It is the fattest folder in my file cabinet. A pastor once jokingly told me that he knew it was time to retire after 30 years in his church because he couldn’t come up with another Christmas sermon. I have been preaching in the same church for 27 years. My “Christmas Messages” file is full while my brain seems empty. I have preached 40 Christmas sermons not counting Christmas Eve and Christmas program homilies. I have preached 6 sermons from the Old Testament, 27 from the Gospels, 6 from the epistles and 2 from Revelation.

Should we preach to the crowd or the core on Sunday morning? Should our sermons be evangelistic, or edifying, to the unchurched or the churched? Many argue today that our preaching should be cross-centered salvation oriented messages rather than expository Bible teaching. The biblical examples of sermons by Jesus and the apostles focus on reaching the crowds of people with the gospel; the argument goes, so we should preach the same way. (Never mind the pesky distinction that Jesus and Paul preached in the marketplace of the city, not the gathered community of believers.) Furthermore, the popularity of attractional sermons seems to validate the method.

“What is moralism and why is it wrong to preach moralism? Are we not supposed to call people to live morally?” One person raised these questions at a recent preaching cohort. Our sermons can degenerate into religious moralism if we fail to keep Christ and the cross in view as we preach on the demands of the Bible. Since God’s holy standards are clear, how can we avoid preaching moralism?

“Pastor, I was here before you arrived, and I will be here long after you leave.” Such sentiments have been expressed in one form or another by church people over the years. The truth is, as pastors, we start in a local church as foreigners or aliens. We are from “away.” Ministry success in other contexts does not guarantee ministry success in the new context. We must learn the culture of the new community. Missiologists call it contextualization, and contextualization matters more than we realize in our preaching.

I went to the fair last week, a day filled with fried dough, horse pulling, and old tools. The farm museum displayed obsolete pieces of equipment culled from deteriorating barns and tagged to explain their purposes. The curator had tagged some items with the question, “What does this do?” The farm equipment had lost its purpose, and even the curator did not know what it was. Sermons, too, can become like old barns and rusty tools. Preaching loses its God-intended purpose when divorced from the God-inspired text. God breathed His Word through His writers to do something in our lives today (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Every sermon should do what God intended to do through the passage being explained.