Nobody Is Searching for “Lessons from Hezekiah, Part 3”

Your congregation records its preaching and puts it online. That’s already more than many churches do, and it’s worth doing.

Then almost nobody outside the membership ever finds it.

The usual assumption is that people simply aren’t interested in sermons, and that assumption is wrong. People search for the answers that sermons contain constantly. The gap is almost always in how the lessons are named.

Titles Get Written for the People Who Were Already There

Think about where a sermon title comes from. The preacher names it for his own outline, or for the bulletin, or for a congregation that already knows what series he’s working through.

So you end up with titles like these.

Lessons from Hezekiah, Part 3. The Sufficiency of Scripture. Walking Worthy. Sunday AM 10-5-26. Guest Speaker.

Every one of those is perfectly clear to someone who was in the building. And every one is invisible to a person who wasn’t, because none of them contain the words that person would ever type.

A man whose marriage is falling apart is not searching for “Walking Worthy.” He’s searching for something much plainer and much more desperate than that.

Name the Lesson for the Question It Answers

Here’s the whole fix, and it doesn’t change a word of what was preached.

Ask what question this lesson actually answers for a person who isn’t a Christian, and put that in the title.

A lesson on Hezekiah’s prayer during the Assyrian siege might be about trusting God when the situation looks hopeless. That’s what it’s about to an outsider. So name it closer to that. The preaching is identical. The label now matches what somebody is actually looking for.

A few more. A lesson titled “The Sufficiency of Scripture” could be named for the question underneath it, which is often how a person can know what God actually wants. A lesson on grief in the Psalms could say so plainly rather than being called “Book of Psalms, Part 7.”

You’re not dumbing anything down and you’re not being clever. You’re putting the subject on the outside of the box.

Three Habits That Do Most of the Work

• Drop the part numbers from the public title. Series numbering is useful internally and it’s a wall externally. Nobody starts at part three of something, and “Part 3” tells a searcher the first two are homework. Keep the series organized somewhere, but let each lesson stand on its own name.
• Never post a date as a title. “Sunday AM 10-5-26” is a filing label, not a title. It tells a person nothing at all, and a page full of dates reads as an archive rather than a resource.
• Say what it covers in a sentence or two. Most churches upload a video with a title and nothing else. A short description doing the work of a tract, saying plainly what the lesson addresses and who it would help, makes the whole thing far more findable and far more likely to be opened. It also helps the person decide this is worth thirty minutes of their evening.

A Quiet Benefit Worth Noticing

There’s a second thing that happens when you title lessons this way, and it’s arguably bigger than the search benefit.

Your own members can share them.

Nobody forwards “Lessons from Hezekiah, Part 3” to a struggling coworker. It would require an explanation. But a lesson named for trusting God when everything is falling apart is something a member can send to a friend without a word of setup, because the title already says why it’s being sent.

A good title turns a recording into something shareable. A filing label keeps it locked in the archive.

Start With the Next One

You don’t have to go back and rename years of recordings, though you might eventually rename the handful that cover the most common questions people ask.

Start with the next lesson your preacher delivers. Before it goes up, ask one question. If somebody outside this congregation needed what’s in this lesson, what would they have typed to find it?

Put that in the title. Add two sentences saying what it covers.

That’s the whole discipline, it takes about ninety seconds, and it’s the difference between a recording that serves the people who were there and one that goes looking for the people who weren’t.

The lesson was already worth preaching. It’s worth naming so it can be found.