Yesterday I shared a helpful nudge a friend had picked up in James Stewart’s Heralds of God. Today I’d like to continue with a related thought. What to do when you have to pick a text on which to preach. What should we do when there is not an obvious text to be preached?
“Then open your Bible. Do not pursue elusive texts. Stop racking your brain for a subject. Take a whole psalm, a complete Gospel incident, or a solid section from an epistle of St Paul. Set yourself to interpret it faithfully.”
How simple. How true. The Bible is God’s Word. We honor Him and it more by picking something and preparing well than by pursuing some mystical state in which we might discover the eureka text but have left ourselves very little time to preach it faithfully.
Some weeks the “artistic inspiration” flows freely, but other weeks we are enabled simply to graft hard. May our graft please the Lord as much as, if not more than, the best and easiest of sermons. And may we not waste time pursuing the elusive text when God has given us a whole canon – pick a passage, prepare and preach!
Biblical Preaching 
I just “stumbled” upon this blog. I appreciate this particular post. As a bi-vocational pastor of a rural church in the USA, I do not have the time to look for the perfect passages from which to preach. I have come to rely on the leading of the Spirit. When an idea or text comes to mind, unless it is obviously only the result of poor food or bad advice, I usually consider it is what God has put in my heart. Oh, it is a little more complicated than that, of course, but I have given up looking for a finger to write on a wall. What works best for me is listening for that “still, small voice” and leaning on the fact that ALL scripture is profitable.
Thanks, and God bless