Chapter 10.  The Preparation of the Sermon

MLJ now gets practical, and addresses a couple of topics:

 

Preaching series.

He doesn’t want hard and fast rules.  We should often be preaching consecutively through Scripture, but there are two qualifications:

• Take the opportunities provided by particular occasions to break into whatever series you are in:  for example, a natural disaster and New Year are often times when people are reflecting on the frailty of their own lives.
• Don’t publish a series in advance (‘I reprobate that entirely and completely’).  By all means plan ahead, but allow for ‘the freedom of the Spirit’ in, for example, taking two Sundays over a passage that you had thought you might do in one.

Whatever the preacher’s text or series or theme, every sermon must be expository, in order to allow Scripture to have its proper place.

 

The preparation of each sermon.

Be honest with the text:  see what’s actually there, in the context, rather than what you want to be there.

Then discern the ‘spiritual meaning’, for which spiritual perception is required (MLJ refers to 1 John 2.20, 27, but I’m not persuaded that they say what he thinks they do).

The chapter ends with a strong appeal that sermon-prep should aim to get to the main thrust of the passage, and that that should be the ‘burden’ of the sermon, with several examples of sermons MLJ had heard that he felt went wrong.

 

Reflections

Many of us publish term-cards with the sermons set out in advance.  There may be all sorts of practical reasons for that kind of planning, and that has always been my practice.  MLJ gives reason to question why we do that, if we do:  is it simply convenient?  am I doing it so that my ministry appears competent in the eyes of the world?  We may decide to stick with our practice, but the questions are good ones.

The exhortation to stick with the main thrust of the passage is always needed.  It’s harder than we imagine to leave such a high proportion of our exegesis, theology, illustrations and applications on the cutting-room floor, but it has to be done.