Every one of us can recall a time when you looked at your watch sometime during a sermon. I’m not talking about when you were preaching yourself, but when you were sitting in a pew and listening to another preacher. The sad truth is that many sermons are too long.
I went to a restaurant three weeks ago and ordered a steak cooked medium-well. The waitress was nice, the service was good, but when my steak arrived it was incinerated. It was overcooked, dry and unpalatable. I was in a hurry, so I didn’t bother to ask for another. I tried to eat a little of it, but instead just ate the potato and salad. I decided not to return to that restaurant again. An overcooked sermon is just as bad and has the same result with your listeners–they won’t be back.
How long should a sermon be? I believe a sermon should be long enough to deliver the message in a complete and interesting way, but short enough to have a powerful impact. I remember sitting at a coffee shop with several young preachers when the conversation turned to last Sunday’s sermons. After several of the young men commented on their messages, the young preacher on my left said, “I was on a roll, I preached over one hour.” I couldn’t help myself and asked, “I wonder how long your congregation listened?”
Don’t misunderstand me; there is nothing wrong with preaching a long sermon IF the purpose and the material of the sermon require a long time to develop. However, shorter is usually better. The difference between a smoldering fire and an explosion is only the time required for the combustion to take place. If you want your sermons to have explosive impact, you must get the point across with power in a relatively short time. The fact is that the average human being cannot stay focused on a speaker for more than a few minutes before his mind begins to wander. There are speaking techniques that can help you keep a listener’s attention but you cannot hold their attention indefinitely. An old proverb says, “The mind can only absorb what the seat can endure.”
As a general rule, a sermon should be about twenty to forty minutes long. If you cannot make your point in that amount of time, you need to rebuild the sermon. Remember that your sermon should have a distinct purpose. This purpose is not the subject of the sermon, but the result of the sermon–what you want your congregation to do as a result of hearing your sermon. So if you can accomplish this purpose in twenty minutes, why stretch it out to forty?
I was listening to a sermon preached by a very good preacher. I was impressed by his power and his ability to paint pictures in my mind with his words. He reached a certain point in his message, and I was ready to act. I was just waiting for him to ask me to commit. But, instead, he kept on talking. He spoke fifteen more minutes, during which time I grew more disinterested. He preached past the best point to conclude the sermon.
The hardest thing for many preachers to do is to find a way to stop talking. The reason being is that most preachers do not design a good “dismount” into their sermons. They work hard on the main body of the sermon but they neglect the most important part – the conclusion and call to action.
In the ministry of teaching preachers to preach powerful sermons, one of the hardest things to get across is the importance of a strong close. If a sermon is to be powerful it must end powerfully and impress on the congregation the need to act.
Are long sermons okay? They are okay if they don’t feel like long sermons. In other words, if your sermon feels long to your listener it is too long. I prefer a short sermon that has focused impact. Let your sermons explode – not smoulder.
