What questions should a pastor ask as he prepares to give a sermon?

Marcus Serven explains in this video that as he prepares a sermon, he starts asking himself questions the day before. He asks: “Do I have something in the sermon for 6-year-olds?” “How about for mothers?” “How about the young people?” “How about for the discouraged person?”

The primary question he asks himself is: “Where in the sermon am I proclaiming Christ and the Gospel?” He explains that integrating the Gospel in each sermon is one challenge of expositional preaching. When expositing a text, pastors often forget to address the Gospel and discuss application points. A pastor's primary goal is to help people to trust in the work of Christ. Accordingly, a sermon should always point people to the Gospel and to Christ.

Romans 1:16 (NKJV) – “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.”

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.