Earlier this week I took time to listen to a short video on sermon preparation featuring Bryan Chapell, Mike Bullmore, and Alistair Begg. The entire video is worth your time if you are a preacher or a teacher of the Bible. It was Alistair Begg’s summary of sermon preparation that jumped out at me. As I listened, I felt like I had heard it somewhere before and this morning I took the time to find it in On Being a Pastor by Derek Prime and Alistair Begg (Which is an excellent book on pastoral ministry). Here is Begg’s summary of his method for sermon preparation.
- Think yourself empty. As strange as it may sound, we must be carful that we do not avoid sound thinking. The temptation to respond emotionally to a passage (this is how this makes me feel) is not unique to our listeners. If we are to have “thinking” congregations it is incumbent upon us to be “thinking” pastors! We do not want to be uncertain by the time our study ends, but it is surely right an dropper to begin with the perspective “I must know what this says, and I must kern what this means.”
- Read yourself full.
- Write yourself clear. Aside from the essential empowering of the Holy Spirit, if there is one single aspect of sermon preparation that I would want to emphasize, it is this. Freedom of delivery in the pulpit depends upon careful organization in the study. We may believer that we have a grasp of the text, only to stand up and discover that somewhere between our thinking and our speaking things have gone badly awry. The missing link can usually be traced to the absence of putting our thoughts down clearly.
- Pray yourself hot. There is no chance of fire in the pews if there is an iceberg in the pulpit! Without parer and communion with God during the preparation stages, the pulpit will be cold. In 1752 John Shaw reminded the incumbent pastor beginning his charge in Cambridge, Massachusetts: “All will be in vain, to no saving purpose, unless God is pleased to give the increase. And in order to do this, God looks for their prayers to come up to HIs ears. A praying minister is the way to have a successful ministry.”
- Be yourself, but don’t preach yourself. A good teacher, like John the Baptist, clears the way, declares the way, and then gets out of the way.
We would all do well to remember that praying ourselves hot is an integral part of sermon preparation as well as delivery. You can watch the whole video below.
