Preacher: Keep it Simple
This blog post is for pastors. It’s good advice anytime, but particularly on a day like Easter. It’s counterintuitive and yet important.
Keep your preaching simple.
It’s tempting to want to make our preaching sound sophisticated. We’ve studied the languages. We’ve read the commentaries. We’ve immersed ourselves in the text. We want to share all that we’ve learned.
We also feel pressure from our congregations. We want people to think that we’re smart, educated, and deep.
Because of this, it’s important to remember our assignment. It’s not to impress people or to say everything that could be said. It’s to feed our people with Scripture and help them encounter God. Don’t dumb it down, but don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be either.
J.C. Ryle wrote:
To attain simplicity in preaching is of the utmost importance to every minister who wishes to be useful to souls. Unless you are simple in your sermons you will never be understood, and unless you are understood you cannot do good to those who hear you.
Preach to be understood, which means that we must preach simply.
Simplicity in preaching matters for several deeply practical and theological reasons.
It honors the nature of the gospel. The gospel is gloriously simple: God saves sinners through Christ. Paul's concern in 2 Corinthians 11:3 was that the minds of believers would be led astray "from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ." When preaching becomes unnecessarily complex, it can obscure the very message it's meant to proclaim. Clarity is a form of faithfulness.
It serves the whole congregation. A sermon that only the educated can follow has already failed a significant portion of the room. Jesus spoke to fishermen, tax collectors, and farmers, and they heard him gladly. Simplicity isn't dumbing down; it's communicating so that the grandmother in the back row and the PhD in the third row both walk away fed. The goal is comprehension, not impression.
It forces the preacher to actually know the text. Vagueness hides in complexity. When you're forced to say one clear thing, simply and well, you quickly discover whether you actually understand what you're preaching. Simplicity is a discipline that exposes fuzzy thinking and demands theological clarity before you ever open your mouth.
It sticks. People can only carry so much out the door. A sermon with twelve points is a sermon with no points. But a single, well-anchored truth, stated clearly, illustrated memorably, applied practically, can follow a person into their Monday morning. Haddon Robinson's principle holds: “A sermon should be an arrow, not a shotgun blast.”
It reflects humility. Overly complex preaching can quietly become about the preacher demonstrating range, learning, and rhetorical skill. Simplicity is a posture of service. It says, “I'm not here to be impressive; I'm here to be useful.”
The tension is that simplicity is harder than complexity. It takes far more work to say one thing clearly than ten things muddily. But that labor is worth it because the word deserves to land with weight, not get buried under the preacher's effort to sound thorough.
Spurgeon said:
I fancy that I could preach a very fine sermon, one that would please gentlemen who are fond of oratory, but that highflown style of preaching seems to me to be wicked so long as souls are perishing; and I am determined, as far as ever I can, to preach the gospel plainly and simply, so that everybody may understand it.
Preacher: preach the word, and preach it simply this Easter and always.
