Unity.  Order.  Progress.  Three essentials in effective communication of a message.  Yet it strikes me that we can sometimes take these for granted when we are preaching on a single passage.  Unity?  One passage.  Order?  Moving through the passage.  Progress?  Getting closer to the end.  If this is all we have, then I suspect our preaching may be bordering on boring, among other things.

Unity.  It takes more than simply having a single preaching text. After all, the content of a message “united” by a single passage can be totally random in examples, references, illustrations, etc.  If we work at grasping the distilled single sentence main idea of the passage, then there is hope of unity in the preaching.  But if we simply bounce off the text and go where our thoughts lead us, then there is no limit to the disunity that can result in our preaching.  How often do we hear preachers supposedly preaching from one passage that seem to feel compelled to refer to fifteen others?

Order.  It takes more than simply having a single preaching text. For example, if you are preaching a ten-verse chunk of text, simply moving from the first to the last does not guarantee a sense of order.  If we fail to wrestle with the text and grasp the essential flow of thought in the passage, then we may simply jump off apparently disconnected thoughts in each successive mini-chunk, resulting in an apparently disordered collection of thoughts.  Surely the biblical writers were not presenting disconnected mini-thoughts?  Yet how often do we hear preachers supposedly preaching from one passage, yet at the end we as listeners have little grasp on the flow of thought in the text, little sense that the passage itself actually makes sense?

Progress.  It takes more than simply having a single preaching text. As we preach, listeners should be moving with us through the combined explanation and application of the text in the experience we call a sermon.  There should be a start.  Then there should be the sense that we’re heading toward a finish.  If we fail to wrestle with the text enough to grasp the movement and purpose of the passage, if we fail to craft the message into a plot or journey that goes somewhere, then what happens?  We end up with a pedantic and plodding presentation.  How often do we hear preachers supposedly preaching from one passage, yet all around we sense that others are looking at the text, as we are, to see how much more of the message there is still to come?  These things ought not to be!

Unity, order and progress.  These are evident in each unit of biblical text.  But the onus is on us as preachers to make sure they are clearly present in our message on that text – the text alone will not guarantee it!