Marcus Serven explains in this video that as he is putting his sermon together, he asks himself if it applicable to all people. Where are you proclaiming Christ and the Gospel? Preachers have a job to lay out Scripture and make it applicable to them and to tie it to the Gospel.

Romans 15:13 (NKJV) - "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."

This is a little farther down in the process after you've already done your wrestling with the text yourself, the exegetical study, and putting it all down on paper. And I start asking myself questions, and oftentimes this happens on Saturday afternoon, you know, the day before, and I'm thinking, do I have something in the sermon for six-year-olds Ellie who's sitting in the front row? Is there something in the sermon for the young mom over here who's really stressed and has a bunch of little children under five, Do I have something for the person who's really discouraged or fearful right now? And then the big question of all for me is to ask, where in this sermon am I proclaiming Christ in the gospel? I want very much to do that in every sermon.

And that's part of the challenge in expositional preaching, is that some preachers will just lay out the whole text. They'll put a whole banquet out there, but then they won't allow you to eat it. You know, it's just, here's all this information, and you're sitting and soaking in this information, but they don't really bring the gospel out and they don't bring any application. And so as a result, you just have this this great feast but can't touch it. So My job as a preacher is to make sure that I lay out a great feast, but then I also encourage the people to eat and by faith to trust in the work of Christ.

And then God impacts them at that point, and they're able to see lives change and all of that. And that makes me very, very happy as a pastor.