I love Twitter. For some reason Twitter seems to fit me. I like brief, to the point, and concise.

I’m not sure I have always been a brief, to the point, and concise kind of person. Maybe I have been preaching so long that it has made me a perfect fit for Twitter.

What is it that Twitter can help us with preaching?

First, sermons should have one and only one point. Some people call this “hammer and nail” preaching. The preacher takes the nail–the point of the sermon–and hammers the point again and again.

If the preacher can’t communicate the point of the sermon, how will the listeners ever be able to do so?

Twitter has hashtags that give you the subject in a word or phrase. The preacher should be able to do the same. There’s an old joke that asks what the sermon is “about.” The answer: “It’s about thirty minutes.”

We who preach the gospel should always be aware of what the sermon is about. Those who hear should be able to quickly communicate the point of the sermon. I always feel good about sermons that elementary age children can understand. When children can put the message into a word or two, the preacher has communicated well.

Second, good sermons can be summarized easily and concisely. Twitter has to put the message into a concise sentence of 140 characters or less. My preaching professor, the late James Taylor, taught his students to do exactly that. He wanted us to to be able to summarize the sermon in a brief, concise sentence.

Harold Bryson, another student of James Taylor and my colleague at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, taught his students to give the “Essence of the Sermon in a Sentence.” He shortened this to ESS.

Third, sermons are about the present not the past. James Taylor taught us to use concise points that are easy to remember, and he wanted the points to be in the “now.” By “now” he meant to speak to the audience today. Preaching is not a history lesson or even a Bible lesson, it is a message from God about how to live and follow Him.

May God bless you and those who hear you as you take God’s message to a “Twitter” world.

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