Month: July 2008

Check Your Dashboard

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I remember a few years ago hearing a message by Bill Hybels.  He spoke about the gauges on his personal dashboard.  If my memory serves me well, he said that his spiritual gauge was looking good, but something was wrong.  He was heading for burnout, but not because of spiritual issues.  He said that he learned there were more gauges than just spiritual.  If you remember the message, feel free to comment and correct my ten year memory.  But the point is a good one.

What is the reading on your spiritual gauge?  Are you walking in step with the Spirit, living close to Jesus and spending time in His presence through His Word?  What about your emotional gauge?  Are you taking time to rest, to laugh, to play, to wrestle with your children or enjoy a walk in creation?  What about your physical gauge?  Are you getting the sleep you need, ingesting healthy fuel and burning energy (and stress) through running, gym-time, judo or traditional native dance?  And let’s ask about the mental gauge too.  Are you being stimulated in your thinking through a variety of reading, some stretching, some relaxing, some outside your primary areas of focus, etc.  And what about stimulating conversation?  That may be hard to come by, but in the context of healthy relationships, it can work wonders on all four gauges!

Whatever gauges you have on your dashboard, take a reading from all of them.  It could be devastating to be looking at only one of them and find yourself burning out unawares.

The Very Words of God

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Monday’s a good time to pause for thought.  Perhaps you preached yesterday.  Perhaps you’re preaching again next Sunday.  Let’s always remember that God, in His grace, has given gifts to every believer.  To some of us He has given “speaking” gifts.  In 1Peter 4:10-11, Peter urges everyone to invest their lives in each other through the gifts they’ve been given.  Some gifts are “up-front” while others are “behind the scenes” – my understanding of the two terms he uses, “speaking” and “serving.”  None of us have a right to boast in our gift, but all of us have a responsibility.

We have a responsibility to study God’s Word to the very best of our ability, wrestling with the text and allowing the text to wrestle with us.  Thus the first half of the sermon preparation process is so important.  Then, with the humble confidence that we have something to share from God’s Word, then we move on to the second half of the process – formulating the sermon.  The whole process really matters.  The church is a community that may currently or soon be called on to suffer for their faith.  One critical resource for enduring such struggle is the earnest love for one another within the community of believers, and one example of such love is the effective stewardship of our spiritual gifting.  After all, when we speak, we are to speak as one who speaks the very words of God!

Stage 4 – Passage Idea

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Having studied the content of a passage, focusing on the structure, outline and flow of thought (stage 2), and the intent of the author (stage 3), it is important to arrive at the goal of your study. The goal is the passage idea, a distillation of the author’s thought in one sentence. This sentence should convey the true and exact meaning of the author. This sentence is critical for the building of the sermon. To bypass this stage is to miss the central link between passage and sermon.

Many people study a passage and never feel that the task is done. Details lead to more details, bunny trails, etc. The more they study, the more they feel they need to study and the task (even if enjoyable) is never over. Understanding the importance of finding the idea helps to bring closure to the first half of the preparation process. Once the idea is determined, further study will either clarify the idea, or simply affirm the idea. Once our study starts to affirm what we have determined, it is time to move on to preparing a sermon (so many new preachers get so excited or overwhelmed by the study of the passage that they don’t give enough time to actually formulating the sermon, even though Sunday is looming).

Previously – Here is an important reminder of the importance of the idea. Working on the idea will improve your preaching, as long as you are saying the text’s something. Passage selection will influence this stage too, since a bigger passage has a broader idea.

Remember you can click on “Stage 4 – Passage Idea” for a full list of posts on this important stage of the process.

Stage 3 – Passage Purpose

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The second stage of passage study is all about interpreting the details in the passage. This stage is not complete until you get to the idea, which is actually stage 4. In order to distinguish the stages somewhat, I tend to view stage 2 as determining the flow or outline of the text’s content. This third stage focuses our attention beyond content alone. As you study the passage, you are studying not only the author’s content, but also his intent. Why did he write this passage and what was he trying to achieve? It is the understanding of both content (stage 2) and intent (stage 3) that leads to a full understanding of the passage, its idea (stage 4).

Previously – There have been several posts addressing the issue of authorial intent or passage purpose. Why was the text written as well as purpose and preaching, both touch on this stage significantly. Two posts on preaching help to clarify that the author’s purpose may differ from ours, but we must be careful not to bend the text too far to achieve our own purposes.

To see a full list of all posts that relate to stage 3, please click on the menu to the right.

Stage 2 – Passage Study

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This is a series overviewing the 8-stage process of developing a sermon. Remember that for all related posts, you can click on the “Stage 2 – Passage Study” button in the menu to the right.

Stage 2 – Passage Study

Once you have selected your passage or passages for the message, the next task is to study, study, study. A lot of elements come into the equation here, but basically your goal is to study the details of the passage in its context using good hermeneutical principles in order to arrive at the author’s idea in the passage. This stage is strengthened by awareness of how individual genres work, and any Bible study skills you have. I would suggest you do the initial work in the text without reference to commentaries and other experts, but these resources are important once you have soaked yourself in the text first.

Keeping the goal in mind is very important during Bible study. You want to discover the author’s idea in this unit of thought. This will be a distillation of the coherent thought written in the passage. It will take into account all the details, but will be stated in one complete sentence. Keeping this in mind will help you avoid being overwhelmed by endless bunny trails in your study (such as endless cross-referencing, excessive study of minor details and so on).

Previously – There have been numerous posts written that address this stage of the process. The fundamental conviction required concerns whether the text is boss of the message. When it comes to studying the details, not every detail is equal. The process can be described as a wrestling with the flow of the text, or as a journey. It is important not to impose points on a text, but to be sure to enjoy your study!

There have been various posts on the biblical genres too. For narrative passages it is good to review the basics, and to get to grips with them in this post, and in this one. Remember that poetry is different.

Passage Selection – Stage 1

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A little milestone was reached yesterday as the hit counter passed 100k. So I thought I’d take some days to offer a brief summary of the 8 steps of sermon preparation, suggesting some links back to posts that are particularly relevant to each step. Remember, you can see all the posts related to stage 1 by clicking on the “Stage 1 – Passage Selection” button in the menu. Thanks for visiting this site!

Step 1 – Passage Selection

Before you can design a message, you need to have studied at least one passage on which to base the message. Before you can study, you have to select the passage. There are two issues to bear in mind at this step:

Issue 1 – Which passage will you preach? If you are mid-series, then the next passage is already chosen. If you are preaching a stand-alone message, then you have to pick a passage to preach on (perhaps influenced by the occasion, the needs of the congregation or even your personal motivation). So sometimes selecting a passage is not an issue at all, but issue 2 always matters . . .

Issue 2 – Are you studying a complete unit of thought? This is always important to double check. Once you have you passage, you need to make sure it is a complete unit of thought. It is often possible to study and preach two or more units of thought that stand together (for example, two gospel stories presented together, or multiple paragraphs in an epistle), but it is very risky to try and study or preach half a unit (half a psalm, half a proverb, half a speech, half a story, half a paragraph . . . half a thought!) So for each passage you decide to study and preach, be sure to give thought to the true beginning and end of the unit of thought.

Previously – Concerning the first issue, selecting a passage, here’s some advice on how to select a passage, and another one. This post suggests preaching series, and in some churches there’s the practical issue of multi-speaker series, see also part 2.

Now concerning issue 2, the complete unit of thought. Here’s a post in which I point out that we can’t simply rely on the chapter and verse divisions, we have to select our passage personally. There is some helpful advice here in a post on longer narratives. And the issue of preaching several passage is addressed in this post on topical preaching. Finally, two posts on why I suggest generally sticking in one passage: A low fence and part 2.

Set Off With Strength

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Once you have your message mostly prepared and you begin to focus on your beginning, craft carefully.  It is worth setting off with strength into your message, it is worth beginning with a bang.  That first sentence should command attention and usually set the direction of the message.

Too many of us ease into a message.  It is tempting to take time with introductory humor or nice opening remarks.  “Nice” is not a great compliment, more a vanilla description.  Inexperienced speakers, in any context, tend to begin with a variation on “thank you for this opportunity” or “it gives me pleasure to address . . . ” or similar.  Dull.  Wasteful of these key moments.  Don’t.

I would make two suggestions, depending on context:

If you are in your own culture, begin with a bang. If you have some type of compliment or praise for the listeners, interject it later in the message where it will feel genuine rather than trite.  Give the impression that you intend to waste no time, but rather have something important to share.

If you are visiting another culture, provide a purposeful adjustment phase. I find it is helpful when speaking in a foreign context to begin with a few brief comments expressing my appreciation of their welcome, the heat in comparison to my cold country, or whatever.  I don’t want to undermine my message by beginning with excessive power that might suggest a foreign arrogance.  Neither do I want them to miss the important opening statements as they adjust to my accent.  This introductory phase is limited, purposeful and carefully designed.

The opening sentence of a sermon is critical.  Prepare it carefully, polish it purposefully and practice it repeatedly.

Don’t Jump Right In

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The first moments of a spoken message are critical.  In the first moments your listeners will make a lot of sub-conscious and conscious evaluations of you as a speaker, your apparent integrity, likeability, authority, etc.  One small but effective piece of advice is don’t jump right in.  Before you begin, take some time in a commanding pause where you stand before your listeners and make eye contact with them.  If you are leading the service, pause before preaching.  If you are introduced, then walk purposefully to the stage, put anything on the podium (Bible, notes, watch or whatever), then begin your “eye-contactful purposeful pause.”

This is not a hard and fast rule, but it is good advice.  I remember hearing Luis Palau speaking at a missions conference some years ago.  He was already preaching before he got to the steps up to the stage!  If you trust the sound crew to have your mic working, and if you have both boundless enthusiasm and a super-engaging dynamic persona, then feel free to do this too.  Otherwise, probably better to get set and pause.

One way of ensuring this pause is not rushed is to slowly internally state your opening sentence before you verbally state it.  It may feel strange, but if you begin this way with a calm confidence, listeners will be intently listening when you begin.  If you start like a runner at the gun, eyes down, still putting your notes down, etc., then it will take some time before everyone is listening (and perhaps some never will!)  The first moments of the message matter very much, so make sure nobody misses them.  Begin in a commanding and purposeful manner, don’t jump right in.

Solid Solitary Converts

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We’ve probably all heard about evangelistic preaching that has somehow manipulated the crowd.  I remember sitting in the back row of a meeting with a very famous preacher.  When it came to the evangelistic part of the evening, he presented the gospel.  Then when it was time for the altar call, somehow the gospel message morphed into “if you have done this before but still struggle with sin, come forward…”  Naturally the numbers swelled significantly!  It may look great on reports, but it is manipulative and dishonest if these people are counted as converts.

I’m not in any way suggesting altar calls are inappropriate.  In some situations they are highly appropriate.  But manipulation and dishonesty in preaching is always inappropriate.  The end does not justify the means.  Let’s be sure to preach the gospel and pray for thousands to respond, but rather than get clever with the call, let’s praise God for solid solitary converts!

They Make It Look Easy

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This year I was in the States when the Wimbledon tennis championships were taking place.  So I missed the annual spectacle.  I’ve watched it many times.  Not just the tennis on TV, but the resulting tennis in the local courts.  People watch their heroes on TV, the best tennis players in the world.  Then they are inspired to go to the local courts and have a go themselves.  Courts that sit empty for most of the year are always busy the first week of July!  Why?  Because the best make it look easy.  It’s true in tennis, in football, in every sport.

In some ways that is our challenge as preachers.  We have to be the best that we can be.  We have to study exegetical stuff that would never be a bestseller.  We have to wrestle with the complexities of current trends and the complex motivations that move people to think in certain ways.  We have to somehow interact with all levels of social, religious, spiritual and fashionable trends, sometimes at very high levels.  Yet in it all, we have to be careful not to come across as high academics.  It’s tempting to do that.  After all, it’s easier to not translate from erudite verbosity to normal speech.  It’s better for the ego to dazzle and impress our listeners.  But remember the great tennis players.  They make something immensely complex look so easy.

Let’s strive to do the same.  Replace the twelve letter word with a five letter word or a couple of them.  Speak like a compelling communicator rather than a dull lecturing “expert.”  Let’s do the extra work and put aside our egos in order to communicate effectively.  Perhaps then the gospel will be free to access lives with all practicality.  Perhaps then people will rush out to the tennis courts of their lives and apply God’s word for themselves!