Pastors: it will happen to you some time. Whether it’s from lack of preparation, sloppy transitions, a dry delivery, confusing sub-points, or bad gas, your sermon will fall dead flat on its face. The most seasoned veterans down to the first year rookies will experience the devastating Sermon Fail.

Occasionally it’ll be your fault. Instead of proper research on the historical-grammatical context, you looked up too many illustrations from Time Magazine and CNN. Instead of hitting up your office or local Starbucks for a solid five hour block of sermon writing, you chose to sleep in or play video games or procrastinate with a 24 marathon.

Other times it’s just life. School, work, family, emergencies, or even the meaty pastoral stuff like counseling and hospital visitations. Your sermon sits there on your desk or in your computer with half a page all week and by Saturday you’re scrambling to put bits and pieces together from somewhere in the backseat of your brain. Come Sunday you have a half-cooked sermon that you pray to God will come together if you can just wing it with your personality and winning smile and excessive hand motions. What you really have is a microwaved chicken on a fancy ceramic dish.

Perhaps the most embarrassing fail is the Invitation Rejection. You make a call for commitment to the altar and hope to see several pairs of knees down, others coming forward, at least one person praying for another. But none of it happens and it doesn’t go how you expected: no revival, nothing. You repeat the call, repeat it again as the last time, then repeat it once more as the actual last time in case no one heard you the last three times. And still, no one moves. We’re not supposed to be discouraged by these types of things but we’re in the flesh: it’s tough. I can see why so many pastors are afraid to do the altar call, and also why so many do it just to measure their own effectiveness.

Strangely enough after some sermons that felt completely lacking, some will remark how it had moved them. Inversely there are some messages I had thought the Spirit moved but there will be zero feedback. It’s just one of those things: the work of the Spirit is the work of the Spirit. It’s of little value to hang on every compliment or criticism if that would define you. Our job is to get out of the way and point to Him. A pastor who relies on how many people come to the altar for his own personal gauge of victory has much to learn: it’s not remotely close to anything about that.

Still we are emotional beings so full of hopes and goals and expectations. There’s a pressure for pastors every week to inspire people with the Word of God and that deadline never stops. We must humble ourselves from expecting too much, yet also trust God will make something great out of very little.

That moment after the sermon is so raw, sensitive, vulnerable, humbling, horrifying. I beat myself up over what I should have said, how I could have worded this differently, how I contradicted myself in this point, how I missed an opportunity in another, how I should’ve cut out this entire diatribe here and there. The pastor is never quite satisfied with the message. Nor should he be. In the end we only prepare so much and deliver so well. What enters and leaves that paper is only the neon sign to the God who saves.

There are no guaranteed ways to avoid Sermon Fail, but a guaranteed way to make it happen is to avoid the Word of God. The further we get from it, the less the Spirit will work. It might be an awesome speech but it’ll never be a sermon. Those expecting fame, recognition, masses of fans, and endearing compliments need not apply. It’s for Him and by Him: there will be more Sermon Fails, but by His grace the Spirit wins too.

And so each Monday we go back to the drawing board, the basement, the laboratory, hoping that God will work our people despite us. That sort of boldness — knowing we work for God — is trusting His Word does not need our gimmicks and winks and persuasions. Just the sincere delivery of one who believes in His power.

>When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.