What’s in this Episode?

Wow, that was a great sermon pastor. I really can’t remember what it was exactly all about. But it was great. You’ve heard that before. Maybe you’ve said it before. Well, today’s episode of church tips, I want to talk to you about my three all time favorite, most memorable sermons. In fact, we’ll discuss Dick’s all time favorite sermons.

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Read the Transcript

Jonathan Hardy 0:23
Hey, I want to welcome you to this episode today. We are excited to have you with us. We’re gonna be doing something a little bit different today. This is gonna be fun.

Dick Hardy 0:29
It should be, yeah, hopefully, hopefully.

Jonathan Hardy 0:31
I know, it will be. I’m excited about it. So today, we’re gonna be talking about Dick’s favorite sermons. Yep, we’re gonna reverse engineer some of these favorite sermons of yours, why they’re your favorites. So that way for you as the listener, you’ll be able to then think through as you develop future sermons, what you can be doing to help make your sermon stand out. I think for all of us, as communicators of the gospel, we want to continue to work to improve our communication. Obviously, the Bible, in and of itself, is powerful and effective at communicating what we need to hear as listeners, but when we, as the preachers can do what we can, to do better at that, that only makes it absolutely more powerful, more effective for people as they are listening to the preaching. And so we’re going to be diving into these. In fact, over the next three episodes, 77, 78 and 79, we’re going to be breaking down some more stuff related to the ins and outs, the nuts and bolts of sermons, and how those can be more effective. For the listeners. But with that being said, for today, we’re going to be diving into Dick’s top sermons. So you ready to go?

Dick Hardy 1:37
I’m ready to go.

Jonathan Hardy 1:38
So what’s one of the ones that’s at the top for you?

Sermon #1

Dick Hardy 1:39
Well, we’re gonna start in chronological order. We’re gonna start back when you were about two, or maybe zero or something, but we’re talking on the 80’s. We’re talking the 80s, early 80s, I worked for a guy named David Crabtree, and he preached a sermon entitled, “What to Do if You Miss The Rapture.” And I’m telling you, that message, obviously, was what you should do if you miss the rapture. The whole point of it was don’t the rapture. Don’t miss it. So, but it was a fascinating and creative title. Yes, that really grabbed people’s attention. And I mean to tell you, we had a packed house. That was back in the day, when we had Sunday night services. And I mean, we had the lower level, the balcony was packed. People were bringing chairs down the aisle. You know, preachers always love it when they’re bringing chairs down the ailse. And then pastor Crabtree had us create the (there was no digital back there friends), it was cassette tapes. Well, we’re selling those little cassette tapes, that normally we’d sell for like three bucks. And he said, “I want to make a couple thousand of those and sell them for a buck.” And so after, you know, as soon as they did that people are placing orders $20, $25, $50, where they get a whole bundle of these cassettes to give out their friends and family. So you can’t afford to miss the Rapture. You need to listen to this. Or if you do miss the rapture, now listen to this tape, because it’s gonna tell you what to do. Because you missed it. Yeah, so I’m gonna just had all that going. And what, I guess what I observed with that Jonathan was that he was a creative communicator. And there are varying levels of creativity in pastors/preachers, I understand. But he really, he really took the time to think through what was going to captivate the minds and hearts of people. And I would say, for pastors, we need to be doing that all the time. You’re not gonna be able to get a bell ringer every Sunday, right? But there are times where you can do something that the Lord speaks to your heart and, and present it in a creative way that really captures the heart of people.

Dick Hardy 1:40
Yeah, so it’s really some kind of a hook that grabs our attention. It says, “Ooh, I cannot miss that.”

Dick Hardy 3:58
I cannot afford to miss that at all.

Jonathan Hardy 4:01
Yeah. So I think that’s a really good thing to be thinking through as you develop, once your sermon develops, is like, “What’s the hook? Right? What’s the thing that people are wanting that your message is going to answer for them?” Yeah, that’s good. Okay, so what’s another one?

Sermon #2

Dick Hardy 4:16
Second one. Okay. We’re gonna move on to the 80s and into the 90s.

Jonathan Hardy 4:19
Okay, I know about the 90’s.

Dick Hardy 4:20
So 1994, I went to the first Promise Keepers, for a little history, a little church history for people, that filled a football stadium. So, it filled Folsom Stadium out where the University of Colorado played football. And Jack Hayford was a preacher on Saturday morning. Now it was stinking hot out. It was like 90 degrees at 10 o’clock in the morning. And I’m sitting out on basically what would be the 50 yard line. They got all these chairs on the field. And this buddy of mine, Dave and I are down there. And the message from Jack Hayford was an acrostic, the word praise. Okay, so PRAISE. Now I can’t even really tell you the depth of the total content of that message. So to discourage you pastor, you preach your heart out, and people think it’s a great sermon, but they really don’t remember what you said.

Dick Hardy 4:28
But you remember the word praise.

Dick Hardy 4:57
But I remember the word praise. And the issue here was where my heart was. My heart spiritually, was cold and dry to the things of the Lord. I knew the Lord but I mean, he felt like a million miles away. And so what Jack Hayford had to say that day penetrated my heart, in a place where where I was at. And the point I want to make for pastors here, is you’re gonna go in and preach a message on something. And then the Lord is going to speak to someone on something else. You’re gonna preach a message, pick a title, on love. Somebody comes up afterwards. “Oh, Pastor, man, I appreciate that message on love, or appreciate that message on tithing. I mean, that really, really helped me.” And you’re going “What?” You know, you preached on love, but they heard something else. Why? Because their heart was open and ready to receive. The Word does not return void. So my challenge for you, why this is important to me, and my challenge to every pastor is, no matter what you’re preaching, do it full on, with the Holy Spirit’s anointing, and blessing. And the Holy Spirit is the one that does the work. None of us are really good enough to talk people in or out of things. But every Sunday of life, there’s somebody coming to your church, whose heart is open to something. And the Word that the Lord has placed in your mind and heart and lips to speak, is exactly what they need.

Jonathan Hardy 6:53
So the first one really sticks out because there was that hook. The second one sticks out to you because it met you where you were in that moment. And there’s a lot of people out there where that’s the case. What’s the third one?

Sermon #3

Dick Hardy 7:05
Third one, okay 80s, 90s. We’re going to skip the 2000s. No, no offense to the 2000s. But so, we’re gonna jump all the way up to 2019. Okay, 2019. August. I’m sitting in our church, at James River Church and John Lindell preached a message on The Law of the Harvest. Now, it happened to be the second message in a three-part series during the capital campaign they were doing. And here’s the gist of it. The gist of it was he had someone come up on the stage, and he put a kernel of seed, corn seed in their hand. He said, “Hold on to it.” And then he said, “How much seed can that seed produce while it’s in your hands?” Of course, the answer is nothing, right? So, keep holding on to it, because you can’t afford to lose that. And of course, he makes the point, you keep hanging on to it, that thing’s going nowhere. Then he makes the point, “Well, go ahead and release it.” Now goes into the ground. And now the corn can begin to reproduce with the earth, the water, the sun. And so then he says, “Okay, open your hand again.” He puts some more seed in and says, Okay, hang on to, then release it, and then more and then release, and more. Well, before he’s done, he’s up there, and he’s got this, you know, super, like five-gallon container of corn seed, and he’s dumping it on this women’s hand, and she’s just receiving and dropping and receiving. And he’s talking about the law of the harvest, and thinking, “Oh, my goodness, this message!” Now, you know, we’ve told you, Jonathan is our son. Mom and I have tithed all our life. We’ve given to missions all our life. We’ve ran into capital campaigns all our life. So, giving was not a new concept. But that message, talking about the law of the harvest, and what we could do with what God gives us, moved us to a whole new level. So John’s message preached, in a sense of motivating us to do what we already knew was right to do at a brand new level.

Jonathan Hardy 9:06
Okay. So, that’s the direction of the Lord or what would you say is the thing on this one that…

Dick Hardy 9:15
Well, the thing is to know that they, your people know to give. They know to be in the Word, they know to pray. They know to be in community, they know to serve. But our role as preachers is to communicate those very simple, fundamental, basic things to people to levels that will take them higher than they ever went before. So, it’s the sense of motivation. Now you know, granted, John is a motivating speaker, and pastors listening to this, watching this, you know, they can be here, they can be there, they can be here in terms of that. But you’re asking the Holy Spirit to use what He’s put in your heart, to really speak and and lift people in the motivation. So I mean, the three things to recap this. The first is the, was the message that was so creative and created a hook that people said, “I want that.” And your message is that important that you need that good hook. The second one was important, because of where the hearer was at. And you have hearers in your church every Sunday, that their heart’s open to whatever the Lord has given you to speak, even if it’s not on the subject that you’re speaking on. And the third one is the motivation, the biblical motivation to go to levels that you’ve never been before.

Jonathan Hardy 10:35
So that’s good. Yeah. So those are Dick’s favorite sermons.

Dick Hardy 10:38
Top three of all time.

Jonathan Hardy 10:40
And hopefully, that’s encouraging for you, as you think about reverse engineering some of these concepts that we talked about today. We want to mention too, that tomorrow is a very special day. And pretty exciting. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what’s happening tomorrow.

Dick Hardy 10:52
Tomorrow, we open up the preaching track of Church University. You know, leaders.church has a partnership with Church University. And if you’ll go to ChurchUniversity.com tomorrow, and gonna click on the preaching track icon, you’re going to find a complete, I mean complete, comprehensive, A to Z course on preaching. And if you preach on a regular basis, you know. You know it , I know it. We all want to get better at preaching. And this course, I’m just telling you, is going to cover it all. It’s going to cover the spiritual aspects, the technical aspects, I mean, everything we’re talking about, everything from being compelling to being reflective. We’re talking about how you use your notes, how you do illustrations, how you dissect the Word of God, how you close what you do. I mean, it just it does the whole thing. Yeah. And I’ll tell you, it is so comprehensive, this is not going to be a deal where you pick it up, and you’re done this weekend. Yeah, I mean, it is gonna take your time. And I would say, for anybody who preaches on a regular basis, that you, you pick up this resource, and then you use it with your team. If you have others. Maybe you have an assistant pastor or youth pastor who speaks to other groups in the church. Yeah, everybody on your team can benefit from this. Yeah, absolutely. I’m beyond excited about tomorrow, it opens university.com.

Jonathan Hardy 12:18
It’s gonna be awesome. And it’s it’s, I mean, it’s basically a college level type.

Dick Hardy 12:23
It really is.

Jonathan Hardy 12:23
is a legit course, for pastors. And it’s very relevant to where people are today.

Dick Hardy 12:30
Well, and we put with it, we’ve got a boatload of bonuses in there that aren’t worth I don’t know how much. I mean, it’s just a sermon, sample sermons, sample series outlines, we’ve got the calendar, sermon calendar, a template for you to use. So you’re just going to find a bunch of great value in there. That’s going to help you be better. We’ve got discussion guides that go along the way, they’re going to help you drill in and pull out of yourself what’s in you after you watch the videos.

Jonathan Hardy 13:00
Yeah, that’s good. Well, we want to thank you for being with us today. If you have not yet subscribed, either on our YouTube channel or on whatever podcast platform you are listening to this, please subscribe. We want to continue to get the word out and make you up to date with all the current and latest tips and tricks here from Church Tips. So it’s right. All right. Well, with that being said, we will look forward to seeing you next time. Until then take care and be blessed.

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