Why Does Sermon Prep Take So Long?

/ Expository Preaching, Preaching Helps, Sermons, Uncategorized / By

If any of you believe that God has put you on on the planet to keep me humble, just know that you have to compete with my children. Here are a few examples from the past:

  • Yeah, but you’re not like a “real” doctor.
  • Why is your tummy squishy?
  • Daddy, why is your beard so gray?

Recently, one of them asked, “What does a pastor do anyway?” After I tried to explain my job, the follow-up question was, “They pay you for that?”

Yes. I get paid for that.

But, the question prompted some discussion not only about what I do, but about how my time gets spent as a pastor with the inevitable question that gets asked, not only by my kids, but by many other people:

Why do you need so long to write a sermon?

Since I’m sure that many of you have asked that question and because I even sometimes forget why it can take sooo long to prepare a sermon, I’ve listed many of the steps below that went in to writing a sermon on the Gadarene Demoniac called Lord of the Legion.

  1. My sermon prep begins long before the sermon is written with an general outline of sermons in advance. The idea for this sermon was laid out several months ago when I began planning for a sermon series on the book of Mark (I use Evernote for all of my sermon planning and creation).
  2. Tuesdays are sermon prep days. The first half of the day is usually spent just reading the passage, journaling through it and chasing down scriptural cross-references. I then attempt to outline the passage into what will eventually become sermon points. In the afternoon I flesh out the sermon points and being to work through commentaries and resources.
  3. Wednesdays I usually spend about half of the day finishing the sermon and either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning I move the outline into a MS Word document and add study questions to be printed with the bulletin for Sunday morning.
  4. Thursday afternoon is often spent in commentaries and resources again and searching for illustrations to add to the sermon (which can sometimes take a frustratingly long time).
  5. Friday and Saturday I try to leave my sermon alone.
  6. Sunday mornings I arrive at the church between 7:00 and 7:30 (if all goes according to plan) where I work through finishing touches and usually read through a commentary or a sermon on the text that I have intentionally left until that time. Unlike most men I know, I tend to tweak my sermon up until the very last moment.
  7. PRAYER. If you are a keen observer, you will notice that prayer is not listed. That’s because for me prayer is a constant throughout my sermon prep. I pray as I journal. I pray as I read. I put post-it-notes on the covers of my commentaries to remind me to pray before I open them. I wake up praying on Sunday mornings and pray until I preach. Usually on Sundays I pray specifically:
    • That God would make me holy before his people.
    • That God would make me clear.
    • That I would not be in the way of his work.
    • That the Holy Spirit would go ahead of me.
    • By name for people who I may believe have a specific need for that sermon.
    • For hurting people who enter our worship.
    • For guests.

I’m not nearly as regimented as many pastors I know, and some are much more detailed than I am in their sermon prep and time-management, but this is a pretty good schedule of how my time gets used. But, you may still wonder how those blocks of time get used. Much of the time gets eaten up because of the number of resources needed to write a sermon. If you think back to the term-papers you wrote in high school or college, you were no doubt urged to use many different resources. Preparation for a sermon requires a number of different resources as well. For this particular sermon, I consulted 25-30 resources. Even if I only spend only five to ten minutes in each resource, the research (outside of the time spent in the Bible) can take four or five hours.

I’m not whining. I love it. But, for those of you who may have had questions, hopefully this helps to provide some answers. Sermon preparation is exhilarating and it can also be exhausting. But, delivering a well-prepared message for God’s glory and man’s good is one of the greatest experiences in the entire world.

Partial list of resources for Lord of the Legion