Preaching well is hard work. We’re expected to be witty, warm, and wise. And then next week, we have to do it again. The great science fiction writer H. G. Wells reportedly said most
people only think once or twice in a lifetime, whereas he had made an
international reputation by thinking once or twice a year. Lots of
pastors have to think once (or more) a week! More often than we would
like to admit, we begin preparing a sermon with the feeling not that we
have something to say, but that we have to say something. Only one time
in twenty do I start my preparation feeling that this sermon will go
well. The creative process is accompanied with a feeling of ambiguity
and uncertainty, of trying to make the unknown known.
Like the homemaker whose goal of three nutritious meals a day is
complicated by toddlers making messes, demands of a part-time job,
overflowing baskets of laundry, and a phone that won’t stop ringing, the
multiple demands of pastoral life make fresh thinking and sermon
writing even more difficult.
People never die at convenient times. The administrative load
preoccupies pastors with scores of details that won’t go away. Emotional
weariness from dealing with people problems drains creative energies.
And speaking several times weekly outstrips your capacity to assimilate
truth fully into your life.
Just as savvy homemakers find resourceful ways to feed their families—a
deft combination of ten-minute recipes, healthy snacks, a microwave
special, and a few full-course evening feasts—pastors, too, can find
ways to keep tasty and balanced spiritual meals on the table.
Distinct Phases
When we feel we don’t have anything to say in a sermon, it’s usually
because we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. We’re thinking about the sermon
before we’ve understood the text. Instead, we need to divide our sermon
preparation into two distinct phases.
What Am I Going to Say?
I start the process by focusing on content, not delivery. Approaching a text with the attitude
How am I going to get a sermon out of this?
pollutes the process. We can end up manipulating the text for the
purposes of an outline instead of first trying to observe, interpret,
and appreciate the text. For one message based on the story of Christ’s calming the storm, I
began my study assuming my sermon’s main idea would be that we can count
on Christ to calm the wind and waves in our lives. But as I studied the
text, I realized I couldn’t promise the people they would never sink
just because Christ was with them in the storms of life.
This passage has to be seen in its broader context. Jesus has called
the disciples and told them about the nature of his kingdom: It will
start small but spread wide. In that early stage, everything depended on
the men in that boat—Jesus and the disciples. If they go under, the
kingdom is gone. The point of the passage is that those who have
committed everything to Christ’s cause can know that the kingdom will
ultimately triumph because of the power of the King. This is an eternal
truth that shifts the emphasis from the personal storms in my life and
whether I will sink to the eternal kingdom that will never fail. If I
promised that Christ would calm every storm, I would have twisted the
text to say what I wanted. Instead I preached what the text taught me. I have learned to let understanding the text dominate the sermon
process early and later let sermonizing dominate. I have more material
than I can preach when I first try to understand and interpret a text
for its own sake.
I ask,
What is the biblical writer doing?
Then I study the context for the flow of thought. (I usually get more
preachable insights from context than from studying the grammar and word
structure of the original language.) By studying the context, for
example, I came up with a major lead for a sermon on 1 Peter 5. “To the
elders among you,” writes Peter, “I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness
of Christ’s sufferings and one who also will share in the glory to be
revealed” (v. 1). In my study, I found the theme of suffering
accompanied by glory runs throughout 1 Peter. Whether in marriage,
government, family—or church—when we suffer for Christ, we experience
the glory of Christ. My sermon therefore pointed to this theme as it
applied to leaders in the church.
How Am I Going to Say It?
In this phase, I move to the communication question. How will I get the
ideas I’ve uncovered in the passage across to people in a way that
interests, informs, motivates, and changes them? Out of all that I could
say about this passage, what will I choose to say? This part of the process can also provide us with something significant to say. Early on I ask,
Which of the following tacks is the biblical writer taking here: Is he primarily (a) explaining, (b) proving, or (c) applying?
(a) If the passage majors in explanation, then my sermon will major in
teaching. In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke
18:9–14), the primary purpose of this passage is to teach that the
person who sees God as God and humbles himself before him is justified
and exalted, and the person who exalts himself before God remains in his
sins.
Accordingly, my sermon majors in explanation, not exhortation. I dig
beneath the assumptions we have about the Pharisees and tax collectors,
helping my listeners get into the minds of these two men. What did they
think about themselves? What did others think about them? How would
these roles look today? I talked about the nature of the sins of
hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and disobedience.
(b) One of the best ways to overcome “sermon block” is to think through
What’s hard to believe about this passage? We can underrate the need to prove the truth of a text. Even if there isn’t a skeptical bone in our body, we need to ask,
Will those who hear me believe this? Does this conform to my and their experience? If not, why not?
Our experience doesn’t govern the Bible, but we need to explain
perceived discrepancies between what the Bible says and our reality.
Suppose someone hears a passage, “If two of you on earth agree on
anything, it will be done for you.” She wonders,
What if I want a blue Cadillac? If I can get two of the elders to agree with me in prayer, is that a done deal? Like most people, she questions,
Do I believe that?
In my sermon, I try to be an advocate for that person. She won’t raise
her hand and interrupt me, but like most people in the pews today, she
listens to sermons with a keen sense of skepticism. The preacher who
ignores that is ignoring reality. C. S. Lewis has been popular in recent
decades largely because he deals with the “Is this really true?”
question. He assumed people needed to be convinced.
(c) Good ideas for preaching also emerge as we apply the Bible’s truths
to people’s lives. Sermon ideas ignite when the flint of people’s
problems strikes the steel of God’s Word. Sometimes we can’t come up
with much to say because our thinking is too steely; it’s all God’s
Word, but we don’t link it to specific situations in contemporary life.
Other times we come up short because we’re too flinty; we’re
people-oriented, but we lack the authoritative content that only
Scripture can bring.
But we almost always spark a preaching flame if we strike those two
elements together. So part of my preparation is to ask these application
questions:
What difference does this make? What are the
implications for our lives in this text? If someone takes this truth
seriously and tries to live it on Monday morning, how will he or she
live differently?
Kitchen Helpers
Like labor-saving devices in the kitchen, there are ways to write a
sermon that can relieve the pressure of finding something to say. Here
are six “kitchen helpers.”
Develop a Preaching Calendar
Many pastors set up a plan for what they will preach over the next
quarter, half-year, or year. We can take a retreat for several days and
ask ourselves what the needs of the congregation are, what subjects we
sense God impressing on our hearts, what themes we have an avid interest
in.
A preaching calendar doesn’t have to confine us. If some brilliant
stroke from God strikes us, we can always change our plans. But it not,
when we walk into the study, we have a sense of well-thought-through,
well-prayed-through direction. My calendars have been based primarily on
expository series through complete books of the Bible (which provides
more than enough grist for any mill).
Once a calendar is set, we can set up file folders for each series of
sermons, which become repositories for the relevant material we come
across in the weeks and months before the sermon is preached. When the
time finally comes to begin preparing the sermon, we already have a file
of illustrations, quotes, and insights.
Work on Sermons in Ten-Day Cycles
The purpose of a longer cycle is to provide simmer time. On the
Thursday ten days prior to the Sunday I will preach, I do my exegetical
study. I read the text and think about it till I hit a wall. Then I
write down what is holding me up:
What words don’t I understand? What issues can’t I solve? What ideas don’t make sense? If you can’t state specifically what your problems are, you won’t get answers.
Thus, ten days before I preach a sermon, I know what I need to be
thinking about, which I do while driving the car, taking a shower, or
lying awake at night. This also directs my reading. I know where the
gaps in my understanding are, and I can more quickly find the answers. I
can cull twenty commentaries in an hour if I know the key questions.
Often when I sit down to resume study the following Tuesday, the issues
in the passage are much clearer. I wonder,
What in the world was I so hung up about?
When I preached a sermon on the seven churches of Revelation, I grew
curious about the seven cities and how they affected the churches. I did
some extra research that added significant insights. If I had been
writing this sermon the day or two before preaching, I couldn’t have
done that.
My next study time in the cycle is five days later, on Tuesday, when I
finish up my exegetical work and organize the sermon. By the end of
Tuesday, I want at least to have the sermon’s homiletical skeleton and
introduction completed. I may also have begun shaping the main
movements. My final writing installment takes place on Friday. I finish writing and actually have time to rearrange and polish.
Get Double Duty Off Study
Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, first introduced me to the
idea of preparing two sermons from research on one preaching passage.
When he was pastoring in Memphis, if his Sunday morning message
primarily explained or proved the truth of a passage, on Sunday night he
focused on application. Or, on Sunday night he developed a subtheme of a
passage that couldn’t be given justice in the Sunday morning message.
In Philippians 2:1-11, for example, he might preach in the morning on
Christlike humility and on Sunday night, the doctrine of Christ’s
humanity.
Think Visually
Think of words on a spectrum, with abstract words and ideas at the top
of the ladder and concrete ideas at the bottom. Scholars climb up the
ladder of abstraction; communicators step down to get as close to
specifics as possible. When I have an idea without a specific picture in
my mind, nothing interesting happens in me. But my mind starts to roll
when I have an image.
When I study a text, I ask,
What image was in the biblical writer’s mind as he wrote this?
If the subject is reconciliation, he didn’t write about some abstract
doctrine; he was thinking about enemies who made peace. As I study such a
passage, I pose questions that keep me close to real life:
What’s it like to have an enemy? Why is it so hard to make peace? I’ll
think about countries in the Balkans, where people who have lived
together for decades suddenly begin killing each other. What happens
when neighbors turn into enemies?
I don’t think about abstract ideas like “parenting.” I think of
bouncing a baby on my knee, of getting up in the middle of the night and
staggering to a crib of a child who won’t stop crying, and of the
feelings of love and anger that go along with all this.
Work on a Sermon Out Loud
My family learned that if they walk by my office and hear me mumbling,
I’m working on a sermon. I get in imaginary conversations with people I
want the sermon to help: “Robinson, you say God wants us to love our neighbors, but what do you
do when you go to wash their feet and they kick you in the mouth? How
many times do you get kicked before you say, ‘Forget it’?” “You have to get kicked three times,” I’ll continue out loud to myself,
“and then you can break his toes. No, I wouldn’t say that. What would I
say?” Working through a sermon aloud helps crystallize our thinking. It also gives us a feel for the flow of thought in the text.
Borrow
God doesn’t give us any points for originality. He gives points for
being faithful and clear. To have sitting on our shelves books from the
great teachers of the world, people who have spent years of their lives
studying a book like Romans, and not use them is to deny the many
contributions of Christ’s church. To think that in three hours of
exegesis we’re going to match the insights of those who’ve spent years
studying a book is a mistake.
But save commentaries for later in the process. If we go to the
commentaries too quickly, they frame our thoughts. But once I have read
through a passage and know where my difficulties lie, commentators
become our teachers.
Tributaries for High-Water Preaching
I have developed habits that help me collect material for sermons on an
ongoing basis (not just for the sermon I will be preaching this
Sunday). They are tributaries for high-water preaching.
Observe and Interpret Daily Life
Helmut Thielicke said, “The world is God’s picture book.” We can waste a
lot of experiences. There are lessons in every day’s events, in things
as mundane as getting stuck in traffic or hearing a joke. This is especially so when something happens that touches us
emotionally, either positively or negatively. Even if I don’t
immediately grasp its significance, I write the anecdote down on a 3x5
card and reflect on it. It’s a piece of life that someday will fit some
insight, illustration, or sermon.
Reading books and magazines and watching movies and television—even
commercials—is another way of observing life. I recently watched the
Italian movie
Jean de Florette, which begins with a city
dweller inheriting a farm, moving to the country, and trying to learn
farming from books. Wanting the farm for themselves, some unscrupulous
neighbors block a spring that irrigates the farm. The new owner, unaware
that he owns spring water, prays for rain. Storm clouds gather, but the
rain falls on the other side of the mountain, never watering his land.
Eventually the man dies, and the corrupt men buy his farm for next to
nothing. There the movie ends.
I turned off the VCR profoundly depressed. I said to my wife, “That’s
the way many people see the world. Evil triumphs—The End.” If I ever
preach on Ahab stealing Nabal’s vineyard, though, that movie will be
part of my introduction. The questions I ask about ads are,
What do they want people to do? And how are they motivating them? Marketers
spend millions of research dollars to learn what motivates people.
Watching their ads, we see the results of their research.
In one recent ad, a school appealed for new students, stating
repeatedly that graduates make more money. The school didn’t promise its
classes would make students deeper, better people or open the door to a
more fulfilling career. The carrot being dangled was money. In
preaching, I can use that ad to raise the question of whether money
alone is ultimately going to satisfy.
As another tributary for high-water preaching, I make it a point to
converse with people different from me. I’ve learned to make the most of
the power of questions:
How do you make your living? In your field
of work, what are your biggest problems? Who are the successful people
in your world? What makes people winners or losers to you? What do you
have to worry about? If you could have anything in the world, what would
it be?
One of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had recently was with a
person who has AIDS. He had been involved in a homosexual relationship
with a man with whom he thought he had a “love-bonding relationship.” “He didn’t tell me he had AIDS,” he said sadly. He described his fears
of dying in a few years and his anger that someone he loved had done
something that would kill him. He talked about his feelings of regret,
of being ostracized, of wanting others to care but not sensing their
care, of being sexually frustrated yet at the same time hating sex for
its drawing power. “I couldn’t do to another human being what that man
did to me,” he said. Through all of this, he had become a Christian. Talking with him helped
me better understand people in such situations. Such conversations feed
my soul and add richness to preaching.
Soul Attention
The more full our souls, the more we can preach without running dry. Of
the many spiritual disciplines that enlarge spirit, mind, and soul, we
need to find the ones that benefit us the most. I have a friend whose son has joined a monastery in pursuit of
spirituality. He finds great benefit from the vow of silence and from
long periods of meditation on Scripture. Such disciplines have less
benefit for me. But it is impossible for me to overstate how much my
friendships with certain people have challenged me. Although being with
large groups does more to drain me than stimulate me, I will rearrange
my calendar just to spend a day or two with a friend.
There’s a difference between someone who derives great pleasure from
meditating on a sunset and someone who meditates on a sunset because
that’s what “deep” people do. We can read in
Preaching & Preachers
what Martyn Lloyd-Jones says about the importance of urgency in
preaching, but if we try to be more urgent without having the values and
passions that produce urgency, our preaching will strike listeners as
affected. The ideas, themes, experiences, virtues, authors, and art that
have gripped our souls are the ones that fill our preaching cup.
The number of issues that need to be addressed is so vast, the quantity
of preaching material in Scripture so great, the needs of people so
inexhaustible, a preacher couldn’t finish the job in ten lifetimes. If
we organize our sermonic work and stay full of God, more often than not,
as we sit down to work out our sermons, we will not only have something
to say, we will have more to say than time allows.
Taken from
Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching, The by CRAIG BRIAN LARSON; HADDON ROBINSON. Copyright © 2005 by Christianity Today International. Used by permission of
Zondervan.
