Lesson Goal
In this lesson I hope to encourage preachers to have a logical flow to their preaching.
Lesson Intro
Let all things be done decently and in order (1 Corinthians 14:40). When a sermon is disorganized it is less effective. Organization does not mean that we ignore the Holy Spirit and his inspiration, just the opposite. Organizing the written Word of God was the result of the Holy Spirit's inspiration and so too ought organizing a sermon. We need the Holy Spirit to guide us in the preparation as well as the delivery of our homilies.
Lesson Plan
This chapter proposes to teach you how to take a bunch of disjointed thoughts and ideas and organize them into a cohesive whole with a logical flow. Start with prayer, purpose, resources, then working on your outro, plan, body, title, intro and review. It then concludes with an overview and suggests a common outline which can be adapted to a wide variety of sermon styles and gives an example.
How Prepare
1. The Goal (Your Secret Reason for Giving this Sermon)
The most important preparation for any sermon is prayer. Ask God to guide your thoughts into his will. Clear your conscience of any guilt, by asking for a repentant heart and forgiveness for specific sins. Ask the Head of the Church, Jesus Christ, for his specific will, regarding this particular homily. Be ready to submit to his will and to change your mind if you had another idea.
Now ask yourself why Christ wants you to give this particular sermon. You may have no other purpose other than to preach on one of the three or four suggested Scriptures in a lectionary. That is a start. Eventually, once you have chosen a particular passage of Scripture, you will also want to narrow down why you are preaching this passage to this church at this time. Is there a natural topic in the text that fits current needs? For instance, the topic of James 3:5-12 may be the tongue, but your purpose in giving the homily may be to discourage some of the gossip that can damage any local church. So write it down. It does not have to be stated openly while delivering your sermon, but you need to know why you are giving it.
2. The Sermon Plan (Your Road Map)
What is your sermon plan? Your plan may differ from your goal or purpose. If this was a classroom, it would be a lesson plan. The goal is the reason you are giving the homily and may go unstated, especially if it might be too sensitive to state bluntly. The plan is a proposed roadmap, a succinct summary of what you specifically intend to speak about. It is less wordy than a précis, which can be up to about a third of the length of the sermon. That is too long. The plan is more of an outline of what you actually propose to speak about. You may plan to speak about the four areas where the sower in Luke 8 sowed his seed. You could give a statement that your plan is to discuss four areas where the Word of God lands. It's really that simple.
Preparing your plan immediately after working on your conclusion helps you make sure you have ended up where you promised. Sometimes it is good to tell people where you are going and state your lesson plan. However, there are times when you want to keep people guessing, such as a mystery tour or other such suspense-building device. Suspense keeps people interested and so is a good strategy at times. In those situations, you don't have to tell everyone what you intend saying, other than say that you are taking them on a mystery tour, or some such thing. However, for your organizational purposes, you need to write the plan down and include a statement such as you are going to keep them guessing until the end.
You now have direction for your homily. This does not mean that the direction is fixed. You may get all the way through your preparation and decide to give a completely different sermon. That is quite normal. Don't stress about it. You simply have a new goal and a new direction.
What resources do you have at your disposal? Here are a few recommendations:
Search www.christianbook.com for some of the best academic, theology and pastoral books. It is a real treasure trove and they ship worldwide.
Several Bible translations or a computer program such as the excellent Bible Works are available at www.bibleworks.com or through a local bookstore. There are also a variety of translations at http://www.biblegateway.com/ or http://blueletterbible.org/ or other similar web sites.
Hebrew and Greek lexicons such as the popular BDB Hebrew Lexicon, the Friberg Greek Lexicon, the Louw-Nida Lexicon, the UBS Greek Dictionary and so on. Parsing Greek and Hebrew is much easier today with computer programs such as those mentioned above.
Many commentaries are excellent resources. Of the free ones on the Internet at places like http://www.studylight.org/com/ the highly recommended commentaries are Adam Clarke's Commentary, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Matthew Henry's Commentary, and the Catholic Encyclopedia. Most scholars do not recommend Schofield's or Darby's. If you can afford some more modern commentaries, highly recommend are The New International Commentary series, the Word Biblical Commentary and the latest Catholic Encyclopedia. If you cannot afford them personally, perhaps your church will consider adding them to the church library.
I highly recommend books by a variety of reputable, orthodox theologians. I earnestly counsel every preacher to completely avoid the many books written by popular but otherwise totally unqualified individuals. Why would you want to preach hogwash!
Miscellaneous resources would include books of short stories, books of clean jokes, a local daily news source, keeping up to date with missionary stories, conversations with pastors or priests in other denominations around town and Internet sermons which can have some ideas you may want to use.
Caution: Don't just preach a sermon from the internet or a book. Certainly, use it as a resource, but if it is not the product of your own prayer and research, it will just sound wooden and stiff.
3. Your Sermon Body (Your Details)
After you have put your plan together, you will then want to organize a sentence that bridges into the first point of your sermon's body. Bridging statements create a segue (pronounced SEG-way), a smooth transition from one section to the next. For instance, you may say, "In order to understand why, we will look at two balancing reasons. The first advantage is..." or "Let's look at three things Jesus teaches us in this passage. The first point is..."
You will want to organize the body of your sermon into several points. One to four points are usually best depending on the style of sermon. We will discuss how to organize the points for different sermon styles in greater detail in future lessons. For the moment, ask yourself how many points naturally fit the passage of Scripture you are dealing with. If you are dealing with a topic, ask yourself how many points the congregation can effectively digest in one sermon. Some topics are best dealt with in a series of sermons, either once a year, once every so often or every week for several weeks.
Important inclusions in your homily's body are illustrations and applications to every day life. We will discuss that in greater detail in a future lesson. If this is a teaching sermon, you may want to continually refer to your points. We will discuss teaching techniques in future lessons.
4. Prepare Your Outro (Your Take-Home)
As stated in lesson 4 your outro is best prepared before your intro. The reason is that it helps you make sure you end up with the same topic that you started with. Of course, the flow of ideas may mean that you already have a hot point or two for some other part of the sermon, that you want to write down before you forget. That is fine. Just jot any thoughts down somewhere to be organized later. This lesson is detailing in what order to organize your sermon, not when an idea ought to come.
You do not have to completely prepare your outro if other ideas are flowing first. However, in general it is best to discipline the mind to do one thing at a time. So prepare a tentative outro now which you can tweak later.
5. The Title (Your Advertising)
Why bother with a title? Biblically, the opening words of a section of Scripture sometimes served as a title. For instance, Genesis is actually called "In the Beginning" and Revelation is actually called "The Revelation of Jesus Christ."
A title is important for the church bulletin, an outside notice board or any other kind of advertising for your sermon in the local newspaper, on television and the internet.
The early church was persecuted for several hundred years and did not have many opportunities to advertise openly. Today’s churches can use real estate to the Gospel’s advantage, and many use a billboard out front. Imaginative and sometimes humorous advertising of this week’s sermon title can be the talk of the town.
How can you create a good title? A good title is an imaginative advertisement. Be brief. Use few words. Remember the advertising slogan: less is more. Long titles on a church’s public notice board don’t get read by passing traffic. Make it tantalizing, interest provoking, challenging. It could be a captivating question, an alarming statement or a puzzle. Make it honest advertising not deceitful hype that promises more than the sermon can deliver.
What is an example? Let’s imagine a sermon on Peter’s vision in Acts 10 and play around with words for a number of possible titles. "Peter’s Vision" is accurate, but perhaps somewhat boring. "Pigs Welcomed" is imaginative and challenging and has an air of intrigue about it, if it fits the local culture. What about something like "Non-Christians Welcomed," "Exclusivity Finished," "Old Taboos Removed," "A Trance on a Rooftop," "Tired of Picky and Exclusive Religion?" There are endless possibilities.
Not every title will be a winner, and that's okay. Frankly, not every sermon you give will be either. However, the important thing is that a title is advertising and that any such advertising be consistent and reliable.
6. The Intro (Your Teaser)
Now that you have most of the sermon prepared, you can more appropriately introduce it. For more details on intros see chapter 5. After preparing your intro you will need to work on a segue into your plan statement. See above.
7. The Review (Your Double Check)
You have now finished the basic preparation for your sermon. Now it's time to let it stew for a few days. Do you remember your high school study methods? One of those taught when I was in high school was the SQ3R method. It stood for survey, query and review 3 times. That is also a good idea for sermon preparation. Survey your homily. Question yourself as to the validity, appropriateness, relevance and orthodoxy of the ideas. If you are like most of us who preach, you will probably review it more than three times before you give it.
This is why it is so important NOT to prepare a sermon the night before. It simply does not give you enough time to meditate and pray to perfect it, reviewing it at different times during the week. If you have made a lifelong habit of preparing your sermons well ahead of time, you will have noticed how a different day gives a fresh outlook. Something you thought was the ants pants the day before may not seem so wise and wonderful the following day, or vice versa. Allowing a sermon to simmer during the week produces a better product in the pulpit.
Preparation Overview
The first thing you will know about your sermon will probably be your purpose in giving it. The first thing other people will know about your sermon is the title, perhaps by reading it on an outside billboard. The idea of preparing your introduction last is not the unbendable law of the Medes and Persians, but it does give a rough guide as to when you will normally prepare the various components of a good sermon.
The Organized Sermon
The sermon comes together then as an organized whole when we consider all the elements as follows:
Title
Goal
Intro
Segue into Plan
Plan
Body
Segue into Main Point 1
Main Point 1
_____Sub Point a
_____Sub Point b
Segue into Main Point 2
Main Point 2
_____Sub Point a
_____Sub Point b
_____Sub Point c
Segue into Main Point 3
Main Point 3
_____Sub Point a
_____Sub Point b
Segue into Outro
Outro
Example Sermon
The following example illustrates how your sermon notes might look including all the ingredients discussed above.
Title: "Enormous Power in a Small Package"
Goal
To discourage destructive church gossip and promote edifying, constructive conversation.
Intro
There is a power which we all possess, which has enormous influence. Within your body there is an organ that has the power to build up this church or destroy it completely. It is a very powerful organ, yet it is one of the smallest organs in the human body. This important appendage has caused nations to win or lose wars, destroyed or built up businesses and marriages, and build up or ruined churches. It can set the world on fire. That organ is the tongue.
Plan
Today I propose to discuss James' instructions regarding the tongue and focus on three things: how universal the problem is, how it sets our direction and how it can burn.
Body (James 3:1-12)
1. Universal: we all stumble
Because we all stumble then we need mutual forgiveness. Which of us has not used out tongues to tear down a politician, a business, a fellow driver, a referee, an umpire, a neighbor or a sermon?
Example
Last political controversy. Which of us did not comment judgmentally without knowing all the facts?
2. Rudder: the tongue steers
How we speak sets the direction of our lives, our businesses, our neighborhood, our marriages, our children's lives, our church. What kind of speaking do we allow out of our mouths, into our ears?
Example
A father's words are often fewer than a mother's. How many Dads have used those words to cheer their children on to success in life?
3. Fire: the tongue burns
Fire burns. Only when it is controlled is fire good. Out of control it is very destructive. A small lit match dropped on the forest floor is an uncontrolled fire and potentially very destructive. Yet, controlled fire is potentially very powerful for good for driving a car, cooking or heating.
Example
A church can be destroyed by tactics similar to the destructive oratory of politicians who constantly undermine the government in power. Christians cannot operate that way, yet how many of us do?
Outro
We all need to constantly forgive each other for our all too frequent lack of self-control of our tongues. Our tongues set the direction of our lives, our businesses, our church. Our tongues are a fire, which if used rightly can set hearts ablaze with gusto and passion for the job at hand. If we are Spirit-filled, then we are also filled with the fruit of self-control, and we will notice that in how well we control our tongues.
One Final Thought
Make another review of your sermon a few days later. Look at your notes again and meditate over what you actually said, perhaps listen to a recording of your homily, or analyze any comments made by others. Don't do it Monday. Monday is the worst day of the week to do anything like that. Monday is also a bad day as a day off. Who wants a day off that you can't enjoy? Take a day off later in the week. Monday, you will have post-adrenaline let down, resulting in that feeling of being a little depressed, or even a lot depressed. You need to know that is normal and must realize that Monday is the day when most pastors hand in their resignation letters. Use Monday to decompress. Just putter around the office on Monday. Do a few small things. Review your sermon another day, not Monday. Listen to a recording of your sermon another day, not Monday.
Suggested Assignment
Choose a passage of Scripture that is easy to work with. Organize a sermon expounding that passage. Copy the outline below onto a sheet of paper or into a word processor. Fill in the blanks as you go. Remember to work on your goal first, skip the intro for now, and moving down the page come back up to your intro last.
Lesson Outro
We have discussed how to prepare a sermon including all the ingredients of title, goal, intro, plan, body and outro. Future lessons will teach you how to tweak these basics into a wide variety of sermon styles so that you will hopefully only rarely become dull or boring.
