reasoned counterargument look like for the unbeliever’s objection? The fact that God chooses those whom he wants to use might seem offensive, but it is good news because God chooses people just like all of us. And because God does the choosing, we can be confident that if we believe in him, it is due not to our genius or greatness but to his grace.
In this way, refuting obstacles is always an act of love. When the persuasive preacher takes objections seriously and addresses concerns thoughtfully, he is loving his listeners. We can’t imagine a good river guide hearing a group member shout, “Help! I am stuck over here!” and saying in response, “I hear you. And I concede that you are stuck. But we are going to keep moving.” The loving action would be to help the group member navigate the obstacle to arrive safely at the destination.
We leave one word of caution for those who lean into refutation with ease. Be careful. Refutation can act as an addictive drug for some preachers; they can do it for the wrong reasons. Many people love bullies, especially when bullies are beating up someone whom those people don’t like. Resist the temptation to refute arguments just to conquer your opponents or to suit worldly passions in your listeners (2 Tim. 4:3).
Notes:
- Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Harvard University Press, 1920; repr., Lyceum Institute, 2024), 5.5, 5.13–14, https://lyceum.institute.
- Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 4.5 (emphasis original).
This article is adapted from Persuasive Preaching David R. Helm and Jeremy Meeks.
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