In his sermon 'What Puts Preaching in the Hospital or in the Morgue,' Brian Borgman outlines practical advice for preachers to improve their sermons and avoid common pitfalls. He discusses two primary categories: keeping sermons out of the 'hospital' through effective introductions, clear conclusions, focused content, and avoiding excessive dependence on manuscripts. Borgman warns against preaching multiple sermons within one, the intellectualization of sermons, and long-winded preaching. He also cautions against extreme homiletical models, advocating instead for balance and the importance of simplicity and clarity. Borgman emphasizes the critical role of prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit, warning that neglecting these elements can 'kill' a sermon. He shares personal anecdotes and stresses the need for preachers to be both well-prepared and spiritually dependent, ensuring that their sermons are not just informative but transformative.

All right, well, we're down to our last session. And I want to say that I look forward to this one because it's just sort of practical. All right. Now, it won't be without gravity and earnestness at points, but these are just some things. So I'm going to talk first, I'm going to talk about two things.

One, how to avoid putting your sermon in the hospital, okay? And then second, and you can just tell this is more serious, how to keep your sermon out of the morgue, right? I'm gonna talk about nine handicaps You have to avoid in order to keep your preaching useful. So back in the year 1997, I enrolled at Westminster in California. They used to have a D-Men program in homiletics and the director of that program was Jay Adams.

And by the way that was a great experience for me. I had Jay Adams for a couple of classes and he was memorable. I had Ed Clowney for one of the last classes he ever taught on Christ in the Old Testament. I had Dr. Joel Beke for experiential preaching.

So it was a great time, but we sat there in that first class and Jay Adams looks around and there's I think 12 or 13 students and he looks around and if you ever were around Jay Adams you know that he didn't pull any punches he was very direct looks around and he says you know why there's only 12 or 13 guys in here? Because most pastors think that their preaching is as good as it gets, and there's no more room for improvement. And he says, everyone that preaches the word should try to improve, try to grow. You don't just rest on your gift of gab and just go from there. You try to improve.

And so I'm going to give just some some pitfalls to avoid, alright, and some of these you guys don't do at all. Younger preachers might be more prone, right? So if you're an older preacher, invest in younger preachers and help them be better preachers. All right? So number one, ineffective introductions that fail to introduce, fail to create any interest, are just overall lame introductions.

Work hard at your introduction. So make sure that your introduction is actually really connected to the sermon. A guy who is sort of a prince among Reformed preachers, he's a homiletician, I heard him preach a sermon one time and the opening illustration had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the sermon. And you know what I thought about for the rest of the sermon? Why did he use that introduction and it had nothing to do, right?

I mean it's easy to distract people and like bad introductions will do it. Make sure that your introduction doesn't promise more than you're actually going to deliver. Okay, don't have like some grandiose illustration that's moving and gripping and stirs the soul and creates people salivating for what's to come and then once the introduction is done you put them to sleep. Make sure all your introductions don't sound like every other introduction. I'm gonna argue that you shouldn't do that with conclusions either.

Alright. Okay, so ineffective introductions are lame. Avoid them. Work hard at your introductions. A second thing that will put your preaching in the hospital is failure to land the plane.

So last night I forget it was maybe Isaiah was telling me that somebody was flying into Asheville and as they, which I didn't get to fly into Asheville, but as they were coming the plane went down, the fog was too thick, and then they pulled right back up. Now, if you've ever flown into Cody, Wyoming, you know that Cody is one of the worst airports in the Western Hemisphere. And you have these swirling winds, and you're always on a little plane going into Cody and what happens is you go in for the landing and then they have to pull up, circle, bounce around, right? And what happens? You get motion sickness, right?

You start looking for the little bag, right? Well, sometimes preachers will conclude sermons like they're landing a plane in Cody, Wyoming. Okay, they will start to land the plane and then pull back up and then jostle around a little bit and have some turbulence and then go for it again. And brothers, here's the thing is as I'm telling you this, my sermon last Sunday I got to the end and I thought that I had it down. And as I got to the end, I thought, ah, that's not the best way to end it.

And so I tried to end it differently. And I thought, you dummy, you're violating the very thing that you're going to tell these guys because it was like, so that illustration didn't work, maybe one other one, you know, just stop. There's actually, there's no shame in just saying, I'm done. I know I'm probably the only one that have done these things, right? Number three is avoid preaching five sermons in one.

Now this is the bane of young preachers because they study and study and study, and somebody told them somewhere that they needed to spend 40 hours to prepare one sermon. Let me just say something about that. If you take 40 hours to prepare one sermon, you need to get better at studying. A busy pastor that's preaching maybe two or three times a week. You got to be realistic.

And so someone somewhere said an hour in the study for every minute in the pulpit. I think that's actually just Kind of silly. So I don't even remember what my point is. Let me get back to it. Oh yeah, preaching five sermons in one.

So a lot of times we study, we study, we study, and we end up with a big stack of paper or we end up with this growing file. And what we end up doing then is we end up going into the pulpit and just making this information dump, right, where we've actually forgotten the big idea of the text. We have the heap of papers, we have the word doc. And here's something to remember, You're not obliged to share everything that you learned in the course of the week with your congregation. In fact, I would say that you should probably not even be sharing up to half of what you learned.

Stay focused. Stay focused and realize that the sermon is for the help of the people. It's not to demonstrate all of the incredible exegetical nuances that you picked up in the course of the week. Nobody cares if it's a Cal infinitive. Nobody cares if it's a present active infinitive or a present active participle.

Now I tell our people about grammar all the time. But it's kind of helped them appreciate grammar a little bit more. But you don't have to turn around and share and you don't have to share every single quote. Right? Be selective.

Okay, And don't just go in doing a sermon dump. One time we had a guy in our church, he was a dear brother and he was one of our elders and he was an engineer. Someone just said uh-oh. And when he would preach, it was meticulous and exhausting. He went to preach Psalm 42 one morning, And he spent 25 minutes on mc-com.

And then at the end says, but really nobody knows what it means. Alright, this next one is always gets me in trouble. Okay. And you want to put your preaching in the hospital, be way too dependent on a manuscript. Preaching is not reading.

Alright, now I know this is going probably a little too far, but I would say you're safest if you don't take one with you. Does that make some of you nervous? Right? So when I've said this and I teach I teach preaching for Reformed Baptist Seminary and I always get pushed back when I tell the guys, hey don't preach from a manuscript. Now here's the thing is that some people will say I want to make sure that every single word is well chosen.

We want accuracy in preaching, but the idea of precision I don't think is necessary. We want to be accurate. Precision means that, and here's the thing, I wouldn't trust myself in the production of a manuscript any more than I trust myself in extemporaneous preaching. Where is our trust in preaching? Well, it's actually in the Spirit of God, right?

And of course you don't just stand up there and go off half-cocked and all of those things. You study hard, but I will tell you that the more that you drill down in the text, the more that it becomes a part of you, the more liberty that you end up having in the preaching. Okay? And so I would argue that extemporaneous preaching best serves liberty in preaching. So there's an old French Calvinist by the name of Marcel.

He has a little tiny book called The Relevance of Preaching, and he says this, if the preacher is and remains dependent, and I'd argue that's what we're really talking about, if the preacher is and remains dependent upon his manuscript or upon his memory, memorizing a sermon, There's not just one prisoner, there are two. The preacher and the spirit. The written or memorized text of a sermon at this moment exercises its dominance. Christ through the spirit is not free. To read Lloyd-Jones classic work on preaching, he talks about that there's a dynamic between the preacher, the congregation, and the Holy Spirit, right?

That's the dynamic that you want. If you are overly dependent on a manuscript, you've just added another player into the equation. Now it's the preacher, the manuscript, the spirit, and the congregation. And so can you tell when somebody is preaching from a manuscript and is very dependent on it? So I went to a youth con, my wife, we go to the Reformed Baptist Riverside, Reformed Baptist Youth Conference in Riverside, California every year, we've done it every year.

My wife goes down early, she's always a chaperone, she loves the kids. It's a great time, Many of our kids have been saved at that over the years. And I would usually go that same weekend and teach at the Institute for Biblical Counseling and Discipleship and then preach at Jim Neuhuisers Church in the morning and then go over to Riverside in the afternoon. And I walk in and I lean over and I said to Ariel, I said, so how's it going? She goes, it's really good.

Like that, right? It's really good. But there's something off. And I sat there and I said, well, I lean over and he's reading his manuscript. People can tell.

Now the untrained person may not say, oh, he's reading a manuscript. The untrained person, though, will catch on to something that this is not happening. And what I want to urge you to think about is that in experiential preaching, this kind of eyeball-to-eyeball contact is absolutely crucial. Whoever told preachers to look at people's foreheads, that is the worst advice ever. Okay?

You are preaching to souls. Look them in the eye. You can't do that if your eyes glued to paper. Okay, number five, boring people with the Bible while pretending to be intellectual. I know, so I'm a confessional reformed Baptist, okay?

And we know what it is to pretend to be intellectual. Lecturing about the Bible, lecturing about theology, instead of preaching it with a warm heart will actually put your sermon in the emergency room and maybe even on life support. Okay? All right. Number six thing to avoid is bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in a windstorm.

Nobody, even the most diligent listener can follow and when they try they get whiplash. You've heard sermons like this. He's here, he's there, he's back there, he's over here. So, one of the things that we should excel in, or attempt to excel in, is simplicity in preaching. Read J.C.

Ryle on simplicity in preaching. Then my congregation won't know how smart I am. My congregation won't know that I've spent a long time in school. Well you're not there to display something about yourself. You're there to display Christ.

So simplicity in preaching. Simplicity but then also clarity. Now clarity is going to look a little different. So some people like to announce their points, right? Point number one, point number two, point number three.

And I'm not very good at that. Not very good at that because I'll say point number one and then forget to say point number two and then point number three. And then I'll say point number four. And then everybody's like, what happened to points number two and three right okay so but but so it doesn't depend on being able to march out the points if that's if that's what helps you with clarity great clarity is actually more than parading the points okay Clarity actually, simplicity is it's easy to understand. Clarity is it's easy to follow.

And we should strive for that. We really should. Number seven, this is a pet peeve. I guess all of these are pet peeves. Poor diction, enunciation, and poor voice projection detracts from edification in preaching.

Can I prove that from 1st Corinthians chapter 14? In order for edification to happen there has to be a distinct sound. And oftentimes what ends up happening, and we all do it to some degree or another, is we might mumble a little bit or we might run words together or we might leave a word off at the end, and I would say that we should collectively lament the lost art of elocution. Actually speaking in a way that is clear, understandable, intelligible, where we enunciate our words so that... Now, if you've got somebody from Scotland in their preaching and somebody leans over and says, what did they say?

That's one thing. But if you just speak good old American English and people are going, what did he say? You might want to rethink the way that you enunciate and project your voice. Number eight, big pitfall, preaching for 70 to 75 minutes because you think that what you have to say is so brilliant and then brag about it on social media saying I don't usually preach for 75 minutes, but boy when I do, it's fire. Read Spurgeon on long sermons, okay?

Sermons, okay? You have all kinds of circumstances. Now I usually preach for 50-55 minutes. There are occasion when I'll go over that, but here's the thing, if you can preach a sermon that's a little shorter, ended a little sooner than you normally do, it buys you a little goodwill when you go a little longer. If all you're known for is just going long, okay, even the most patient of God's people will be tested.

So for instance, you've got nursing moms and they're sitting there and you've gone on and on and on and on and on and on. And their milk's coming in. Or you have, if you're in a ranching community like we are, people are thinking I got to get back, I got to take care of the cows. So going for an hour and a quarter or an hour and a half is not a sign of sanctification. It actually may be a sign of poor preparation.

So Spurgeon used to tell his students if you want to preach shorter study better. Last one and this one maybe we'll talk about in the Q&A. I would say that to keep our preaching out of the hospital, we need to avoid extreme models or views. Two in particular, and I don't have time to develop these, but one would be an extreme law gospel approach to preaching. So do we believe in law and gospel?

The answer is of course we do. Of course we do. Is the law gospel distinction the homiletical pattern that we should follow for every sermon? And I would say no. We had a man preach in our church who was very committed to this.

He preached on the the parable of the Good Samaritan and he turned it into a law gospel sermon and by the end I had no idea what he was talking about. Not every text is a law gospel text, and so there is a way to create in a sense a false dichotomy in a text where that dichotomy does not exist. Now this other one is going to be a little closer to home maybe and that is an extreme view of redemptive historical preaching. I've already said that we should preach Christ from all of Scripture. Christ is the grand subject, but there is an approach to redemptive historical preaching that ends up virtually flatlining every text in the Bible, okay, and losing the beautiful contours that you have in the Revelation of redemptive history.

And so, if you're interested, I wrote a paper on this too, and thoughts on Christ-centered preaching in the era of Christ-centered preaching. And so here's, let me just say that one of the things that we end up inadvertently doing when we take an extreme view of this is two things. One, we end up treating the Old Testament in a way that the New Testament does not treat the Old Testament. So if I'm going to preach the Old Testament, is it okay if I treat the Old Testament like the New Testament treats the Old Testament? I would hope so.

So one of the big bogeymen in redemptive historical preaching is moralism or exemplary preaching. And I want to say if you read the New Testament, guess what you have? You have the New Testament frequently using Old Testament in exemplary manners. And so you could take a great Christocentric redemptive historical text like 1 Corinthians chapter 10, where Paul says that Christ was the rock. You can't get any more Christocentric than that.

Baptism going through the Red Sea, Passover, the Lord's Supper. These are huge redemptive historical themes. And then Paul says, and these things were written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the age have come so that we would not crave evil things like they did. It's both. Take Elijah.

Is Elijah a type of Christ? Yes. In his office as prophet, he's a type of Christ. James says, consider Elijah who had a nature just like ours and he prayed. Okay, so the first, in my estimation, the first big problem with extreme versions of redemptive historical preaching is that we end up doing things to text especially in the Old Testament that then or that we fail to do things with the text in the Old Testament that the New Testament is not afraid to do.

I mean, Hebrews 11, all right? Second is that there is a tendency in extreme forms of redemptive historical preaching that leaves application out of the sermon. Non-applicatory preaching. Why? Because the idea is your only job as the preacher is to point to Christ and then you let the spirit do the rest.

So we were in another part of our state and we were in a different church on the Lord's Day. It was Presbyterian Church, BCA Church, and there was a professor from a Southern California seminary in, well, I won't tell you the name of it, And the professor of homiletics was there, and he was preaching, and he had the text, Who do men say that I am? Awesome text. He gets to the end, and He's a practitioner of the redemptive historical approach. He gets to the end and he says, well, who do men say that I am?

He's the Christ. He's the Son of the living God. And I know that you believe that. Let's pray. I'm dying.

I want to get up and start preaching because I want to do what? I want to drive that question home. Who do you say Christ is? Just to leave and just say, well I presented Christ. So we can adopt, sometimes they're kind of trendy.

Podcasts, by the way I wish the internet would have never been invented but so these things will seriously hamper your preaching. Now let's talk about what will put it in the hospital or the morgue sorry. I have two things but maybe I'll only do one here. They're related. What will put our preaching in the morgue is forgetting the Holy Spirit.

And I'm going to argue that there's two primary ways that forgetting the Spirit manifests itself. The first is prayerlessness. Is prayerlessness. If I am not praying in my study, if I'm not praying over that text, If I'm not asking God for help, if I get up to preach that sermon and have not earnestly sought God, I'm in trouble. I am in trouble.

Sinclair Ferguson tells a story of this young seminary student in Scotland who was very, very gifted and was just so eager to preach and to share his gifts with the congregation. And of course, you know, in some of those Scottish Highland churches the you descend the pulpit, right? You go up the steps and And this guy was so excited to preach. He was really good at exegesis He was very good at theology and he had his sermon all neat and tidy. And he gets up out of his pew, and he goes bounding up the steps.

And the sermon bombs. And he knew it. He hangs his head, and he goes down the steps. He goes to the old wise pastor and he says, what happened? What went wrong?

And the old pastor said, If you'd have gone up like you came down, maybe you could have come down like you went up. Just that sense of dependence. I had an interesting experience Sunday morning. Of course, you're going to have on Resurrection Sunday, you're going to have visitors, right? And so we had 60, 75 visitors.

60, 75 visitors. And so there's a sense, man, I'm, this is, I want to preach the gospel. But I'm preaching through Romans, and I'm in Romans 14, And in Romans 14, in verses 9 and 10, you've got the resurrection. So I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stick with the text and then preach and focus more on that he died and came to life, okay, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.

And so I worked on it all week and I got up that Lord's Day morning and I'm looking at my outline and I'm... This is pathetic! You ever have that feeling? Like you're looking at it and you're like, bitch! If I was happy with this at any point of the week, this is terrible!

And you know what? I started praying. Like, Lord, there's going to be lost people there. You have to take this and make it into something different as it comes out. Right?

And God did. God did. God helped. And here's the thing, brothers, is that when we forget the Holy Spirit in preaching we will enter into a prayerlessness. But the second way that it manifests itself is this, is that there is a lack of conscientious dependence on the Spirit.

And so, and I've never been able to find this, but I read it in a book on preaching, and that is as Spurgeon walked up the steps to enter into the pulpit at the Met tab, he would, with each step, he would say, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the Holy Spirit. And what I want to say to us as men who are wary of an overemphasis on the Spirit in certain circles, and we kind of want to eschew that. I want to say that we can't fall off the other side of the horse.

If it weren't for the power of the Holy Spirit, none of us should ever preach another sermon. And you have to believe that. You have to believe that. And so if we forget the spirit, if we forget how dependent we are, have you ever been preaching and it's not in your notes, it's not a premeditated thought, you're preaching and something from the text opens to you. Have you ever had that happen?

Something from the text opens up that you didn't see in the course of the week or you say something. Now I'm going to tell you that's not prophecy but I will tell you that it's the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. We have to believe in the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to actually work in us and through us. And so let me just say, if your cessationism is so strict that you have no room for the Spirit actually helping you preach, the act of preaching, then cessationism is a sermon killer. And so prayerlessness and a lack of conscious dependence both will kill preaching.

Have you ever been preaching and you don't say it out loud because people would think that you were crazy, but then you just go, Lord, you got to help me. Have you ever said that? You get to this and you're like, Lord, please help me. Lord, they're drowsy. Lord, they're not with me.

You ever have something and all of a sudden there's just this, maybe some sort of disruption happens in church and all of a sudden nobody even is listening to you. Everybody's over here and you're like, Lord, Lord, help me, help me, help me, help me get them back, right? And so that conscious dependence that just breathes out in prayer. And so, brothers, in a group like this, I want to say that instead of being dependent on the Spirit, we can end up being dependent on good exegesis. We can end up being dependent on sound doctrine.

Do we want good exegesis? Yes. Hundred percent. Do we want sound doctrine? Yes.

In fact, if you don't have it, don't preach. Okay? But what I'm saying is, in our kind of circles, we can become dependent that I've exegeted the text, I've diagrammed the text, I've done my word studies, I'm actually, I'm just done the solid work, and boy, my doctrine is good. To preach the living word of God, that's not enough. We can be satisfied with, hey, I teach the Word.

We went through the text. I taught the Word. I explain the gospel regularly. That's great. Do you plead with souls?

The danger for us is that we can fall into an intellectualism, an academic approach that just turns us into rationalists. And see what's interesting is that we don't believe rationalism. We believe that in order for a person to be saved, God the Holy Spirit must do a supernatural work of regeneration in their hearts, must open their eyes, must give them a new heart. We believe those things. We believe those things credibly, but then we turn around and we preach as if we don't believe those things at all.

And so, you know, The rationalism is, you know, I've done the work. My doctrine is perfect, or at least almost. And what I'm doing is I'm just, I'm disseminating the truth. And in the end, We can end up becoming routine preachers who just preach routinely to our congregations who get accustomed to the routine. Very little prayer, very little sense of dependence on the Spirit.

Charles Bridges again he says to study and meditate much and to pray little. All. So brothers, let me just conclude by saying first of all, we must pray. We must pray. And it is easy to forget to pray, is it not?

Let us make sure that before we open up our books, before we lay out that text, that we pray. Prayer is the lifeline to the Spirit's power. Charles bridges again, nothing will give such power to our sermons as when they are the sermons of many prayers. Plead for the help and the power of the Holy Spirit. Lord, help me to see the text.

Help me to understand the text. If we think our understanding of the text is going to be limited to how good we are at exegesis and hermeneutics, then we are in sorry shape. Help me to taste the text. Help me to see the text. Open my eyes so that I can behold wonderful things from your word." Spurgeon says, "'Your prayers will be your ablest assistance while your sermons are still yet upon the anvils.

Texts will often refuse to reveal their treasures till you open them with the key of prayer. And then in good fashion as in the book of Acts, plead for help in the proclamation. God may we proclaim your word with power. Prayerfully depend upon that the Holy Spirit with the absolute confidence that If we who are evil know how to give good gifts to our children How much more will our Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask? Spurgeon again most preachers who depend upon God's spirit will tell you that their freshest and best thoughts are not those which are premeditated, but ideas which come to them flying as on the wings of angels.

I've never had that, but unexpected treasures brought on a sudden brought brought on sudden by celestial hands seeds of the flowers of paradise wafted from the mountains of myrrh of Spurgeon. This is simply what the old timers called unction. It's what they called the sacred anointing. And so we have to be careful. And then One last thing, not only pray, but plead with your congregation to pray for you.

Here's this new little baby congregation and Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5.25 and 2 Thessalonians 3.1, brethren pray for us. He didn't say, I'm an apostle, I'll pray for you. Brethren pray for us. And I'll just close with one last comment. I would rather deal with a clunky introduction, poor transitions, and yet someone whose heart is on fire and they've been with Jesus.

I'd rather have that than the smoothest, finest, homiletical specimens with polish. I'd rather have a man who has spent as much time on his knees as with the text than a man who's never been on his knees. Spurgeon says this, this is so convicting, he says, the minister who does not earnestly pray over his work must surely be a vain and conceited man. He acts as if he thought himself sufficient of himself and therefore needed not to appeal to God. Yet what a baseless pride to conceive that our preaching can ever be in itself so powerful that it can turn men from their sins and bring them to God without the working of the Holy Ghost.

Brothers, let us keep our sermons certainly out of the hospital, but most definitely keep them out of the morgue. Let's pray. Father, we pray for every man here who preaches your word and ask that you would use them mightily in their congregations and Father we pray that your word would run and be glorified in our churches for the glory of our Savior in whose name we pray, amen.