Every sermon should answer the question raised in the text, but often preachers answer the one they walked in with rather than the one the passage asks.
Example: You have been carrying something on your heart all week. A conversation that went badly. A pattern you keep seeing in the congregation. A book you just finished. By Saturday it becomes the burden of the sermon, and the text gets recruited to address it.
The problem: the passage had its own burden, and the sermon preached past it.
Bryan Chapell calls this the Fallen Condition Focus, the specific condition in the listener that this passage exists to address. Not just the human condition in general, but the specific one in the text. Hebrews 3 is written to people in danger of drifting from what they once held. Psalm 73 is written to a man watching the wicked prosper and losing his footing. Each text names a burden, and the sermon ought to strive to show how the gospel answers it.
Pro-tip: If the burden you preach would fit any passage, it probably came from you and not your text.
Now, to be fair, a borrowed burden usually comes from real pastoral instinct. You know your people and you know what they are facing. That instinct is not the problem. The problem is when it replaces the text's diagnosis with your own. A congregation fed on the burdens in your heart might learn more about you over a year than they do about the Scriptures.
The discipline is answering one question before you outline: Why did this passage need to be written? Not what does it teach, but what was wrong that this text addresses? Answer it from the passage, in the passage's own terms, before you reach for anything from your week.
Then keep going, because naming the burden is only half the work. The reason to find it is that the gospel speaks to that very burden. Find the burden and you have found the shape of the grace the passage is offering, which is why this criterion sits next to gospel clarity rather than next to application.
The burden is not your idea, it comes from the text. And so does the relief in the form of the gospel.
Let the text name what is wrong, then drive toward the one who died and rose again to lift it.
New this week: a Tuesday email, if you want it. One prompt to look back at Sunday and one to start the next one. Turn it on under Account.