Transcript
So here's my methodology of preparing to preach a series on a book of the Bible. Let's just say the gospel of Mark. So what I'm going to first do is I'm going to read Mark over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Have I said this enough?
Becoming Literate in the Book
Again, I want to be literate in Mark so that the flow of Mark is familiar to me, the way mark approaches history is familiar to me, the themes of the gospel that are in Mark are familiar to me. Once I've reached that level of familiarity, then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to begin to divide mark up into -- I don't know what else to call them -- but sermon chunks. Chunks that take seriously Mark's purpose, Mark's argument, that do justice to the flow of Mark, that flow that I'm now familiar with.
And when I do that, I'm doing a lot of the labor of preparation. I'm not just chunking Mark up into sermons, I'm really thinking about what will be the argument of this sermon, what will be the purpose of this sermon, how does that do justice to this passage, what support material I need to have? So I'm really beginning to do the first step of preparing those sermons. In fact, my experience is by the time I'm done doing that, I could preach a lot of those sermons because I've done so much work with Mark, so much work with the individual sermons, I've reached a fairly high level of readiness.
I'm saying you're going to take lots of hours in preparation to build that familiarity, to build that literacy, to be familiar with the flow, to chunk things up into sermons where you have a reason for the way you've divided the book. By then, you've done a tremendous amount of work that will lighten the load that you'll have when you begin to work on the individual sermons of that series.
