Satan is a boring preacher
From Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as a preaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church, where he ministers weekly at the congregation’s Fegenbush location.
The best way to outwit the Evil One is to anticipate how his powers will seek to counter-act your preaching. It’s helpful for me to think as I’m preparing to preach of all the ways my own heart seeks to evade the truth of the text. Once, as I was studying to preach on a Beatitude, I realized that I was treating the text exactly the way a liberal would treat a passage forbidding women in the pastorate: “Well, it can’t mean that, what it appears to say, so…”
The more you know your people, their struggles and triumphs, and the more you know human nature, the better you’ll know how to preach sermons that can pierce through strongholds, and gain attention. That doesn’t guarantee that people will like what you say; but it helps ensure they’ll hear it being said.
Also, remember you are speaking for Christ. There’s a passion and a gravity that ought to come with one standing in the place of the One who has been granted all authority.
Beyond that, but a sermonic information dump—with PowerPoint outline point by sub-point by sub-sub-point can “safely” distance your people from Christ. A sermon that simply collates and regurgitates what you’ve read in commentaries can make the Word of God a matter of cognition not submission. A strung-together list of life tips can make it easy for your people to disregard this word just like they disregard the weight loss plans commercials on television or the flossing ad campaigns they see from the dentist’s chair.
The devil doesn’t mind boring sermons, so long as you allow him to preach too. He’s doesn’t mind the Word being heard so long as it’s the appetites that really enliven his people. And he doesn’t mind the gospel going forward as long as God’s people hear his accusations of them (and they’re all expository and biblically-based!).
But if you grip people with the drama of the gospel of Christ, if you jolt them into seeing the ancient newness of the Word of God, then you’ll have a demonic insurrection on your hand.
You preach verse-by-verse through the text? You do well. The demons, they preach also—and they’re boring.