Category Archives: writing out the sermon

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The “intense preparation” it Takes to Preach Without Notes

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It’s not so much about whether you have notes or not, but…

In my previous post I mentioned reading, Augustine and the Cure of Souls: Revising a Classical Ideal, by Paul R. Kolbet. It’s one of those books that majors on pastoral ministry with a minor in preaching.

One of the interesting things about the book is that it shows how the Greco-Roman world of Augustine’s day influenced his understanding of pastoral ministry. One way the G-R world influenced Augustine and all public speakers was in the area of speaking without notes.

Here’s an example:

“To a sophist’s audience, such oratorical display appeared spontaneous and effortless–the ad lib creation of the moment coming into existence in their very presence–but that spontaneity was, in fact, an illusion made possible through intense preparation and skillful use of known rhetorical methods.” (p. 21)

Yes, “an illusion made possible through intense preparation…”

Elements of that kind of intense preparation are:

  • Begin writing your sermon from the moment you begin studying the text. This means training yourself to never write notes without thinking about how you will say it to your listeners. As you write, you’re talking to them about them from the biblical text.
  • Treat your biblical text as your cue card. If you are an expositor, then the Bible is your primary manuscript. I use to tell preachers-in-training: “If you lose your place in the sermon, just look down at your Bible, find your place in the text, and continue. No one knows your plan which means they don’t know you’ve lost your place unless you tell them.”
  • If the biblical text is your cue card, that means you should be able to follow the logical flow of thought or argument of your text. This is critical for helping your listeners follow along with you. This will prevent you from losing your place.
  • Internalize both technical and restatements of the most important theological concepts in your text. This does take some time and effort. Know key definitions from HALOT or BDAG, for instance, but also an easier-to-understand version you’ve created.
  • Finally, save time Saturday evening and early Sunday morning to read through your manuscript carefully, editing along the way. You’ll experience times when you say, “That isn’t clear to me,” or “I lost myself at this place,” or “There’s a better way to say that.” Great learning takes place during these practice sessions.

And, the bottom line is, it’s not how many notes you have or don’t have in the pulpit that makes communication effective. It’s how well you communicate with your parishioners. Do they hear you talking to them about the Bible or talking to them about them from the Bible?

May our Lord continue to receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as you continue to communicate His Word each Sunday.

Randal

P.S. Most Sunday’s I have on my iPad a limited number of Scripture verses or quotes from authors that I don’t want to memorize, but want to read.

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Confusion or Clarity? A Brief Word From Augustine

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Augustine was very sure he was being clear! I am not always so sure!! You?

Last week I finished reading Augustine’s classic little paperback, On Christian Doctrine (translated by Robertson). I had seen it quoted so many times through the years and figured it was about time.

Early on in the book, Augustine baldly stated:

“I am not to blame because they do not understand.” (p. 3)

If I remember correctly, Augustine took a job teaching rhetoric in order to pay the bills. So, he was well-trained in communication. Evidently, he knew how to be crystal clear when he taught Scripture. And he was confident in his abilities.

His statement reminded me of the importance of being clear. It’s more important that being interesting or clever. As much as I value preaching with accuracy, what is accuracy without clarity?

Augustine got me thinking about what enhances clarity. Here are some things to consider as you prepare to preach this week:

  1. Exchange your informational sermons titles (I am assuming your titles provide statements) for transformational titles (ones that hint at application or response even before the sermon begins).
  2. Similar to #1 is to clearly state the primary worship responses to your Text. As I have written before, you might complete this sentence: “We worship this morning by_____________.” This is another way of talking about sermon application. When you insert this sentence into the opening minutes of your sermon introduction, your listeners are clear about how to worship during the sermon.
  3. Whether you use formal outline points or not, make sure to create clear transitions from thought-block to thought-block. Everyone should hear how the parts fit together so the sermon doesn’t fragment in their minds.
  4. I find it’s easy not to be clear with defining key terms. I am trying to make sure my sermon manuscript has one robust sentence for any word that requires careful evaluation. The lexicons are still my favorite source for concise definitions in context.
  5. I need to practice this more: follow up a lengthy quote, with something like, “Now, what D. A. Carson is saying is, ___________________.” That gives listeners two opportunities to hear the content.
  6. Finally, be clear about the Gospel, how Christ-crucified makes it possible for us to put the Scripture into practice (the worship response in #2 above).

Maybe, after all that, I can say with Augustine, “I am not to blame because they do not understand.” And may our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21), because of our sermon clarity.

Randal

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Ready for Another Year of Fast-Paced Weeks of Sermon Prep?!

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Sunday’s come so quickly!
Suggestions to handle the pace

Are you ready for another year of preaching Sunday to Sunday?

If you are a preaching pastor, you know that Sundays come so quickly. It is tough to keep up this pace week after week. Here are some things I do to work effectively and efficiently each week:

  1. Keep improving your own exegetical skills. This takes time, but saves time in the long run when it’s time to consult commentaries (later in the post). The more quality exegesis you do, the less you need the help of scholars.
  2. Identify the big idea (or whatever you call it) and intention of the preaching portion on Monday morning. For years I have taught a Monday morning ritual to aspiring and accomplished expositors that reverses normal sermon preparation sequencing (begin by gathering exegetical fragments, but wait until the end of the week to put it all together). Try locating the meaning of the pericope and what it intends to do to the church early. Then you will know how the fragments fit. It addresses the ole, “I’ve got lots of notes but no sermon yet,” end of the week syndrome.
  3. Use the best commentaries efficiently. This implies that you know how to find them. Access copies of the two OT and NT commentary surveys by Longman and Carson, respectively. Since you’re improving your exegetical skills, you read the best commentaries to locate only what you’ve missed. You can read faster than you would if you were relying on the commentators to find meaning and intention.
  4. Write your sermon while you study. This is the best thing I have learned through the years. I never study for a sermon without creating the manuscript in real time. As I execute my method, I write as if I were preaching.

Sundays come so quickly. I hope you will consider these four tips and I know our Lord will receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus through your efforts (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal

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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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Me and God in the Study (part 2)

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If you’re hungry, go to moonpie.com!

This morning I had the privilege of reading 1 Thessalonians 5:14 with our faith-family. It is an excellent test case to continue our discussion in the previous post about how much original material we put into our sermons.

The reason is because it is a short verse that needs a heavy dose of explaining:

“And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.”

This means that much of the sermon contains the most precise, effective definitions we can get our hands on from Greek lexicons. Nothing original there.

So, what exactly do I bring to the equation with a text like this?

  1. I selected the text because of our current mini-series on our faith-family’s core values.
  2. That means I bring congregational purpose to this sermon, a purpose that, I hope, matches God’s purpose for this verse.
  3. Part of my job is to convince our listeners that this is critical (“…we urge you…”) and that they all have this responsibility (“…brothers…”), not just the leadership. These are implications of the explanations of meaning. Definitions alone won’t go there, but we need to.
  4. Then, I needed to help everyone see how important it is for us to care for each other like this. God decided to give us these four instructions at the end of the little letter. They must help a faith-family flourish spiritually. I helped them see the importance of these instructions by asking them what a local church would look like that didn’t treat each other like this.
  5. I wanted to make sure everyone realized that there are times when they might find themselves in one of the categories and in need of someone else’s assistance. Otherwise, we need to be ready to add real ministry to our small talk because it’s possible that whoever we’re fellowshipping with is in one of the categories and needs the appropriate response.
  6. Finally, I wanted to connect v. 14 with the the early part of the letter where the gospel and its transforming power is mentioned. This helps us see that God’s salvation in Christ creates the desire and capacity for us to respond well to each other. That way applying these instructions is a matter of genuine faith-at-work in a faith-family.

There may have been more, but this is a good amount of material that is more or less my doings. Before this coming Sunday, consider what kinds of things you contribute to your sermon and may our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) through your efforts.

Randal

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Me and God in the Study

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Thinking about what I actually bring to the equation for a given Sunday Sermon

This weekend I am thinking about what I actually bring to the equation with respect to sermon development. I had the privilege to preach Luke 14:25-35 this morning where Jesus explains the high cost of following Him.

Sometimes I feel that I contribute very little except for the ability to read the best material that other scholars have provided. It is an important part of preaching, but I thought we might give this some thought.

First, is this feeling true? To what degree do I add original material to my sermons? Second, if it were true, is that okay?

So, first, it is not true. Each week I select my preaching portion, trace the argument of that Scripture, and begin my analysis without consulting any of the best exegetes and theologians I can access. Being able to read Hebrew and Greek help me use excellent lexicons to get to critical definitions-in-context. Oh, and God’s Spirit operates in answer to my prayers for insight: “Lord, grant to me keenness of mind, capacity to remember, skill in learning, subtlety to interpret…”

But, more than that, each Monday provides an opportunity to also identify the big idea and intention of that passage. I now know what God intends to do to those in our faith-family that have ears to hear. And I know enough of the flock to know this is going to be a very important act of watching over souls.

Second, if it were true that I brought very little to the sermon equation, it would not be okay. God has called me and is equipping me to help shepherd a little flock. Not someone else. So, while I might benefit from Marshall’s fine treatment of Luke 14, it can’t be Marshall’s sermon.

As we head back to work tomorrow morning and begin preparing for our next sermon, let’s enjoy our time with God and His Word so He receives glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal

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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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What We Preach No Matter the Preaching Portion/Pericope

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Abe’s new book is very helpful, especially in the discussion about theology and application.

I decided to select Abe’s new book, A Manual for Preaching: The Journey from Text to Sermon, as one of the required textbooks for my upcoming sections of PAS 513 Advanced Homiletics (Lancaster and D.C. locations of Lancaster Bible College|Capital Seminary & Graduate School).

Abe does an excellent job summarizing the preaching task with respect to what happens each Sunday in church. Think about your preaching portion from this morning or the one you will be preaching on this coming Sunday. Can you see your preaching fitting into the following description?

“So each pericope [the section you’ve selected to preach on] is God’s gracious invitation to humankind to live in his ideal world by abiding by the thrust/force of that pericope–that is, the requirement of God’s ideal world as called for in that pericopal world segment (e.g., listening to/obeying only God’s voice, from 1 Sam. 15 [where King Saul failed miserably!]. And as humankind accepts that divine invitation and applies the thrust/force of the pericope, week by week and pericope by pericope God’s people are progressively and increasingly inhabiting this ideal world and adopting its values” (p. 29).

If we’ve selected them properly, our preaching portions contain “God’s gracious invitation” to our listeners to inhabit “his ideal world.”

That happens when we urge them to be or do what the pericope is requiring (what Abe calls its “thrust/force”).

Sunday after Sunday the cumulative affect is growing more and more into the likeness of Christ (“inhabiting this ideal world and adopting its values”).

Can you see why it’s impossible for congregations composed of some with “ears to hear” not to grow into a mature Body?

I can’t think of anything more fulfilling than being the mouthpiece for God’s invitation to live in his ideal world. And as we do that each weekend, may He receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal