Transcript
I want to give the illustration that I constantly could give that is helpful for me in thinking about the process of the preparation of an individual sermon. We've laid out the series, we know where we're going where we have a high level of familiarity with the portion of scripture.
Preaching Is Like Preparing a Banquet Meal
I think of preaching like preparing an awesome banquet meal, celebration meal, like a Christmas meal or a Thanksgiving meal. If you're going to prepare a wonderful, good-tasting, beautiful-looking, nutritious meal, it starts with collecting fine ingredients. If you don't have good ingredients, you won't have a good meal.
And so, the exegetical, theological content part of preaching is pulling out of that passage all of those wonderful gospel ingredients. When you're going to do a Thanksgiving meal, it's probably the one time where you don't just go to one grocery store. You go to several grocery stores because you're trying to go to the store that has the best, finest ingredients. So now I've collected those wonderful ingredients. They're there. They're in the passage. My job is to find them and find the particular way that they're held together by the logic of this particular passage.
But I'm not ready to preach that. What I have is ingredients. Those ingredients then need be formed into a meal and that's the more artful, communicative part of preaching. You know, on Thanksgiving afternoon, I don't put flour, butter, and cornmeal on the table because a bite of flour and a bite of butter and a bite of cornmeal is not attractive, nutritious, or digestible.
Forming Ingredients Into a Meal
But cornbread is awesome and so I want to see those ingredients -- now that I've collected -- formed into this beautiful meal that I put before hungry people and they can take it in, it nourishes them, and it comes out as their strength.
Now, I think that means that I need to spend as much time in the communicative process as I do in the content process and for me, that means the week that I'm going to preach that sermon, I'm going to preach that aloud to myself, fifteen, twenty, thirty times.
I'm serious about this and I find as I'm preaching it over and over again, I'm less tied to my notes, illustrations come to mind, turns of a phrase come to mind. This thing is becoming artful. It's becoming beautiful. It's becoming consumable. It's becoming a gospel meal.
Carrying a Bag of Ingredients Into the Pulpit
I think there are thousands of pastors every Sunday who are carrying a bag of contents, a bag of ingredients into the pulpit and they're reading notes that aren't artfully put together, whether it's a manuscript or not. I mean, this will sound cynical. I'm not amazed sometimes that people fall asleep in a sermon. I'm kind of amazed that more don't because a person isn't ready. This is not engaging.
Listen, I know I'm preaching to a broken-hearted elderly man who's facing physical sickness. I'm preaching to a wife who wonders what in the world's happened to her marriage. I'm preaching to a teenager who's attracted to the world. I'm preaching to a single person who hates their career. Their hearts are distracted.
I want to put glory in front of them that attracts them, and I've got to be ready to do that so it grabs their attention and they say, "This I want to listen to and this Jesus I want to follow." Preaching is spiritual warfare and I want to be a good soldier. I want to be ready for that war and I want to get up ready to communicate adequately and beautifully these liberating truths.
