There are two books I often recommend when it comes to the mechanics of preaching. The first is 12 Essential Skills for Great Preaching by McDill. It’s a terrible title, but an excellent book. This is the main resource I recommend for learning process. The second is Preaching by John MacArthur and the faculty of the Master’s Seminary. It contains more technical essays and discussions of specific aspects of preaching and exegesis leading to exposition. It will be useful in getting a broader and deeper grasp of the discipline of homiletics. There are many other books on preaching, some of which I have read and some of which I have liked--Martyn Lloyd-Jones's Preachers and Preaching and John Stott's Between Two Worlds are classics worthy of mention. But I don't think a great deal of time should be spent on studying homiletics but rather on preparing to do it faithfully. In other words, I would rather a preacher master the basic principles and skills by studying one or two volumes and then spend the rest of his time wrestling with the biblical text. Granted, there is a place for rhetorical excellence, and my own preaching is "all wrong" if measured by the canons of proper oratory. Some would argue my own ministry would be more effective if I spent more time learning how to preach, and they may be right. But I would rather spend the majority of my time in the biblical text, studying the original languages, and reading widely and deeply in theology and edifying literature. I do not aspire to be a great orator, just a faithful, even if barely competent, teacher.
What follows is a basic sketch of sermon preparation. This could be significantly elaborated, but the basic steps should suffice as a starting point. Every preacher will need to revise and make it his own with practice over time. This isn’t a checklist I follow for every sermon. Sometimes I spend more or less time on each “step.” But it is a general outline of the flow, the major phases, and important exercises that help preachers develop faithful and fruitful exposition. I am going to be as brief as I can while still attempting to give enough explanation that each step will be understandable and actionable.
1. Pray
This may seem obvious, but it is easy to overlook. I know I too frequently neglect it in my own preparation for preaching. Prayer is the single most important element of your ministry and your most powerful tool in preparing for and practicing ministry. Pray before you begin, as you proceed, and when you are finished. Pray that God will use you, feeble and fallible though you are, to speak to his people. Pray that he will give you clarity in thought and expression. Pray that he will lead you every step of the way. You cannot pray too much. Most of us pray far too little. I confess with shame that I certainly do not pray as I should.
2. Read
The first step is becoming very familiar with the sermon text. You need to read the text… a lot. This preparatory reading must be both extensive and intensive. If you are preparing to preach through a book, you should be reading it straight through, preferably aloud, at least once a week for a long time before you begin preaching it. If you don’t have a long time and the book is short, plan to read through it every day for the next 6 weeks. Read it aloud. Read it with passion. Vary your tone and expression. Get “into” the text and story. Read it in multiple translations, all of the major English translations (e.g. KJV, NKJV, NASB, NIV, ESV) and some of the lesser known ones as well if you have access to them. This is extensive reading, and it may start years before you begin to preach through a book.
Intensive reading focuses more narrowly and deeply on the texts you will be preaching. When you start a new chapter, repeat the above but with particular attention to just that chapter. Read the particular paragraph/pericope or verses you are studying and planning to expound. Plan to read the text many, many times. Do not even look at the cover of your commentaries until you have thoroughly read and are already beginning to understand the content and concepts of the text.
A word about note-taking: Feel free to take notes during every step of this process, but don’t turn reading into study. There is a difference. Don’t run rabbit trails with your notes at this stage. I keep a legal pad next to me and jot down observations, ideas, and cross-references throughout my study process. By the time I am ready to sit down and outline the text, I usually already have several pages full of notes.
3. Translate
Now it is time to dig into the passage in the original languages. Do the best you can with the current skills and tools that you have. Copy the text you are preparing to preach by hand (i.e. the specific verses for your next sermon), and then create an initial, rough interlinear translation. I skip lines on my legal pad and write the text in black ink and my interlinear translation in blue. Use an interlinear and lexicon to check terms you do not know and to correct or confirm your work. Now that you have a rough version, use your lexical and exegetical tools to dig into each word of the text. Look up meanings that may be significant or that are unclear, parse the verbs, make sure you understand the relationship of the parts. Remember that meaning is not merely a function of individual words but the relation of the parts to the whole. Be sure you understand how these parts are relating to one another and examine how the syntax should inform the proper translation. Check for any textual variants and get familiar with the issues involved and the reasons for accepting one variant over another. Finally, write a full translation based on the above work. This will be the type of translation you would find in a modern English version, not the wooden interlinear version you created above. If your full translation differs significantly from major English versions, go back and examine why. Be sure that you understand why you are departing from these other versions, and be prepared to explain and defend your translation choices.
4. Study
Now that you have a thorough familiarity with and understanding of the text both in translation and in the original source, you are ready to begin studying it. When I am preparing to preach through a book, I find and collect the best commentaries on the text I can obtain and afford. Researching which commentaries to use should happen before the series begins, and you will want to pre-read portions of each of the commentaries (e.g. the introductions to the book) if not the entirety of some of them before you begin preparing sermons. I usually identify 2-3 primary commentaries and several other secondary commentaries to use in my study. I read the primary commentaries every week, straight through, working through the commentary as I prepare to preach each passage. I do not attempt to read through all of the secondary commentaries, but I refer to them whenever I am grappling with a difficult text or am looking for further information or inspiration. Be sure not to overlook older resources from Church history. Augustine and Chrysostom’s sermons, Calvin’s sermons and commentaries, the Puritans, and even classic devotional commentaries like Matthew Henry, Matthew Poole, and John Gill can be extraordinarily helpful in preparing to preach the text even if they are not your best resources for exegetical and linguistic analysis of the text. Be sure to use a balance of exegetical, linguistic, and homiletical commentaries. You want your sermons to be easy for your congregation to relate to, not sound like academic lectures for graduate students. As you read your commentaries: mark, annotate, capture quotes, and take thorough notes. Over time you will learn how best to do this. Read with a pen in hand and a legal pad close by. And coffee… don’t forget the coffee. All of my favorite commentaries and my Greek and Latin Bibles have been baptized by carelessness with my coffee mug. Those stains are reminders of happy hours in the study sitting before the Lord and poring over his word.
5. Outline
By this time you may have already outlined the passage, but if not, do so. This is an outline of the text, not necessarily the outline that you will preach. Sometimes the textual outline becomes the preaching outline, but more often they will differ. At the very least, the former should be structural and the latter expository and hortatory.
Now you need to develop the outline for your sermon. This is the skeleton on which you will build the substance of the message. There are many different ways to develop preaching outlines from any given passage of Scripture, and over time you may preach the same passage on different occasions using different outlines. But of preeminent importance is focusing your sermon outline on one idea, a clear proposition which focuses the entire message and is supported by every point in it. You may have three or five or more points in your sermon, but you must have one central idea. Identifying that central idea will depend first on the substance of the passage (you should not make your point something the text does not support) and second on the needs of your congregation. Any given passage might include several ideas that could each warrant its own lesson, but you must decide how best to expound and apply the text on any given Lord’s Day. Sometimes you will not be able to identify a central, unifying theme for the message. If you have done all of the above work and wrestled with the text for some time, back up and re-examine the verses you planned to cover. Perhaps you need to include fewer verses or more verses to find a unifying theme. Do not force a theme onto the text, and do not write a sermon with multiple, separate themes. Adjust how much of the text you plan to cover each week so that every sermon will have a unifying theme.
6. Write
I do not think it is important that every sermon be written out as full manuscript, and it is certainly not necessary (and not always advantageous) to preach from a full manuscript, but after many years of preaching from skeleton outlines, full sentence outlines, and with no notes at all, over the last several years I have become a firm believer in and proponent of manuscript writing. The discipline of preaching without any notes whatsoever is a skill worth developing on its own and might be a good subject to discuss on another day. But I have become convinced that most preachers would be well served to write full manuscripts every week, whether they take those notes with them into the pulpit or not.
Writing a full manuscript forces you to be clear in your thinking, expression, and argument. You cannot deceive yourself about the true substance and simplicity of your message if you are compelled to write it down in full. I would highly recommend that at least one of your weekly sermons be written as a full manuscript, using the aforementioned sermon outline as the framework. Format the manuscript like a paper or essay you would write for seminary. Be grammatically correct, precise, warm, and above all… clear. Write as you would preach; this is a sermon, not an academic essay. But do not be chatty. Make sure that your prose carries itself with the dignity of the subject and task before you. You may look back on your early manuscripts several years down the road and cringe as you read them, but they will be an invaluable resource for capturing your work and displaying your progress as an exegetical expositor.
7. Cool
Once your manuscript is written, it needs time to cool. Put it away. Don’t look at it for at least a day or two--but don’t wait too long or your recent study will begin to fade and your mind will be distracted by other things. Your sermons will suffer if they are being completed at the last minute. They need time to rest so that you can reflect and then more effectively revise them.
8. Revise
Come back to your sermon after a couple of days and re-read it, aloud, and begin proof-reading it for errors. Reading aloud is the best way to proof-read work, and since the sermon is ultimately intended as an oral communication, reading aloud will help you discern how well the manuscript comes across. Correct misspellings and grammatical errors. Evaluate your expressions and revise or rewrite as necessary. Be prepared to rearrange sections, to add and delete words, sentences, and whole paragraphs. Hopefully you will not have to abandon the draft and start an entirely new one, but be ruthless in editing. Good writing is concise. Eliminate extraneous words.
9. Review
On Saturday night or Sunday morning, find a quiet place to read your manuscript again. I read it with a highlighter, red pen, and black Sharpie in hand. Ideas I want to emphasize and transitional cues get highlighted. Specific sentences I want to be sure to say get underlined in red. And extra material that, while helpful, is not necessary to the message, gets lined out in black ink. If you are preaching without notes or with only a skeleton outline, make sure you review and rehearse the transitions so that your argument will follow a straight line and your expressions will be clear.
10. Preach
Pray for God’s blessing on the message. Ask that he will help you hide behind the cross, stand upon his Word, and be a conduit for the truth his Spirit is pleased to unleash and apply. A conduit is not meant to impede progress; it is merely a channel that gets the power from the source to the receptacle. That is your job. The Holy Spirit is to be the Church’s teacher; you are simply the mouthpiece. Do not obsess about your notes, however much or little you have with you in the pulpit. There may be ideas you planned to share that you forget to include; there may be ideas you did not intend to share but that fit and so you incorporate them on the spot. Don’t be a slave to what you have written, but be bound fast by the Word. Stay grounded in the text, and do not wander from it. Come back again and again as you preach to the passage before you. Point your hearers back to what God has said. You are not giving a TED Talk; you are proclaiming the God-breathed, inerrant, and holy Word of the living God.
Many years ago I read or was told a simply four-point plan for preparing to preach that sums up the above better than I could. “Read yourself full, think yourself clear, pray yourself hot, and let yourself go.” That’s how to preach. Do the hard work as a student of the text, think long and hard about what you will say, seek the Lord’s blessing, and get out of the way. --JME
