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1.  Passion —  Passion doesn’t mean that you have to rant and rave, but it does mean that you should show some conviction about what you’re preaching. There is a flaw in my nature: I don’t keep listening if I’m not interested in the communicator in the first 5 minutes.
2.  Prayer — I didn’t include this because I was supposed to, but because it is the lifeblood of our sermon preparation.  As pastors, we can easily forget to pray.  Prayer can quickly become something we do instead of part of who we are.  Prayer needs to be at the forefront of our sermon preparation.  If God’s Word is the source of our preaching, then God should be the source that we seek to lead us.
3.  Planning — Regarding sermon writing, some pastors must stop claiming that their laziness is God’s Spirit at work.  Sometimes God throws a curve ball, and you must change your sermon last minute. Planning honors God, and God honors planning. The next time you have a Sunday where you’re not preaching, spend time that week acting as if you were and write a sermon for the following Sunday.  Your sermon is already done the following week, or at least the nuts and bolts of it, and you can work on the following Sunday.  All of a sudden, you are two Sundays ahead in sermon prep.  Being ahead in my sermon planning has been my greatest liberator in sermon preparation.
4.  People — Any sermon that is not focused on the needs of the people is not worth preaching. It’s only when I focus on the needs of the people that I preach anything worth listening to.  If I preach what I feel and not what the people need, I may as well be preaching to an empty room.
5. Purpose — What do you want people to do with your message?  If there is no next step for the people to take, then what was the point of preaching the message in the first place?  You must have a clearly defined message purpose.  When you’re done, what do you want people to walk away and do?  Don’t overthink it.  Finding purpose in a sermon doesn’t have to be painful for you. It just needs to be practical for them.
6.  Precision —  This is where much of the hard work pays off.  When you deliver a sermon, why have the text to begin with if you are not faithful to the text?  There is room for interpretation on some things in Scripture that maybe you or I should agree on, but we need to be precise in dividing God’s Word.  I better preach this passage God has laid before us precisely.  I want to do my best every week to rightly divide God’s Word to His people.
7.  Power —  This is the one I have no control over.  This is the part that I cannot generate and cannot manipulate.  This is the part that I beg God for every single week. “Lord, send YOUR power!” 

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