"Whatever you are walking through this week, God is with you."
The line sounded very pastoral. Nobody disagrees. Nobody is moved either, because a sentence built to fit every situation fits no situation closely enough.
The problem: application that generically addresses everyone convicts no one.
Tim Keller argued that a preacher should be able to name the specific kinds of people present and address them differently, because a passage does not land the same way on a woman in her third year of caring for a dying parent and on the man beside her who was passed over for a job he wanted. Same text, same room, two different Tuesdays. A sermon that speaks to the average of those two people speaks to neither.
Pro-tip: If your application would comfort everyone in the congregation equally, you have not applied it to anyone.
Now, the instinct behind this is understandable. You do not want to single anyone out. You don't want the couple who stopped coming to small group to think the whole sermon was aimed at them. So the language widens until it is safe, but safe application is application that moves nobody to repentance.
The discipline is to name two or three specific applications, not twenty. Before you write the application, list the actual situations in your congregation this passage speaks into. Not demographics. Situations. The elder who is tired. The man nine months unemployed who has stopped telling people he is looking. The young mother who cannot remember the last time she read anything longer than a text. Then write to two or three of them by situation, out loud, in the sermon.
Two things happen when you do. The specific kind of people you named know the sermon spoke to them. And the kinds of people you did not name learn that this preaching is the kind that matters for real people, which makes them listen differently next week.
Specificity is not narrowing the sermon. It is acknowledging that the congregation is not one monolithic person.
Preach to the people who are actually there.