Preaching Practicals. (WITH PODCAST LINK BELOW!!)
A Look at the Practical Side of Making Sermons
By Dolton W. Robertson II
Pastor, Parkway Baptist Church, Trinity, AL
If you care at all about being heard, you have to consider the practical side of sermon preparation. Jerry Vines said, “If the preacher is to be effective in sharing the word of God with his people, he must have a keen interest in whether or not his message connects with his audience.” F. D. Whitesell, said, “The supreme test of a sermon is whether or not it communicates.” No one thinks that a sermon title, an outline or a carefully considered delivery is a replacement for the power of God. However, it is clear that God has chosen to use human instrumentality, and therefore, our diligence in preparation is consistent with that truth. It is not holy, nor is it spiritual to wing it in the pulpit.
In the world of preaching, it is common to encounter an over-spiritualization of the elements of what preaching requires. I suppose it is a misapplication of the Holy Spirit’s work in guiding and empowering us through the process. It is not altogether incorrect to say, “God gave me a message,” as long as you are referring to the effect of God’s truth on your heart – as long as the message is consistent with the author’s intent. God speaks and guides through scripture (Jn. 16:13). The same Bible that says, “Be filled with the Spirit,” (Ep. 5:18), also says, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needed not to be ashamed.” The elders who are to be honored are those who labor in the word and doctrine (1 Tim. 5:17). We are admonished to “exercise thyself rather unto godliness” (1 Tim. 4:7), implying that spiritual service involves practical commitments and quantifiable measures of action and labor. It is elementary – to preach the Bible you have to know and understand the Bible and to know and understand the Bible you have to work at the business of doctrine. What naturally follows is the reality that truth poorly delivered is ignored. As D. Martin Lloyd-Jones said, these things are important because “people are going to listen.” So, we must know the Bible, understand the Bible and be adept at communicating its truth, that is, apt to teach (1 Tim. 3:2).
Preaching Practicals
Let us consider some practical ideas for better preaching:
- Develop a systematic approach to sermon preparation.
Some practical, systematic habits, which allow your mind and heart to be influenced and transformed by your text will prove to be invaluable. Some of these habits are logical and indispensable and others are personal and adaptable to one’s own gifts and skill set. Regardless, you have to have some go-to procedures to aid in sensible preparation. The moments where God moves on our hearts in special ways providing guidance, illumination and conviction are the consequence of this systematic labor.
The business of preaching is far too important to be left to impulse and inspiration. Preaching is the product of thorough preparation. We are reminded of the old analogy of shaking the tree of scripture, every branch, twig and leaf until no detail is missed. Luther said to beat importunately on the text…query the text (question it). Lloyd-Jones likened it unto a potter fashioning clay or a blacksmith pounding away upon the anvil, forging stubborn steel. Lloyd-Jones, speaking of the sweat and toil of sermon preparation, said:
This is the most grueling part of the preparation of a sermon; but at the same time it is the most fascinating and a most glorious occupation. It can be at times most difficult, most exhausting, most trying. But at the same time I can assure you that when you have finally succeeded you will experience one of the most glorious feelings that ever comes to a man on the face of this earth.
The primary point here is that when a task is daunting, the systematic approach is the only way to begin unpacking the seemingly inscrutable mysteries of the text and seeing its truth in an orderly structure. This structure makes the way through basic study and leads to the development of a sermon. Unfortunately, as accurate and meaningful exposition of the text at hand appears to be of little importance to far too many preacher. The word of God is simply there to support what they already want to say.
A systematic approach also aids greatly in navigating the difficult passages, which will often de-mystify once the process has begun. If it is your aim to preach the whole counsel of God, then hard passages and complex truth will have to be dealt with in the pulpit. Systematic preparation will make this rewarding instead of irksome.
Here are some simple ideas for developing a systematic approach to sermon preparation, based upon the assumption that you already know your text at least a week ahead of time and significant preparation concerning the book of the Bible and general context has already been done. Be aware, this is a painfully simple illustration of how a systematic approach can move you, step-by-step, through the process of exposition.
What To Do Daily
Monday
Read your text twice (once in the AM and once in the PM).
Write out all that you already know about the text with cross references.
List any questions that arise as you read so that you may find the answers.
Tuesday
Read your text twice (once in the AM and once in the PM).
List and research all persons mentioned in the text.
Carefully check and rehearse all complicated pronunciations.
Wednesday
Read your text twice (once in the AM and once in the PM).
List and research all places and customs relating to the text.
Rehearse pronunciations.
Thursday
Read your text twice (once in the AM and once in the PM).
Diagram your text.
Study and define any and all words in the text that need defining.
Rehearse pronunciations.
Friday
Read your text twice (once in the AM and once in the PM).
Answer these questions:
What is the big idea of the text?
Develop the answers to those questions with how’s and why’s.
What will you challenge your congregation to do or believe?
What direct imperatives are found in the text?
Read commentaries.
Rehearse pronunciations.
Saturday
Read your text twice (out loud).
Outline your sermon and write it out as thoroughly as possible.
Prepare to teach the outline:
How will you introduce the sermon?
How will you get their attention?
How will you conclude the sermon?
What will the title of your sermon be?
This is painfully basic, but if you have no system, it will help you to be more prepared than ever before. Obviously, each day’s assignment will vary in its demands upon your mind and your time. This is just a simple guide. If step one on Monday takes very little time, move on to Tuesday’s requirements. By Friday you will be ready for the heavy lifting of exegesis and homiletics, and by the weekend, you will be ready to preach. Jerry Vines provides a piece on “Mastering your Material,” that is very helpful here:
Mastering Your Material
Step #1 Deepen your understanding of your material so that you thoroughly know what you are saying.
Step #2 Have strong organization for what you want to say.
Step #3 Understand the logical relationships of the ideas in your message – know how the various ideas in your sermon fit together.
Step #4 Rehearse the thought sequences of your sermon one by one; speak them out loud; master the ideas and pictures; depend upon logical rather than verbal memory. You will be surprised at how many actual phrases and word sequences will come back to you when you know thoroughly the logical sequence of your concepts. When you are not trying so hard to remember the words, they will flow much better. Words cluster better around ideas and pictures than they do around attempts at memorization.
Step #5 Distribute your review over several different times; always review the night before you preach and then again shortly before you preach.
Step #6 Overlearn your material. Be so familiar with what you are going to say that it is a part of you.
- Read, read, read.
Honestly, every preacher must read as if his life depends upon it, because, your life as a preacher does. My friend, Pastor Jim Alter, says that preachers saying, “I don’t have time to read,” is like saying “I don’t wear deodorant.” You don’t have to tell us. We already know. Slow reading is fine. Using a dictionary every page is great. Not reading is failure. It is intellectual arrogance to say, in essence, “I don’t need the thoughts of 2,000 years of church history. I don’t need great minds influencing my stellar views of scripture.”
The fear that reading leads to apostasy is ridiculous. A preacher that cannot read without declension is a novice. Facts lead to increased information and insights lead to increased understanding. It is impossible to grapple with eternal truth, to plum the unsearchable riches of Christ and communicate what you find with clarity and meaning if you are not continually reading. Read only those that you completely trust if you must, but read, you must.
The average reader, from the most conservative estimation, can read 200 words a minute (probably more for even slow readers). At this rate, reading only 30 uninterrupted minutes per day, a slow reader could read 10 – 15 300 page books per year. If you read on the same subject for a year, concentrating your effort on carefully selected material, you could make great strides as a thinker and teacher. You could also tackle a few large sets in a year. This kind of “outside reading” can transform the substance of one’s preaching in so many ways.
Reading Tips
- Read systematically. Reading systematically is the act of reading books with understanding them as your aim. One of the best things to read about reading is, How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler. In this book he suggests that you read the index and chapter headings and divisions carefully first. You proceed by reading with the stated purpose or thesis of the book in mind. If the subject is seminal, consider the footnotes and bibliography for your own further reading.
- (2)Read Actively. It is massively helpful to make notes as you read. If I am reading a book that is not a special or antique edition, I will make notes with page numbers in the front and back of the book, highlighting as I read. Books that are particularly helpful often look like they’ve been attacked. This might be blasphemous to some bibliophiles, but active reading is a game changer. You will remember so much more of what you read. Rehearse what you learn, sharing it with others and saying it out loud. Use it, or lose it.
- (3) Read Intentionally. You have to schedule time to read. Busyness is no excuse for failure in this area. It is vital. A good guideline is to read one hour a day, one day per week and one week per year. This does not count your regular sermonic preparation. This kind of intentional emphasis will keep you sharp and informed – ready for whatever you plan to do as a preaching pastor. Every preacher has areas of specialization. Continue developing those strengths by planning what you will read and why. You have to be informed, which means you will know that something is the case. You will need to be enlightened which is to know what something is all about. Adler quoted Montaigne, who spoke of abecedarian ignorance and doctrinal ignorance. Neither is acceptable for a man of God.
Nothing will change your preaching like good reading. Nothing. Francis Bacon, said some books are to be tasted, some chewed, and others swallowed and digested. In any case, read, read, read, as if your life as a preacher depends upon it.
- Write, write, write.
Francis Bacon famously said, reading makes a broad mind; writing makes a precise or exact mind. I have a friend who has been a pastor in Michigan for many years. In the early days of his ministry, his sermons were broadcast on the radio so they needed to be preached in a tight thirty minutes. He knew exactly how many words would make for a thirty minute sermon and wrote a manuscript to that end. While exact manuscripts of this nature would not work for most, the idea of scripting much of the sermon, preparing how you want to say things with exact thoughtfulness, would transform your ability to communicate.
Lloyd-Jones said that if you preach one sermon per week for forty years, you will utter about 9 million words. “So,” he said, “it is worth taking trouble over our own words.” The wise man said, “The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd” (Ecc. 12:10-11).
Words are the bricks by which sermonic temples are constructed. They are seemingly innumerable in availability and they vary in specific meaning and syllabic rhythm. Choosing the right words is necessary if being heard and understood is important. Disagreements do exist among great minds concerning the use of unnecessarily complex words. William F. Buckley, conservative author and commentator, was well-known as an elite wordsmith. His responses to his critics are pure gold. One of his readers wrote him about the word bloviation, saying, “I believe you made the word up and it is nothing more than a lot of blatant blather.” Buckley replied, “Yes, we did make it up – and don’t think it was easy!”
Buckley wrote a notable forward to the journalist and grammarian, James Kilpatrick’s, The Writer’s Art (a book he described as “the best book of its kind I have ever experienced”). Buckley referred light-heartedly to what he called Kilpatrick’s “Hundred Years’ War against Unusual Words.” He quoted Kilpatrick, who said, “No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept: when we feel the impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away…” In response, Buckley offered a theory. “We tend to conclude that people who use words with which happen not to be familiar are using unfamiliar words. If John knows 8,000 words and Susan knows 8,000 words, inevitably John will know 250 words that Susan does not, and Susan will know 250 words that John does not, and John will think Susan exhibitionistic, and Susan will think John affected.” In other words, just because you do not know a particular word does not mean the word is unusual or inappropriate. Buckley gave as possible reasons for using “unusual” words, “…it can be a matter of rhythm, it can be a matter of exact fit – and it can be something by way of obeisance to the people whose honed verbal appetites created the need for such a word, which therefore came into being.”
James Kilpatrick, in contradistinction, said “I have a theory about writing. The theory goes to this effect. The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.” One might conclude from Kilpatrick’s theory that the overuse of unusual words will halt our readers and listeners, becoming irksome rather than edifying.
C. S. Lewis warned, “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean “very,” otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” The style expert, William Strunck, Jr., “…scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute.” Clearly, preaching will be improved by clear, concise, accurate, vivid writing. Even the effort to write out our introduction, transitions and conclusions would be a help. Special, “exotic” words can be used with care, providing unique insight and a personal touch, but never to the point of confusing the listeners.
- Preach shorter sermons.
Remember, “the supreme test of a sermon is whether or not it communicates.” My father always told me, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” The obstinate commitment to preaching long sermons is one of the most common ways that preachers defeat their own interests in preaching. We medicate our regret over excess in this area by blaming the carnal disinterest in the pew, when every single preacher has, himself, bemoaned the discomfort of enduring an elongated sermon.
So, how long should a sermon be? That question always elicits interesting discussion and not a little accusation. When I asked a pastor friend of mine, “What is the average length of your sermons,” his initial response was, “It depends upon who you ask.” Dr. Raymond Barber used to say, “If you can’t strike oil in thirty minutes, stop boring.” Prison evangelist, Dave Turner says the five B’s of good preaching are “Be brief, my brother, be brief.”
Every ardent Bible thumper holds as his justification for long sermonizing, the story found in Acts 20:7-12, where due to Paul’s “long preaching,” Eutychus, fell to his death. It is interesting to say the least that preachers give little pause to seizing as their primary support for sermon length, as story where a congregant dies as a result! I would say to all who see this as a proof text for exhausting sermons, (1) You’re not Paul, (2) You do not have the power to raise people from the dead. The moral being, if cannot bring someone back to life, you probably shouldn’t preach them to death!
There are two extremes in this line of thinking. One, people are slaves to sitcoms, social media, and sound bites, so something akin to a Tedtalk or a homily is best if you want to “build a church.” The other would suggest that a sermon shorter than fifty minutes is some sort of compromise. Jesus stood in the synagogue and read Isaiah 60:1-2 and sat down declaring the fulfillment of the scriptures before their eyes. This took about 90 seconds tops. I would think that somewhere between a minute and a half and the death of your congregation would be the sweet spot. Who could forget the homiletical maxim, “stand up, speak up, and shut up!”
According to an exhaustive analysis of sermons by the Pew Research Group, 39 minutes is the average length of the evangelical sermon. One of the most thorough answers to the question, “how long should I preach?” comes from the popular evangelical, John Piper. He gave numerous factors that should be considered when considering our time in the pulpit in any given circumstance. His first factor was the whole answer in theory:
Vastly more important that length, is whether the sermon is faithful to the biblical text and rich with God-glorifying, soul-transforming truth. Far better to have a truth-laden, Christ-exalting, textually-faithful, clearly-spoken, deeply-felt, ten minute homily, than to have a totally fascinating, biblically-vacuous, textually-unrooted, story-laden piece of inspirational moralism that lasts for an hour.
Piper offered what most experienced preachers would most likely say in essence: it depends. It depends upon the nature of the biblical text, the condition and characteristics of the audience, your giftedness as a preacher, and the situation in which the sermon is being preached. Piper’s final answer was that meaningful, thorough exposition is near impossible to do in ten minutes and often requires forty and even closer to fifty.
The issue that most preachers will face is that their congregations are not as conditioned to receive a fifty minute sermon as congregations that were built on exposition, and most of us cannot do it as well as the brightest lights in the constellation of biblical preachers. Therefore, I recommend preaching shorter sermons. I did not say, short, I said shorter. I promise you, those who are living life in snatches as the average person does will get more from it and will appreciate the consideration. I do preach longer at times but I seldom feel good about it. It usually happens when I am tired or fighting the perception of some disconnect with the congregation – often a wrong perception on my part. Try preaching shorter sermons. Here’s how:
- Over prepare. When you have mastered your material to whatever degree that is possible, you develop confidence and confidence prevents nervous elaboration. You are more direct, more matter-of-fact. Of course, I am not recommending carnal, self-confidence, but the assurance that God’s word has taken root in your heart and mind and that you must deliver it with boldness.
- Be precise in the preparation of the difficult sections of the sermon. This is where the practice of reading and writing will be instrumental. As one evangelical said, lean in (in reading and writing) and lean back (to think and meditate). As you are illuminated in the study, write clearly in your notes and stay close in preaching. This prevents “spinning out” once in the pulpit because you failed to adequately prepare yourself for the task of unpacking the hard texts.
- Resist the pitfall of over-sensitivity in your mental appraisals of how the congregation is receiving the message. If I feel that the congregation is resisting, I often spend extra time trying to get them on board and waste valuable time in the pulpit. Many things can effect how the listener will receive your message. The temperature, fatigue, stress, physical pain and basic distractions can make it appear as though they are not with you. One Sunday morning I thought to myself while preaching, “I think Bob is unhappy with this message. He seems offended.” After the service, when exiting the church he said with a grimace, “I hope I didn’t look mad this morning. I hurt my back this week and I didn’t want to miss church.” While reading the room is a necessary part of being effective, you can over-do it. Prepare your sermon and deliver it with passion. Move through it and if you’re adequately prepared, the gist of the sermon would be understood and well-received. Most of the time.
- Remember how you want the sermon to end. Consider the effectiveness of leaving the congregation invigorated by the fresh awareness of truth, instead of having them check out mentally twenty minutes before you are done. You would be far better off having every other member leave saying, “You could preached all day,” instead of looking at their watches through half the sermon. Few of us are as compelling as we think we are or want to be.
These four practices could revolutionize your preaching. If you develop a systematic approach, work hard at reading, write out your thoughts carefully and strive to condense what you say in the pulpit, you will begin to preach your best sermons.