Recently, while talking with a young man in my church about his preaching, he said something like “I felt like I had good content, but my delivery wasn’t good.”

The thing is, I didn’t notice, and neither did anyone else I asked about the sermon.

Sometimes, I'm prone to the same kind of self-consciousness about my deliivery. I will preach a message and say something like “I really feel like I didn’t do a good job delivering that.” Usually, no one notices.

There are at least three versions of every sermon: the one you prepared in the study, the one you preached and the one people heard. Almost always, we are far more critical of the message we preach than the audience is. What we perceive to be awful missteps, the audience doesn’t even notice. What is going on in our head and emotions when we preach a message rarely aligns with what the people see and hear.

As preachers, we all want to be good speakers. We want to be polished, forceful, to have a certain presence in the pulpit. Maybe we want to look and sound and have the same effect as some preacher hero we have. If we aren’t careful, we can become obsessed with our delivery in an unhealthy way.

So my fifth rule for preaching is this:

Don’t worry about your delivery, focus on making a point.

Let’s break that down…

Don’t worry about your delivery.

There are three reasons why it’s bad to obsess about your delivery…

An obsession with delivery is often a form of self-worship.

Preaching God’s word with authority is an amazing experience. Spurgeon said that if he had to choose any experience to replace heaven, it would be the experience of preaching the gospel in power. It is an exalting experience. There is a reason why Paul warned about appointing a novice as a bishop “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil.” (1 Timothy 3:6) Preaching the word and doing it well is a high and it can also be an ego trip.

While it is right and admirable to want to be your best for the Lord, very often, when we are worried about our “delivery” what we are really after is the praise and admiration of men. We are wanting to be seen as a great preacher - to be seen as powerful - and that is a dangerous place to be. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Your desire to be “great” in your delivery may be coming from a desire to “be the man.” Remember, it was a desire to be great that cast Lucifer out of heaven, you at least need to entertain the possibility that this obsession is just your fleshly pride.

An obsession with delivery misses the point of the sermon.

Think about most of the meals you ate growing up: Most likely, very few of them were memorable. (The ones that were, were likely memorable for bad reasons.) Most of us eat very few gourmet meals. Our diet is made up of very little lobster and filet mignon and a whole lot of mom’s casseroles and mashed potatoes. Here is the thing: those boring everyday, unmemorable meals sustained us. They helped us grow and kept us alive and gave us the energy we needed to get through the day.

As a preacher, you aren’t a gourmet chef. Your sermon isn’t supposed to some gourmet meal that people remember for the rest of their life. It is more than ok if it is a casserole and mashed potatoes kind of sermon that feeds and sustains people. If you are regularly giving people God’s word in a digestible way, then you are doing your job as a preacher.

It is the Word, and not your vocal inflection, that builds us up. It is the Word, and not your hilarious jokes, that breaketh the rock in pieces. It is all the Word, and not your flawless delivery, that makes the man of God perfect and thoroughly furnished to all good works. So if you are giving people the Word, that is what matters.

One final thought on why it’s bad to be obsessed with your delivery of a sermon:

An obsession with delivery usually hinders delivery.

As a casual bowler, I’m above average. Generally, when I go bowling with friends or family, I win. The hours of Wii sports bowling have paid off.

Recently, however, I went bowling with a friend who is both much better than me and who fancies himself a coach. My friend tried to help me, he kept giving me tips and the result of it all was I ended up with the worst scores I can remember. By getting into my head, he managed to undo years of muscle memory and totally ruin my bowling game.

Sometimes, when we give too much attention to something, it ends up making it worse and not better. If we are overly concerned with how we sound or look when we are preaching, it may have the opposite of the intended effect and make us worse (and not better communicators) of the gospel. This may be necessary in the short term to make some improvements, but if it's an ongoing obsession - it will hurt and not help your preaching ministry.

I preach best when I’m not thinking about preaching, when I’m not conscious of my delivery at all and when I am caught up in my message. I suspect this is true for you too.

How to improve your delivery

So if we shouldn't be focused on our delivery, what can we do to be better preachers?

Say something worth listening to.

Charles Spurgeon said that the golden key to keeping people's attention is to say something worth listening to. If you really want people to pay attention when you preach, then preach better messages. Preach the Word, preach it clearly and preach it in a way that connects with people's lives, and people will listen.

Have a point. Know what you are going to say. Know how you are going to say it. Don't veer off. If you can do this, people will deal with whatever kind of delivery you have. If you are boring and don't have good content, then no amount of yelling, running or juggling will keep people interested.

McDonalds is one of the most slickly packaged experiences in the modern world. They have beautiful buildings, animated video signs with some of the best food photography in the world, and constantly changing packaging. In contrast, most of us know a hole-in-the wall restaurant with little to no decorations, standard food service tablecloths and plates, and almost no advertising whose food is amazing. If time isn't an option, which would you rather go to?

Focus on content, not on presentation. Focus on feeding people a good meal - and they will keep coming back for more.

Respect the time and attention of the audience.

Let's say you preach to 80 people every Sunday for 30 minutes. That is not 30 minutes of people's life you are using. It is 40 hours of people's lives represented in the room. If you are unprepared or you drone on (which is often a symptom of being unprepared) you are wasting people's time and often, they know it.

Those people could be sleeping in, or out on a boat, or playing golf. Instead they got up on one of their few days off to worship God and to hear a message from God's word. Their time and attention is a gift. Do not waste their time.

If people expect for you to preach to them for thirty minutes, you better have a very good reason for taking 45. They will put up with that if you are well prepared, they will just stop coming if you are winging it.

My son has a plethora of health issues that force us to regularly drive two hours one way to the big city to go to specialists appointments. Few things bother me more than when we go to one of these appointments and it is obvious the doctor is unprepared and uninterested. It's incredibly frustrating to give up your precious time only to meet with someone who doesn't care enough to do their job well. Do not do that to the people you are preaching to.

If you are the type of arrogant preacher who feels his message is owed an audience, that is probably why you don't have one.

Try to identify and eliminate bad speaking habits.

Thus far, this article has been about how you shouldn't focus on your delivery, but that isn't to say that delivery doesn't matter at all. There are bad speaking habits that can cause people to tune out of even a great message. These need to be identified and eliminated.

You are never going to get to perfect and you shouldn't try to. Most people will put up with a few verbal ticks if you are delivering a good message. The human brain is really good at tuning out verbal imperfections.

But if typical speaking blunders like an occasional "um" or an incomplete sentence are like imperfections in your cars paint job, some public speaking habits are like driving with a missing wheel; People will not ignore them, and you need to get it fixed immediately.

• Some speakers never stop and take a breath.
• Some speak so slowly your brain moves on to something else.
• Some speak so quietly it's like a whisper.
• Some YELL EVERYTHING.
• Some constantly clear their throat.
• Some speakers even insert a phrase into every sentence like "to be able to" or "in everything and all."

These aren't the kind of bad habits that people will ignore. These are the kind of habits that will drive your audience so mad they will refuse to listen to you. In my opinion, these habits keep you from being "apt to teach" (1 Timothy 3) and disqualify you as a pastor. So watch a recording of your speaking occasionally, or ask your wife to help you with this, or get a speaking mentor who will be brutally honest with you. You have to kill these bad habits while you can.

Be yourself.

Some preachers turn into completely different people behind the pulpit. Their voice changes. Their mannerisms change. Their whole persona turns into someone else.

There are, in my experience, two common causes for these transformations: Some preachers transform because they are emulating a hero. Other preachers transform to conform to a cultural expectation of what a preacher should sound and look like.

I remember hearing a preacher once who went to the same school I did. He had adopted almost all of the founder of our schools idiosyncrasies. He even preached a message made famous by this other preacher. It wasn't helpful, it felt like listening to a bad parody for thirty minutes.

I've heard many people who speak clearly and normally transform into a screaming, voice clearing, amen calling camp meeting preacher when it's there time to preach. It's as if the power for the message doesn't come from the word of God but from the camp meeting style they grew up listening to. You begin to wander if they think the apostle Paul and Peter spoke in an exagerated southern accent, cleared their throat constantly, and shouted "Can I get an amen?" over and over.

These transformations are almost never an upgrade. Rarely do they improve a person's ability to communicate. A fake persona usually goes with a fake message. These personality transformations are a distraction and make the message seem less serious.

The best preachers I know are the ones whose preaching persona matches their regular persona. When they mount the pulpit and preach a message, it is like their personality comes alive and is magnified. Rather than changing when they preach, they become more of themselves in the pulpit.

God called you, with your speaking voice, your history and your mannerisms. Be the best version of you, but be yourself. It doesn't help your delivery at all to try to be anyone else.

Look up.

One more piece of advice (and one I am currently working on) is just to try to make eye contact with people. I have a tendency to keep my head buried in my notes as I preach and I've begun to make notes in my notes to look up at certain people and try to make eye contact with them. People notice, and this one small change has definitely helped the way people perceive my preaching.

Personally, I'd much rather listen to someone bound to his notes who was making an interesting point than someone walking the aisles who isn't. But you don't have to choose to be one or the other. Just be sure to look up regularly.