Sermon Preparation
Sermon preparation is to the preacher what meal preparation
is to the homemaker – no sooner is one prepared and served
than it is all to do over again. How old it gets. How can I
prepare something fresh? Something that they will like?
Something that will provide a balanced diet? How can
essential but distasteful dietary elements be palatably
prepared but still retain essential vitamins and minerals?
Fortunately for the homemaker, there are recipe books and
meal planning aids that enable her to keep attractive and
nutritious meals on the table and still keep the house
clean and run the family taxi. But what does the preacher
do? A sermon outline book provides skeletal information and
organization for themes selected by someone else for other
people and other occasions. Commentaries provide more than
skeletal information, but it is neither organized for a
sermon nor adapted to a specific audience. How can the
preacher prepare two sermons week after week, month after
month, year after year, and maintain his congregation’s
appetite and spiritual health?
While there are many aspects of sermon preparation that
vary from preacher to preacher and even from sermon to
sermon, there is one immutable rule – a price must be paid;
the preacher must be dedicated to the task. It must be his
first priority. The sculpting of the sermon is the work of
an artist. All preachers can dream of great sermons; it
requires love’s labor to make that dream come true. The
preacher must constantly keep the sermon seed in his mind,
water it, weed it, nourish it, sweat over it until the
wording is precise and persuasive, and then get it in his
mind (harvest it) for preaching. There are no shortcuts.
There are no substitutes. The price must be paid. The only
question is whether the preacher will pay it in preparation
or the congregation will pay it in listening.
Sermon preparation is the preacher’s first priority. He has
no higher duty. It is the air he breathes, the food upon
his table, the life-blood in his veins. Great preaching is
the result of great study. Success in preaching is no
different from success in any area – ten percent
inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. Great football
coaches may owe some success to the inspiration of game
day, but if there is no game plan, no discipline, or no
execution of the game plan, then there is only a group of
inspired losers. As many a fired coach will testify,
adrenaline provides inspiration, not illumination.
If a preacher preaches to three hundred persons on a given
Sunday morning for thirty minutes, he occupies 600
person-hours of time. That is twenty-five 24 hour days or
seventy-five 8 hour work days. What right does any preacher
have to step into the pulpit and consume such time without
adequate preparation? An unprepared preacher steals time.
It is no wonder that Paul exhorted the young preacher
Timothy that he must “give diligence” (“study,” KJV) in
order to be a workman who did not need to be ashamed.
Certainly preachers will more easily find preparation time
in some weeks than in others. Some weeks the sermon will
almost leap into the mind without the intermediation of
long hours of study. Such serendipities will be more than
balanced by the occasions when the river of originality
turns into a desert. The late Carroll Ellis, who was
chairman of the speech department at David Lipscomb
University and an outstanding preacher, once said that the
preacher ought to be permitted to get in the pulpit on
occasion and say, “Brethren, this morning I have nothing to
say.” Probably every preacher has sometimes felt that way.
If he has not adequately prepared, he says the same thing
in different words. It just takes him longer.