Category Archives: word choice

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Guest Post: Working Harder To Preach Shorter

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Dave and I enjoyed fun times together at our Global Outreach Summit. He also has great interest in hermeneutics and homiletics.

Dave Shive is a 1968 graduate of Washington Bible College, and a 1972 graduate of Capital Bible Seminary with a Th.M. in New Testament Studies. He is also a 1994 graduate of the Baltimore Hebrew University where he received an M.A. in Biblical Literature. Dave also pursued doctoral studies at Baltimore Hebrew University.

He has spent the past 48 years in fulltime ministry as a pastor, Christian school director, college professor, and missions advocate.

Since 2008, Dave and Kathy have served as full time mission mobilizers. They are currently on staff with Frontier Ventures (formerly the U.S. Center for World Mission) in Pasadena, CA.  

Dave and Kathy will celebrate their 54th wedding anniversary in June 2022. They have lived in Catonsville, MD, for 25 years. They have three married children, Dan, Mike, and Becky and are the proud grandparents of 11 grandchildren.

Working Harder to Preach Shorter

As a guest speaker, I was recently asked to limit my sermon to 25 minutes. As one who prefers 35 or 40 minutes to preach, I was confronted by a daunting challenge. Oddly enough, I find that preparing this short post on preaching short sermons is much more difficult than writing a longer post about preaching shorter sermons!

As I prepared my short(er) sermon, I recalled a senior pastor who, when asked by a guest preacher how long he could speak, replied, “Five minutes shorter than you think.”  The senior pastor was probably thinking that he had heard many sermons that could be improved if only they were a bit shorter. One homiletics professor confided to me that each year one or two students would tell him that they could preach a better sermon in class if they were only allowed more pulpit time. The good prof’s response was always the same: “No, you couldn’t” (said with a smile).

As I was preparing my 25-minute sermon, the difficulties in preparing a shorter message were glaring. My struggle reminded me of the quote by Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” Similar to Pascal, I realized I could preach a shorter sermon, but I would need a lot more prep time! Therein lies the dilemma of preaching with less allotted time.

To reduce the length of a sermon, more care is required in the selection of what to say. There also needs to be a ruthless culling of what NOT to say. Almost every pastor can agree that preaching for 25 minutes is harder than preaching for 45. Give me a text and I can preach on it for an hour with little preparation (I’m not saying it would be a good sermon!). But give me the same text and ask me to preach on it for 25 minutes and I would need significantly more prep time.

To preach a shorter sermon, one must be more deliberate, focused, conscious of every word, sentence, paragraph, and idea. Greater discipline is needed to make the best use of every precious minute. I found myself desperately returning again and again to my Big Idea to make sure everything I was saying was necessary and remained true to the text.

Oh, and a footnote to my story about my 25-minute sermon. When I arrived at my guest home the night before I was to preach, I was informed that I could take as much time as I needed! Relieved to hear that, I only exceeded my original time limit by a few minutes the next morning. I realized that my preparation for a 25-minute delivery enabled me to preach a much better sermon.This kind of sermon preparation is great practice in developing homiletical discipline. Try this sample exercise: If you have 40 minutes to deliver a sermon, prepare as if you only have 25 minutes to preach. See what happens!

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What We Preach And How We Preach

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Manuscripting your sermon isn’t about being clever.

I am writing this post on a Sunday evening. If you preached today you know that feeling of a sense of accomplishment, plus the usual nagging thoughts of, “It could’ve been better, Lord. I tried my best.”

I am enjoying the slow process of reentering my “normal” life. Like, for instance, getting back to my reading schedule which includes books like Jared E. Alcántara’s, The Practices of Christian Preaching: Essentials for Effective Proclamation.

In his introduction, Jared reminds his readers that what matters most is what we preach and “not just how we preach” (p. 6).

He quotes Augustine:

“There is a danger of forgetting what one has to say while working out a clever way to say it” (p. 6).

As I mentioned not too long ago, I had the privilege of working with two sections of Advanced Homiletics students in PA and MD. Part of their final sermon assignment involves writing a manuscript. They preach without it, but write it to practice what they want to say to their listeners. In almost every case it makes them better preachers since the practice makes them work harder on how they speak to their congregants.

Alcántara reminds us how important it is to develop sermon content based upon solid exegesis of the passage. That’s what we have to say. That’s where our authority comes from.

But there is a place for working on how we say it. Cleverness isn’t the goal but listenability and clarity are. So allow the practice of manuscripting to aid your communication. Just note Augustine’s warning. We can’t work so hard at being clever that we forget what we have to say.

As you begin to think hard about next Sunday strike a balance between careful exegesis (what to say) and engaging orascript (how you say it). Discover the strong foundation and then build on it.

And our Lord will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal

P.S. I am curious as to what percentage of sermon prep time do you devote to crafting your words (as opposed to the raw exegesis).

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Checking in on Your Wordsmith Superpower

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How’s your ability to work with words these days?

Before getting back to sermon application, I wanted to take a moment to ask you about your word smithing. I know it’s not a word. The spell-checker just rejected my one-word and spit it into two.

One of the top five books on communication that I’ve ever read is Humes’, The Sir Winston Method. He analyzes and summarizes Winston Churchill’s powerful communication style.

A top takeaway from the book is the CREAM approach to crafting words. The acrostic stands for:

C = contrast

R = rhyme

E = echo

A = alliteration

M = metaphor

You can use this acrostic to guide the development of key concepts in your sermon such as your big idea or theme.

I am not great at this, but every once in a while my wordsmithing superpower kicks in. This happened a couple of times the past two weeks.

First, while preaching in 1 Corinthians 1:17ff. where Paul teaches about the cross of Christ and how foolish that message sounds, I urged our folks to

“stick to the script.”

This would help them fight the temptation to change their message ever so slightly to make our Gospel appear more palatable.

Then, yesterday while preaching Jude 5-10 I reviewed the purpose for our series with this broad directive:

“We proclaim the Gospel out there; we protect it in here.”

The first one has a lot of alliteration and a little bit of rhyming going on. The second example has more alliteration and a little bit of contrast.

If you’re serious about practicing CREAM, you’ll enjoy Humes’ relatively short, but packed paperback (see what I did there?). My Doctor of Ministry thesis, Teaching the Skills of Preaching, is not nearly as enjoyable, but does contain examples of CREAM.

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as we put our word smithing (there it goes again!) superpowers to good use each Sunday.

Randal

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Preaching Reality: What I’m Learning from Reading Jonathan Edwards’s Earliest Sermons

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Read to Sharpen Your Theological Thinking
and Add Depth to Your Preaching

Every so often these blog posts dip back into the early preaching of Jonathan Edwards. My purpose for reading Edwards is twofold:

(1) Rarely do I get to have someone preach to me and I benefit from hearing God’s Word from the outside.

(2) Rarely am I disappointed by the depth of Edwards’s theological thinking that always lands at detailed application.

Today’s insights come from Edwards’s sermon, The Nakedness of God, from Job 1:21.

In the introduction to the sermon, Kimnach writes,

“…an even more urgent matter for him here and in later sermons is the…issue of human reality….the problem for men is not one of coming to terms with truth, but rather with reality” (p. 400).

In the sermon Edwards states,

“All the world knows the truth of this doctrine perfectly well [that when a person dies they lose all earthly treasures], but though they know, yet it don’t seem at all real to them; for certainly, if it seemed a real thing to them that, in a little time, they must certainly have no more to do with the world, they would act wholly otherwise than they do [emphasis added]” (p. 406).

The difference is subtle–the difference between talking truth and talking reality. But I find that it is a helpful distinction. My experience is that listeners have to think differently about accepting truth versus accepting reality.

Tomorrow as you begin praying and prepping for preaching, remember Edwards’s observation: your listeners probably believe the doctrine is true. Challenge them with respect to whether they think God’s Word is real. And, of course, we work hard all week with God’s help to develop a sermon that urges them to act as if they believe God’s Word to be real.

And may our Lord continue to receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

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How Reading the Wall Street Journal Can Help Your Preaching. Honest.

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The Opinion section seems fair and the writing is superb.
Photo by Allie on Unsplash

Several months ago I decided to go back to getting a newspaper again. I was close to getting a subscription to digital curated news, such as Apple News, but the reviews were not great. I chose the Wall Street Journal thanks to a generous discount for educators. Or, was it students? That’s not important right now.

What is important is how the quality of WSJ’s writers is helping me be a better communicator of God’s Word.

Here are some lines from this weekend’s WSJ from one of my favorite writers, Peggy Noonan’s, Declarations: The GOP Tries to Make Its Case…

“If you weren’t moved by [Jon Ponder’s speech] you don’t do moved.”

Or, the reporting of Sen. Tim Scott’s speech which included the phrase,

“Because of the evolution of the Southern heart.” (explaining how “a black man who started with nothing [ended up in “Congress in an overwhelmingly white district in Charleston and beat the field, including the son of former-Sen. Strom Thurmond.”].

Or…

“[Republicans] hit on the one fear shared equally now by the rich, the poor and the middle: that when you call 911 you’ll go to voicemail.”

Or, my new favorite word I read several days ago: humblebrag.

So, in Psalm 18:23 David commits humblebrag when he claims: “I was blameless before him, and I kept myself from my guilt.” Much different than David’s confession in Psalm 38:18 “I confess my iniquity; I am sorry for my sin.”

There are several times in the earlier Psalms when David voices humblebrag. It’s a great word to describe how David can crow even though there were many times he had to eat crow.

I just wished I had remembered to say it in the sermon. Oh well.

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) because of our attempts to become better wordsmiths.

Randal

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“most powerful arguments”: What I’m Learning from Reading Jonathan Edwards’s Earliest Sermons

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Edwards’s, The Value of Salvation

The second sermon recorded by Kimnach in his tenth volume of The Works of Jonathan Edwards is, “The Value Of Salvation.” The text is Matthew 16:26

“…what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul…?”

It is clear that Edwards followed God’s lead in creating a sermon full of “most powerful arguments” for making one’s soul utmost priority.

I learned from the way Edwards described our tendency to get earthly things: “If he hugs them [bags of gold and silver] ever so close, he must leave them forever and ever when once he leaves the world” (p. 313, emphasis added).

Then, as I’m seeing so many times in his sermons, Edwards is a master at creating powerful images to illustrate truth. Speaking of Alexander Magnus [The Great] when he was dying:

“he whom the whole could not contain must at last be confined to only a narrow grave. A few square feet of ground is large enough for him now, whom the earth was not broad enough for before” (p. 314)

Ouch!

When he turns to the inestimable worth of salvation, among several statements he wrote,

“They shall be perfectly delivered from sin and temptation. The saved soul leaves all its sin with the body; when it puts off the body of the man, it puts off the body of sin with it. When the body is buried, all sin is buried forever, and though the soul shall be joined to the body again, yet sin shall never return…” (p. 323)

Anyone in the house that realizes their sinfulness will surely smile at the thought of our bright, sinless future.

Edwards begins to wrap up the sermon with these these exhortations:

“We have now heard the most powerful arguments in the world to persuade us [to] take care of our souls….let us take no thought for this present any otherwise than as the means of the good of our souls.” (pp. 329, 330).

Finally, speaking of the Christian life in terms of a race or fight, “men don’t use [to] stop sometime and run sometime when they were upon a race; men, when they are engaged…in a battle, don’t use to stand still now and then to rest when their enemies are about them, for if they so do they are in danger every minute of being killed” (p. 333).

I hope that these excerpts from Edwards will fuel your desire to preach and teach God’s Word so He receives glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal

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More Theology, Less Exegesis: What I’m Learning From Reading Jonathan Edwards’ Sermons

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A few weeks ago I began this series of posts on my rhetorical analysis of Jonathan Edwards’s early sermon. I want to continue this series with a look at two general foci that directed Edwards’s research and writing: theology and expression (the latter meaning expressing theology through language).

In his, Note to the Reader, Kimnach writes, “After theology, Edwards thought most about expression” (p. xiii).

This is insightful for most of us who preach and teach Scripture.

First, I am assuming that most everyone reading this blog has been trained in exegetical practices (such as the well-known historical, grammatical, literary method). That means that most of us think more about exegesis than we do theology.

I am well aware of the interrelationship between the two, between exegesis and theology. After almost thirty years of teaching preaching to all levels of students, I am also well aware of an overemphasis on exegetical analysis in expository sermons. The results are sermons that are exegetically heavy and theologically light.

Lord willing, next time I will flesh this out a bit more with examples from Edwards. For now, let me ask you to think about whether or not you think about theology this week as you prepare to preach and teach God’s Word. Are you moving beyond exegesis to theology? Asking that question forces us to become clearer in our understanding of what theology is.

Second, It is clear from reading Edwards’s early sermons that he spent much time thinking about how to express the theology contained in his selected passages of Scripture. He was a master of the English language of his day. He mastered language in order to get a response from his hearers.

Of course that meant for Edwards and means for us that we save sermon preparation time for crafting the message. This means being “done with” exegesis (see, I couldn’t help myself!)–I mean, theology–and devoting hours to thinking about the best way to use language to be used by the Holy Spirit to move people into an act of worship.

Before Sunday, devote sermon prep time to thinking about the theology of your passage and the best way to communicate it.

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21),

Randal

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Introducing My Second Most Important Resource

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Since I just completed the blog series on preaching through Judges, I thought it was time for a lighter kind of post. Let’s face it. Preaching through Judges is tough sledding.

So, this week let me take a moment to encourage you to spend some time in sermon prep using some kind of thesaurus. Yes, it’s shallow, untheological advice.

My Reader’s Digest Oxford Complete Wordfinder gets used hard every week. Next to Logos Bible Software, the Wordfinder is the resource I use the most.

And, I should tell you that I use it all week-long, not just at the end of the week. You might think that the end of the week is the time for refining my sermon manuscript. My approach is slightly different.

The end of the week is the time when I am refining my thinking about the details of the sermon and the way in which I am communicating them. But all week-long–beginning Monday morning–I am continually working on my wording.

That’s where something like the RD Wordfinder comes into play. Even after doing my own word studies in Hebrew and Greek and after scanning my favorite commentators, there are times when I still don’t have a clear understanding of a concept. When that happens I turn to my RDW. Inevitably, the still-fuzzy concept clears up when I survey synonym options.

The selected synonym becomes an important part of that sermon segment. It helps me communicate the theology of the passage more clearly.

So, while some kind of thesaurus will help you massage your manuscript, it will also help you master the material in the early stages of sermon preparation.

Before Sunday, see if your thesaurus can help you gain clarity about your passage’s main theological concept.

Preach well this new year so God continues to receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal