I would highly recommended Rich Nathan’s Preaching Manual to anyone who is just getting started in preaching. Here are some highlights from a section in the manual titled “Advice to Young Preachers.”
[Excerpt from Rich Nathan’s Preaching Manual]
1. Preach books of the Bible for the first 4-5 years of your preaching ministry.
Most young preachers really struggle with putting series together. That issue is dealt with if you preach through a book. It is an amazing stress reducer to know that next week’s sermon is going to be James 1:11-16 because you just finished James 1:1-10. Moreover, preaching through a book will keep young preachers from the great mistake of preaching Christian books that they have just read or sermons they have just heard from someone else, rather than preaching the Bible. Book studies also create in you the habit of bridging the gulf between the world of the Bible and the world of today. Most contemporary preaching is completely unconnected to the world of the Bible and too quickly moves to application.
2. Be yourself!
Don’t take on someone else’s persona. Virtually every preacher has his or her own kind of charm. It could be that you are funny, or warm and pastoral, or intense and convicting-but whatever you are, let it shine through. God wants to use you, not some “preacher person” that you are trying to become.
3. Preach topical expository messages.
In my mind, all preaching should be expository because we should always be giving people the meaning of a certain text in its original context. And all preaching should be topical (even messages from a book series) because we are not giving people a running commentary of the text, but rather preaching the theme of a paragraph or a chapter of the scripture. I absolutely would avoid the kind of “topical preaching,” which takes a verse from one book and a verse from another and puts it all together in an artificial outline completely apart from the context in which those verses were originally written. That trains your congregation to read the Bible in a haphazard fashion and at the end of the day people will have heard from you and your clever outline, but they won’t necessarily have heard God’s intended message through his Word.
4. Write out your sermons word for word.
This makes sense for young preachers for several reasons. It keeps you from the kind of rigid outlines that begin with “First of all…” By writing out your message word for word, you hide your outline under the flesh of your message. Second, writing out your message gives you freedom to be spontaneous. That might seem counter-intuitive, but the clearer you know where you are going, the easier it is to depart and walk away from the podium and your notes. Ultimately, you want to be completely free from using notes so that you have eye-to-eye contact with the congregation, rather than eye-to-notes contact.
5. Avoid current jargon, especially psycho-babble.
You do not want a congregation filled with folks who are “getting in touch with their anger” or “healing the child within”. These “Trojan Horse” phrases will kill you in the end. What you want as a preacher is a congregation of people who think in biblical categories: dying to self, repentance, forgiveness, etc. Part of your job as preachers is to bring about biblical thinking and biblical modes of expressing things in the lives of your hearers.
6. Don’t merely address the questions people are asking.
I love the debate between Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. Tillich said it was “the job of the church to answer the questions the world is asking.” Barth responded: “Sometimes the world doesn’t know what questions to ask.” It is the case that the world is not necessarily asking questions about heaven and hell, self-denial, truth, courage, to name just a few biblical themes. Our job is, of course, not to be deliberately irrelevant, but to assist people to see the relevance of questions they are not asking and the answers the Bible offers.