Here is a test that costs nothing but it might sting.
Take last Sunday's manuscript and delete every sentence that mentions Christ. Read what is left. If the sermon still holds together, still makes sense, still tells the congregation what to do on Monday, then you did not preach a Christian sermon. You preached an ethical one, maybe. But the gospel was not the life transforming power surging out of it.
The problem: Christ arrives in the last ninety seconds rather than being arrived at through the text.
Most of us know better than to preach raw moralism outright. So we build the sermon on the passage, work the application honestly, and then, near the end, turn to the cross. It feels like faithfulness.
Bryan Chapell's point is that the passage itself provides the path to the cross. Not a leap, not a formula applied at the end, but a legitimate route from what this text says about the human condition to what God has done about it in Christ. The redemptive arc is not something you add to the sermon. It is the shape the sermon already has if you follow the text far enough.
Pro-tip: If the gospel could be removed without breaking the sermon, the sermon was not built correctly.
Now, to be fair, the end-of-sermon-bolt-on usually comes from good instinct too. You know the sermon needs Christ in it. You are not willing to send people home with just a to-do list and call it preaching. So you make sure he gets in before the benediction. The instinct is right. The placement is what fails.
The discipline is to find the route before you write the application, not after. Ask what this passage says is broken, then ask what God has done about that specific brokenness. Hebrews 3 warns about drifting, and the same passage names Christ as the faithful Son over God's house who does not drift. The warning and the remedy are in the same six verses. Trace that line first. Then write the application, and it will come out sounding like response rather than requirement.
A sermon that ends at 'try harder' has told the truth about the problem and lied about the solution.
Preach the passage until it arrives where it was always going — the power and sufficiency and supremacy of Christ.