Sermon Central
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Better Ingredients, Better Preaching
By Peter Mead on Dec 3, 2025
Even slight shifts in tone, focus, or structure can distort a sermon’s flavor. Guard the gospel, preach the text, and let Scripture, not your outline, set the menu.
Better Ingredients, Better Preaching
A single ingredient can change everything. I learned that the first time I tasted American-made Nutella, same jar, same label, but somehow not the same product. One small change in oil altered the whole experience. Preaching works the same way. You can use the same passage, the same illustrations, and the same amount of time, but a subtle tweak in tone, focus, or structure can shift the entire flavor of the sermon. If we drift from good news, preach our ideas instead of the text, or force Scripture into a pre-made outline, we don’t end up with a better sermon, we end up with a distorted one.
I spent my first few years in Italy. One enduring result of this is a long-term liking for Nutella. The original and best chocolate hazelnut spread! Australians might love their Vegemite and the Americans their peanut butter, but this European can’t get away from Nutella. Except when I see it in American shops, that is.
In recent years I have seen it appearing in the grocery store during my visits to the US, and have bought a jar or two. Same jar, same wrapping, same color, but not the same taste. One ingredient is different, just the oil. One ingredient on a long list, but it makes a difference. The same is true with preaching. One ingredient modified slightly and the whole product can taste wrong.
Here are three examples of tweaks that might ruin preaching:
1. Tweaking the tone from good news.
Same passage, same illustrations, same length of sermon, but if you replace the good news aspect of the message with pressure to conform, guilt for failure or legalistic righteousness, I guarantee the message won’t taste the same!
2. Tweaking “of” to “from.”
This is a common one. Instead of passionately pursuing the preaching of the message of the text, many preachers choose instead to preach their message from the text. That is, they use the biblical text as a starting point, but at the end the listeners don’t feel they know the text any better than at the beginning. Don’t preach from a text, preach the text. (I think this is the hardest one to spot in a mirror—every preacher thinks they are explaining the text. Perhaps you should ask someone who knows the Bible well and be ready to listen to what they tell you!)
3. Tweaking the text to fit an outline.
Some preachers don’t go near this neighborhood; some seem to live there. It's where the text is twisted slightly to help it fit in a certain outline. Perhaps a three-point alliterated outline. Is that really what the writer was doing in the text? Was that his intended outline? If not, you may leave a sour taste for listeners who sense that you’ve done a bit of a number on the text!
These feel like relatively small adjustments, but they leave a very different impression.
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