How Louie Giglio Preaches: Make God Enormous Before the Problem Gets Small
Louie Giglio launched Passion in 1997 and has spent decades preaching to college students in arenas and stadiums. We studied six of his sermons, from the Indescribable tour around 2006 to a Liberty University chapel in 2025. The shape holds: make God enormous before you make the problem small, build the message around one thing people can see, name the pain out loud, and land on a promise.
Who Louie Giglio is
Giglio grew up in Atlanta. With his wife, Shelley, he started Choice, a weekly Bible study at Baylor University that grew to more than ten percent of the student body. The first Passion Conference in 1997 drew about 2,000 students. Passion has since gathered more than one million young adults, including more than 55,000 at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium for Passion 2024.
He founded Passion City Church in Atlanta, which held its first service in 2009. His Passion Talk Series messages, including “Indescribable” and “How Great Is Our God,” have sold more than one million copies, and he has written more than a dozen books, among them The Air I Breathe, Goliath Must Fall and Don’t Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table.
The shape of a Giglio sermon
He doesn’t warm up long. In the first couple of minutes he states the aim or reads the text, then chains several passages around one anchor text.
In his best-known talks, “Indescribable” and “How Great Is Our God,” he spends more than half the hour on stars, galaxies and the cells of the body. Then he turns that scale toward the cross: the God who breathes out stars knows your name and holds you together.
Each message is built around one thing people can see: a golf ball, a table on the stage, a cross-shaped molecule, a whiteboard. And he gets the room to do something with it. They count, nod, read aloud or play a part. He repeats one line until the room owns it, like “star breather” or “the enemy is at your table.”
Late in the talk he tells real stories and names specific pain out loud: cancer, depression, divorce, job loss, grief. He turns to the cross in the last quarter and ends on a promise for the hard place, then a prayer or a call to respond.
What made his preaching different
God enormous
Stars, galaxies and molecules come first, then the cross. The size of God sets up everything that follows.
One sticky image
One sticky image carries the turn: a table, a comma, a dot on a map. People leave with a picture, not just a point.
Name the lie
He names the lie or the pain directly, then lands on a promise, not a recap.
What others said
“Some of the most inspiring teaching on worship I’ve ever heard has come from the mouth of Louie Giglio.”
— Matt Redman
“Louie Giglio explores what God desires most in our worship with clarity and insight.”
— Charles F. Stanley, endorsement of The Air I Breathe, 2003
What to take into your own pulpit
Make God big first
Giglio spends real time on the greatness of God before he gets to the hearer’s problem. A bigger view of God changes the size of everything else.
Give them something to see
One object or image can carry the whole turn of a sermon. People remember the table on the stage long after they forget the outline.
Name the hard place
He says cancer, divorce and grief out loud. The promise lands harder when people hear their own pain named first.
Those are the ideas. The guide turns them into ten steps you can follow this week, plus the sermons we studied and a fill-in outline in his shape.
Free PDF · Preach Like the Greats
Learn to preach like Louie Giglio.
This post is the overview. The guide has the research and the method.
- The 6 sermons we studied, start to finish
- Ten steps to preach the way he does
- His sermon outline, movement by movement
- A fill-in template for your own text, 9 pages
Common questions
What is Louie Giglio’s preaching style?
Big-picture and visual. He shows the greatness of God, often through science, before turning to the hearer’s problem. He builds each message around one image, gets the room involved, repeats one line, and lands on a promise.
How does Louie Giglio structure a sermon?
A quick start with the aim or the text, several passages chained around one anchor text, a visual that carries the turn, real stories and named pain later in the talk, a turn to the cross in the last quarter, and a closing promise with a prayer or call to respond.
What is Louie Giglio’s “Indescribable” talk about?
It’s one of his best-known messages. He uses Psalm 19, Genesis 1 and images of the universe to show why God is indescribable, then turns that scale toward the cross and the hearer’s own life.