When you come to a homiletical fork in the road, take it.

Presuming that you are presenting the right basic content, there is one major challenge to preaching effectively: crafting the message so it has an impact on all the listeners. Any audience is made up of a spectrum of people ranging from those who know nothing about the Bible to those who are extremely familiar with it. Since both need to be reached by a good sermon, the trick is to simultaneously make the Bible both more familiar and less familiar.

To those who do not know it at all, preaching reveals what is new and therefore unknown. But to those who know it well, preaching needs to reveal what is unknown precisely because it is not new. The Bible is intrinsically shocking to the new believer, but it needs to become at least mildly surprising again to the old one. Ignorance and familiarity are thus both obstacles, the challenge being to help some people see it at all and others to see it afresh.

It’s never enough to reach only the one or the other. Really effective preaching forces itself to find a way to reach them both simultaneously.