Proclaimer Blog
Anatomy of a sermon
Next week on the blog I’m going to walk through my sermon preparation process. I’m doing this simply because I often get asked how I go about it. There’s going to be nothing prescriptive in it – there are four of us on staff here who preach regularly, and as far as I know, we all follow different patterns. None is more correct than another. Nevertheless, it sometimes helps us to listen to how other people go about things.
In part, this helps us understand how best we can individually approach sermon preparation. For each of this needs to be different because we have different levels and skills and find some things easier than others. You may be better at original languages than me (I always think about them – but find it very hard). You have struggle with applications or illustrations more than I, and so on.
But there are two constants – one is the text in front of us. It does not change and it requires the preachers hard work to preach it faithfully. The other is a dependent spirit that is reflected in the preacher’s praying. I will not say a huge amount about this next week, but want to say up front that each of my five days is spent at least in part in prayer. Whether physically or metaphorically, each preacher must lay his sermon before the Lord as Hezekiah lay the letter before him (Is 37:14).