Every preacher has a move for the hard verse. Mine used to be caveats. I would name the difficulty, say something true but general about God's character, and then pile up reasons why the verse can't mean what you think it means.
The problem: the hard thing gets acknowledged rather than preached.
You know the verses. The ones about judgment, or hell, or God hardening a heart, or the command that costs something a person in your church is not currently willing to pay. The text puts them in front of you and the sermon handles them the way you would handle a hot pan, briefly and with a towel.
Pro-tip: If your congregation has never left uncomfortable, you have been editing.
The instinct is pastoral and it is not stupid. You know who is in the room. You know the man whose marriage is barely holding, the parent whose kid walked away, the visitor on her first Sunday. You don't want the hard verse to land on them wrong. So you are tempted to soften it, and you tell yourself you are being careful.
But a congregation fed on softened texts for a year learns something you didn't expect. They learn that Scripture is safe, that nothing in it will ever genuinely cost them anything, and that when life gets hard the Bible will have nothing to say that they did not already suspect. You cannot preach comfort with any weight to people who have never heard you preach a warning.
The discipline is to let the hard thing stay hard long enough to cost something, then preach through it rather than around it. Give it the same minutes you would give a beloved verse. Say what it actually says, in its own terms, before you say anything to relieve it. Then bring the gospel to bear on the difficulty you just named rather than on a softer version of it.
Preaching the hard verse is not harshness. It is exposing people to the God who is actually there.
Preach it with the weight the text gives it.