Every preacher who has worked through the Bible systematically has arrived at texts they would rather skip. The imprecatory psalms calling for the violent destruction of enemies. The Canaanite genocide narratives in Joshua. Paul's instructions on gender roles. The terrifying passages in Revelation. The hard sayings of Jesus about hell. The doctrine of election. The violence of sacrifice.
The temptation to skip these passages is understandable and almost universal. But it is a temptation that faithful preaching must resist.
When a congregation never hears their pastor engage with the difficult texts, several things happen. They conclude that these texts cannot be handled responsibly — which leads either to private anxiety about the Bible's reliability or to a selective Bible that they have effectively edited for comfort. They are deprived of the theological depth that precisely the hard texts often contain. And they learn, implicitly, that faith cannot be honest about its own difficulties.
Preaching the difficult texts is not an act of pastoral cruelty. It is an act of pastoral courage — and, ultimately, of pastoral love.
Why Difficult Texts Are Often the Most Important Ones
The texts that make us most uncomfortable are often the ones that are most demanding of theological attention — and most formative when preached faithfully. They force a congregation to grapple with aspects of God's character, the human condition, and the nature of reality that comfortable texts leave untouched.
The passages about divine judgment form congregations with a robust understanding of the seriousness of sin and the holiness of God. The violence in the Old Testament narrative forces engagement with questions about the nature of God's action in history, the typological function of those narratives, and the relationship between the testaments. The passages on sexuality force honest pastoral engagement with desires, bodies, and the meaning of human love. The passages on predestination and divine sovereignty invite a congregation into one of the most profound mysteries of the Christian faith.
None of these can be handled in a single sermon. But every one of them deserves honest, courageous engagement from the pulpit.
Principles for Preaching Hard Texts
Acknowledge the Difficulty Honestly
Do not pretend the text is comfortable when it is not. Your congregation already knows it is difficult — that is often why they are paying close attention. Acknowledging the difficulty directly builds trust, signals that you have not avoided the hard questions, and frames the sermon as an honest engagement rather than a defensive maneuver.
"This is one of the most challenging passages in Scripture, and I want to engage with it honestly" is not a failure of confidence. It is an invitation to genuine theological thinking together.
Do the Exegetical Work Thoroughly
Hard texts require more exegetical attention, not less. The instinct to move quickly to application in order to escape the difficulty is backwards. The application of a hard text that has not been carefully exegeted will almost certainly be either too harsh or too softened — either untempered by the literary and theological context that shapes its meaning, or evacuated of the content that made it hard in the first place.
Spend extra time with the historical-cultural background. Understand the genre conventions. Trace the canonical context. Where does this text fit in the larger story of God's redemptive purposes? What does it look like from the vantage point of Christ's completed work?
Distinguish What You Know from What You Don't
Some difficulties in Scripture resolve with patient exegetical work. Others represent genuine tensions that have occupied faithful interpreters for centuries. In the latter case, intellectual honesty before your congregation is more valuable than a premature resolution.
"Faithful Christians across the centuries have not fully resolved this tension" is not a confession of theological failure. It is a theologically honest statement that forms congregations with appropriate epistemic humility about the limits of human understanding before the mystery of God.
Connect to Christ
The difficult texts of the Old Testament, in particular, require a Christological hermeneutic — an understanding of how they function within the whole canonical movement toward and from the cross and resurrection. The violence of the conquest narratives, the harshness of the law, the darkness of the imprecatory psalms — none of these is fully interpreted without attending to where the whole redemptive story is heading and how Christ's coming reshapes the meaning of everything before it.
This does not mean allegorizing every difficult text into a lesson about Jesus. It means reading the text within the canonical context that the New Testament itself establishes.
Trust Your Congregation
One of the subtler forms of pastoral condescension is the assumption that your congregation cannot handle theological difficulty. Most congregations, when given the tools to engage with hard texts honestly, are more capable of theological wrestling than their pastor suspects. They carry these questions privately. They have wondered why nobody preaches these passages. When you engage them honestly, from the pulpit, the response is often not shock or offense but gratitude — the relief of having a pastor who will not pretend the hard parts are not there.
A Word on Process
Preparing to preach a genuinely difficult text requires more time and more resources than the average preparation. It helps to read broadly in the scholarly and pastoral literature, to consult commentators from different traditions and perspectives, and to bring the question to trusted theological conversation partners.
AI-assisted research tools can be genuinely useful here — not for producing an easy answer to a hard question, but for surfacing the range of serious theological responses to the passage, flagging the key exegetical debates, and helping the preacher understand where the significant interpretive choices lie. The theological judgment, as always, remains entirely the preacher's.
The Pastoral Fruit
Preachers who have the courage to engage with difficult texts consistently find that their congregation's trust deepens significantly. Not because every question is resolved, but because the congregation knows their pastor is willing to stand in the hard places with them rather than offering them a sanitized, comfortable version of the faith.
That trust is one of the most important pastoral assets you can build. And the difficult texts, preached with courage and care, are among the most powerful instruments for building it.