So there are lots of things we could say should be our New Year’s resolution, or even commitment, but I just want to mention one at this point.  Let’s make a commitment this year in our preaching, a commitment that relates to our hermeneutics as well as our homiletics.  It’s a commitment that will make ok biblical preaching into solid and truly biblical preaching!

Let’s make a commitment to do justice to the specificity of a text.  Let’s wrestle with each text until we have not just a main idea that is biblically accurate, but the main idea of the specific text we are dealing with.  Let’s leave no stone unturned as we work through the details of the text, allowing every element of the text, every detail in the narrative, every image in the poem, every connective term in the paragraph, everything, to influence the main idea.  Let’s be sure that when we finish studying a passage, our main idea does justice to the text so that if we were to state the main idea, a true lover of the Bible would be able to identify the passage.

It’s always tempting to end up with a biblically (generically) true main idea – “In tough times God’s people trust Him.”  But that could be from any number of passages.  How can the main idea better reflect the specific details of this text?  Let’s commit to doing justice to the specificity of each text we preach this year.