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Home Preaching to Students? 5 Ways to Make It Work

Preaching to Students? 5 Ways to

Make It Work
Adam Ramsey

The high calling of every parent and preacher is to faithfully pass on the baton of
faith to the next generation. Here are five ways to make the message stick.
Over the past decade, I have had many opportunities to open the Bible and preach to
young people in a huge range of settings and cultures. While I have previously
written on some of the most common ways I have bombed a sermon (and seen many
other young preachers do likewise), I have also learned some helpful practices along
the way that can help your message stick.

The Gospel Is the Power

These practices are intentionally pragmatic, but they are of little use if the message
being preached is anything other than the gospel. Only the gospelthe good news
of the finished work of Jesus, on the cross, in our place, for our sinshas the Spiritpropelled power to make dead hearts live.
In all our ministry to young people, the gospel should never be assumed, but
declared boldly and repeatedly. Your church is only ever one generation away from
extinction, and the high calling of every parent and preacher is to faithfully pass on
the baton of faith to the next generation.
So what follows are five practical sermon-wins I strive to remember when
preaching the gospel to a younger crowd.

1. Be Interactive
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If youve been in student ministry for more than seven seconds, you know that
keeping the attention of a room full of teenagers can feel like herding caffeinated
squirrels. A vital part of preaching to students is repeatedly engaging and involving
them in the sermon. There are many ways to do this, but two of my favorites are:
a. Asking questions. Short bursts of dialogue and well-placed questions throughout
a sermon both challenge our minds and engage our attention. When speaking to a
crowd of young people, I tend to use a mixture of rhetorical and literal questions
that involve them in the message. For example, I might say, The Bible is not a
book about many heroes, but one hero. Whats his name? Thats right, Jesus!
b. Encourage note-taking. The person who just listens to a sermon will never
retain as much as the one who listens and writes down what they heard. Writing
down your big take-aways from a sermon greatly increases your likelihood of
applying them to your life. I encourage our volunteer leaders to sit among their
students (rather sitting with other leaders or standing around the back) so that they
can model this to their students.

2. Be Simple
Simple doesnt mean shallow. May youth ministries be done forever with
watered-down sermons that merely entertain, share, woo, intellectualize or
abbreviate the Word of God! A simple sermon is one where the Bible is preached in
such a way that its truth is understood and remembered.
For me, the hardest part of preparing a sermon is not working out what to say, but
what to leave out. Let me particularly address those who learned to preach in
seminary or Bible college: the goal of a sermon is not revealing what you have
learned about the Scriptures, but imparting what you have learned to your listeners
(2 Tim. 2:2).
You can take your young people much deeper into the Scripture than you think; the
key is doing it in a language they understand. You can teach a deep concept; just
illustrate it. You can use a big Christian word; just explain it. Otherwise you might
feel like you nailed your systematic theology, but your students will have mentally
checked-out faster than a husband being forced to attend a birthing class (this is a
theoretical analogy and in no way related to that one time I fell asleep on the front
row of our first childs birthing class).
Youth leader: Preach the deep truths of Scripture in a way that a 14-year-old will
remember.

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3. Be Repetitive
Memorable preaching hammers home the hook.
An important part of preaching biblical truth in an unforgettable way is boiling
down your sermon to a one-sentence hook. This is the nail that gets hammered
home again and again and again throughout the message. If someone only
remembers one thing from the message, your hook is what you want them to
remember. Memorable preaching hammers home the hook.
When people ask me what I am preaching on, my go-to response is, Jesus. Once
Ive sufficiently annoyed them with my Jesus-juke, my next response will be
whatever the hook of my message is. For example, a sermon on sanctification and
growing as a Christian might have the hook, Fruit happens slowly, but fruit
happens. If you have finished writing your sermon, but you are unable to explain it
in one sentence, you havent finished writing your sermon.
Make space in your sermon prep to craft, edit, meditate on, and re-edit this line until
it finally takes up residence in your head like an unwelcome Taylor Swift song.
Why?
Because memorable preaching hammers home the hook.

4. Be One Step Ahead

Preaching to young people should not only communicate the truth of what the Bible
says, but also anticipate and answer their resistance to this truth, much like a master
chess-player or UFC fighter who sees several moves ahead and strikes accordingly.
Tim Keller, a master of this kind of preaching, explains this further:
Just giving the what (for example, a vivid gospel presentation) worked in the days
when the cultural institutions created an environment in which Christianity just felt
true or at least honorable. But in a post-Christendom society, in the marketplace of
ideas, you have to explain why this is true, or people will just dismiss it.
Now more than ever before, the place of apologetics in youth ministry sermons is
critical if we are to equip our students to flourish in an increasingly post-Christian
culture. My goal in preaching is to point them to Jesus and blow up every excuse I
can think of that might keep them from him. Like an offensive lineman clearing a
path for their running back, apologetics removes the debris of young peoples
objections to the message of the gospel. I am constantly asking myself the question,
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Why would they reject what Im saying?

Too many of our young people graduate from their Christian convictions when they
graduate from high school, because their faith had been based on experiences and
feelings instead of being grounded in timeless truth, with reasonable answers to the
big questions of our day.
One of the foremost Christian apologists of our time, William Lane Craig, speaks to
youth leaders on the importance of apologetics,writing:
Its insufficient for youth groups and Sunday school classes to focus on
entertainment and simpering devotional thoughts. Weve got to train our kids for
war. We dare not send them out to public high school and university armed with
rubber swords and plastic armor. The time for playing games is past.
If the discipline of apologetics is new to you, I recommend the following books to
get you started:
a. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, by Timothy Keller
b. Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction, by John Frame
c. Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, by William Lane Craig

5. Be Sincere
Martyn Lloyd-Jones famously described preaching as theology coming through a
man who is on fire. What our generation needs is preachers who not only possess
the truth, but who are possessed by the truth.
George Whitefield was such a man, and is widely considered one of the greatest
preachers of the past two thousand years. At the age of 24, Whitefield quickly
became known for the earnestness with which he delivered his sermons. Over the
next few years, he would often preach to crowds of up to 30,000 in the open air
without amplification, and then afterwards go backstage to spit up blood because of
the strain on his voice. This self-professed fool for Christ once said,
Oh that ministers would preach for eternity! They would then act the part of true
Christian orators, and not only calmly and coolly inform the understanding, but, by
persuasive, pathetic address, endeavor to move the affections and warm the heart.
John Stott recounts the story of when the agnostic philosopher David Hume was

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seen rushing off to hear Whitefield preach:

A friend met him hurrying along a London street and asked him where he was
going. Hume replied that he was going to hear George Whitefield preach. But
surely, his friend asked in astonishment, you dont believe what Whitefield
preaches, do you? No, I dont, answered Hume, but he does.
Sincerity goes a long way in preaching the gospel. A sermon to young people
should never be flippant, cowardly, or boring, but branded with the earnestness of a
messenger who has been captivated by their message. If we have the greatest news
that history will ever record, then the sincerity of our tone should reflect the majesty
of our truth.

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