Why a Good Sermon Is Not Always a Faithful One

The Assumption We Rarely Question

There is a quiet assumption at work in most of our churches, and it goes largely unexamined. When a sermon is clear and well-organized, when it is delivered with evident conviction, when it moves the congregation emotionally and lands with a satisfying sense of resolution, we tend to conclude that it must have been a faithful sermon. We equate quality with fidelity. We assume that a sermon’s effectiveness is evidence of its faithfulness.

I understand why this happens. Good preaching has a kind of authority to it, and when a preacher handles his material with skill, structures his argument persuasively, illustrates well, and sends people home with something to think about, it feels like the Word has been honored. And sometimes it has been. But not always. And the gap between those two things is one of the more important and underappreciated problems in evangelical ministry today.

This is not a polemic against any particular style of preaching, and I am not interested in declaring one sermon form superior to another. What I am interested in is a more fundamental question: when a preacher stands before his congregation and opens a text, what would it mean for that sermon to be genuinely faithful to that text? And how is it possible for a sermon to be compelling, moving, broadly orthodox, and still fail at precisely that task?

Good and Faithful Are Not the Same Category

The first thing to say is that goodness and faithfulness, as applied to sermons, are not identical categories, even though they often overlap. A sermon can be good in many senses of that word without being faithful to the specific passage from which it is supposedly drawn. Recognizing that distinction is the beginning of clarity.

When we say a sermon is “good,” we are typically making an aesthetic, rhetorical, or experiential judgment. The preacher was clear. He was engaging. His illustrations were apt. He held our attention. He made application feel relevant and urgent. These are real virtues, and I do not want to diminish them. Clarity is not the enemy of faithfulness, and a preacher who cannot communicate has not thereby proven himself reverent.

But when we say a sermon is faithful, we are making a different kind of judgment altogether. We are asking whether the sermon accurately represents what the specific passage being preached is actually saying. We are asking whether the burden the preacher carried into the pulpit is the burden the text itself carries. We are asking whether the shape of the sermon follows the shape of the text, whether the emphasis of the sermon corresponds to the emphasis of the author, and whether the congregation has been brought to the actual meaning and force of that portion of Scripture.

These are not the same questions, and they are not answered by the same evidence.

What a Text Is Actually Doing

Every passage of Scripture is doing something. It is not simply a repository of timeless truths arranged for the preacher’s convenience. It has an argument, a trajectory, a burden, a shape. The psalmist is doing something when he moves from lament to trust. Paul is doing something when he grounds his ethical imperatives in the indicatives of grace. The Gospel writers are doing something when they sequence events and place teaching in particular narrative contexts. The prophets are doing something with their oracles, their signs, their laments, their poetry. All of this has been given to us through real human authors whose intention, under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, is part of what the text means.

This means that to be faithful to a passage is not simply to say true things while standing near it. It is to say what that passage is saying, in the way it is saying it, with the emphasis it places and the burden it carries. A preacher may open to Romans 8 and preach an accurate, orthodox, and even moving sermon on the sovereignty of God, and still fail to be faithful to Romans 8 if he has not attended to what Paul is doing in that chapter, within that argument, with those particular words, for those particular people. Orthodoxy in general does not guarantee fidelity to a specific text.

This is a subtle but important distinction. A preacher can say true things. He can say things that are consistent with the broader teaching of Scripture. He can say things that edify, that comfort, that challenge. And still, he may not have preached the passage. He may have used the passage, or launched from it, or cited it in passing, but the sermon may be governed more by his burden than by the text’s burden, more by his categories than by the text’s categories, more by what he wanted to say than by what the passage is actually saying.

The Preacher’s Burden and the Text’s Burden

Here is where I want to be pastorally honest about a real and common temptation in ministry. Every preacher brings things to the text. He brings his theological convictions, his pastoral concerns, his awareness of his congregation’s struggles, his own spiritual preoccupations and battles. None of this is necessarily wrong. In fact, a preacher who comes to the text with nothing at stake, with no pastoral weight, with no lived conviction, is likely to produce something thin and bloodless regardless of his technical precision.

But there is a difference between bringing yourself to the text and imposing yourself on it. There is a difference between receiving the burden of the passage and riding on top of the passage while carrying your own burden. A preacher who has a strong theological system, or a particular ministry conviction, or a pressing concern for his congregation, can be tempted to find that thing everywhere, to preach it from every passage, to use the text as a launching pad for what he already knows he is going to say. When this happens, the sermon may be technically biblical, in the sense that Scripture is quoted and referenced, but it is not textually faithful, because it has not submitted to this passage, in this place, saying this particular thing.

The faithful sermon is governed by the text, not merely supported by it. That is a crucial distinction. A sermon supported by the text can quote freely, illustrate richly, and land with emotional force, and still not be an exposition of the passage. A sermon governed by the text will derive its structure, its main concern, its burden, its trajectory, and its application from the actual shape and movement of the biblical author’s argument. These are different things, and the difference matters enormously.

When Craft Hides Carelessness

One of the reasons this matters is that strong sermon craft can hide poor handling of Scripture. A gifted communicator can hold an audience’s attention, create narrative tension, deploy illustration skillfully, and land his points with evident weight, and the congregation may leave feeling deeply fed even if the passage has been misread or ignored at a fundamental level. The preacher’s skill becomes, inadvertently, a kind of camouflage.

I have sat under sermons, and preached them, that were undeniably strong in their movement and delivery, and it was only afterward, returning to the passage with a commentary or sitting quietly with the text itself, that I realized how little of the sermon had actually been determined by what was on the page. The message had ridden alongside the passage rather than arising from it. That is a disconcerting thing to notice, whether you are noticing it in someone else’s work or your own.

The most quietly dangerous sermons in the church are not the obviously false ones, which most attentive listeners will eventually detect. They are the subtly misaligned ones, sermons that feel strong, sound broadly orthodox, move people emotionally, and yet have not actually submitted to the text they claim to be preaching. The congregation trusts the preacher, and the preacher trusts his own convictions, and the passage sits there, underexplored, its actual burden undelivered.

This is why sermon craft, as valuable as it is, cannot substitute for hermeneutical honesty. The discipline of interpretation must precede and govern the work of communication, not the other way around. And this requires something from the preacher that does not come naturally: restraint. The willingness to say less than you could say. The patience to let the text determine the direction rather than your accumulated convictions. The humility to be surprised by a passage that does not say what you expected, and to preach that surprise rather than flattening it into familiar categories.

What the Congregation Needs and Deserves

There is an ecclesiological dimension to all of this that I do not want to pass over quickly. When a congregation gathers to hear the Word preached, they are not simply gathering for inspiration or instruction in a general sense. They are gathering to meet God through his Word, to be formed by the actual content of Scripture, passage by passage, book by book, over the long arc of a ministry. And this means they have a stake in whether the sermons they hear are genuinely governed by the texts being preached.

Years of sitting under a ministry more governed by the preacher’s emphases than by the texts themselves will leave a congregation shaped, but shaped more by a man than by the Word. The people may be thoroughly instructed in certain themes, certain frameworks, certain theological categories, and yet surprisingly unacquainted with the actual texture of whole sections of Scripture, with the particular color and weight of books and passages that the preacher never quite let speak for themselves. This is a quiet and serious poverty, and it is not always easy to detect from inside it.

If a congregation consistently hears one or two themes regardless of what passage is being preached, they are not being formed by the breadth and depth of Scripture. They are being formed by their preacher’s emphases. And however orthodox those emphases may be, this is a kind of impoverishment. The church needs the whole counsel of God, and that whole counsel comes to us through the specific texture of its many passages, in all their particularity, difficulty, surprise, and richness.

This means that listeners, too, carry a responsibility. Not the suspicious, fault-finding posture of someone looking to catch a preacher in error, but the discerning, attentive posture of someone who loves the Word and wants to hear it honestly handled. To ask, after a sermon, whether the preacher said what the passage actually says is not a hostile question. It is a faithful one.

A Pastoral Word to Those Who Preach

If you preach regularly, I want to speak to you directly, as one who knows this burden and loves it. The work of preaching is among the most sacred things entrusted to any person in the life of the church. And precisely because it is sacred, it requires a particular kind of honesty before God, an honesty that goes deeper than doctrinal correctness or homiletical competence.

The question I try to ask myself before I preach is a simple one: am I preaching this passage, or am I preaching at this passage? Am I submitting to what is actually here, allowing the text to determine what I say and how I say it, or am I finding in this text permission to say what I was already going to say? I have not always answered that question well. There have been weeks when the sermon was prepared, the outline was sharp, and yet somewhere in the middle of the week I had stopped listening to the passage and started using it. That is a harder thing to admit than a factual error, because it does not announce itself clearly. It just quietly moves in.

Faithfulness in preaching often requires restraint. It requires the discipline of not saying everything you could say. It requires the patience to study a passage until you understand not just what it says but what it is doing, why it says it the way it says it, what it would have meant to its original readers, and what it therefore means for us. This kind of preparation takes time, and the results of it are not always immediately obvious to a congregation. Faithfulness rarely announces itself with the same clarity that rhetorical skill does.

But this is the work. The God who gave us his Word in all its particularity, in specific texts with specific burdens and shapes and arguments, deserves to have that Word handled with submission, precision, and reverence. Not because the form matters more than the Spirit, but because the Spirit gave us this Word in this form, and to preach it faithfully is to honor both.

A good sermon is a gift. A faithful one is an act of obedience. And the church needs both, together, from preachers who have knelt before the text long enough to know the difference.