Four Convictions for Preaching to Youth

Teenagers need to sit under the regular preaching of God’s Word. At minimum, this means on Sunday morning with their local church. It may also include another gathering during the week where students come together to hear the Word taught from their student pastor. For those who have been entrusted by the Good Shepherd to regularly feed students with the Word of God, I want to offer four convictions for your consideration.

1. Commit to preach expositionally over topically. There are student ministry tools and websites that exist to help you teach the Word of God and even have prepackaged sermons ideas and outlines made for you. While these may offer some help, they can often become a crutch. It often seems that these tools are designed to help student pastors preach topically rather than training us to do the hard work of exposition. This convenience tempts us to compromise our God given responsibility to feed the sheep.

Commit to feed Christ’s sheep with the implanted Word which is able to save their souls (Jam 1:21). Give yourself to the hours it takes to find the Christ-centered meaning and the heart-transforming application of the text. Consider preaching through whole books of the Bible, or large sections, with your students. Consider how fruitful it would be to spend twelve weeks walking through Galatians. Maybe take a whole school year and preach through 1 Corinthians. I encourage student pastors to spend time to plan out a preaching calendar designed specifically to shepherd the students entrusted to your care. This is not wasted time. I suggest it is your main form of discipleship.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne said, “The grand work of the minister, in which he is to lay out his strength of body and mind, is preaching.”1

2. Pursue Christlikeness over being cool. Far too many student pastors are seeking to reach their students by trying too hard to be like them. The temptation is that if we wear certain brands, or use Gen Z words, or make certain cultural references, that somehow this will help us reach students. May we not be surprised when this doesn’t seem to work. I find that students are actually starving to hear the word from a humble man who has spent hours with Christ. They want to hear the Word of God from someone who loves Christ and is pursuing holiness. Your aim is to please Christ, not man (Gal 1:10). When we go preach, can our students tell that we have been walking closely with Christ this week, or do they only see someone trying to promote themselves? We can trust the Lord will use our Christlikeness to impact our students as it overflows from us in our preaching. M’Cheyne said, “It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus.”2

3. Radically depend on the Word over technology. It is easy to flood sermons with video clips, or to use ChatGPT to help us with our illustrations or applications. I encourage you to refrain from this. Let us be pastors of integrity who depend on the Word and the Spirit to equip us with everything we need to do his will (Heb. 13:21). God promises that his Word shall not return void, but it shall accomplish his purpose (Isa. 55:11).

It is not that every use of technology in the sermon is wrong. Rather, we must simply ask the question: What am I depending upon? Are we throwing ourselves completely onto the Word to do the work? Consider how you might trim your sermons of anything that could throw cold water on the fire of the Word.

4. Captivate their attention spans over catering to them. It seems to be that we are often told to remember that we preach to teens who have limited attention spans. But are we catering too much to this? What if we trusted the Lord to sanctify those shorter attention spans in the pew? The focus of a 13-year-old can, and should be, trained and strengthened. I suggest that instead of lowering the bar, we raise the bar by giving them something glorious to captivate their attention.

What if the reason students often disengage during the sermon has less to do with attention spans or more to do with the quality of the preaching? It seems the reason they check out is because they have stopped being captivated.

Students can be captivated by a show on Netflix for hours without looking away. There will be teenagers that naturally have trouble focusing during the sermon. But that does not mean they can’t do it. They just need to be captivated by a greater treasure.

What’s the answer? Preach Christ with passion. Preach Christ with clarity. Preach Christ with conviction! Give them a clear outline to latch on to and teach them how to take notes. This will keep them engaged. Show them in the text where you are getting your points. They will track along with you. Teach them big doctrinal truths, like substitutionary atonement and justification by faith, and show them how it transforms their week.

If we expect little of our students, we may get little in return. But if we expect much of our students, knowing that Christ is in them and he will help them, we may be blown away by how the Lord transforms them into his image.

[1] Bonar, Andrew A. Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2012), 400–01.

[2] Bonar. Memoir and Remains, 282.