Transcription
Good day friends. My name is H.B. Charles Jr., pastor of the Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida. I'm also the author of books on preaching, on pastoring, and on worship. Likewise, I'm the host of the "On Preaching" podcast.
In this video, I want to talk to you about my sermon preparation process. Every preacher is going to need a sermon preparation process. You need to first establish what that process of going from text to sermon looks like for you. Do not try to copy or replicate someone else's process. We are all different, unique individuals, and you need to determine what the process is for reading, recording, and reflecting to get you from text to sermon from week to week.
And once you establish that process, you need to master that process. Pick a process of going from text to sermon and just practice it from week to week. Practice, practice will get this process in your system. It will help you as well to lessen the anxiety of weekly preparation because you know that if you go through your steps to the sermon, God will meet you somewhere along the way.
Not only should you master that process after you have established it, but over time, you need to refine that process. One of the ways I refine my processes is in dialogue with other preachers, where I discuss with guys what their sermon preparation process is. Not again to imitate what someone else does. We all have our own level of training, experience, and skill, so the process needs to be unique to you. You don't want to, as the word goes, go to battle wearing Saul's armor. You need to get your own slingshot and your own stones from the brook. You need to work with what God has made you good with.
And once you have established and mastered that process, however, you should be able to refine it over time by ongoing training and also by dialogue with other preachers. I, I enjoy talking shop with preachers and just asking, "How do you go from text to sermon?" And I'm learning from the stories and the experiences and the practices of others to fine-tune my process so that I may grow as a preacher. Faithful preachers are growing preachers. So I hope these few moments will encourage your development as a preacher as I share from week to week what my process is, go from text to sermon for Sunday's sermon.
Let me put a footnote before I go any further to note that when I work through the stages of this process, they may differ depending on the activities and the responsibilities of the week. If I am responsible for, for instance, midweek service here at our church, then the days shift as I have multiple messages to prepare. Or there may be a week where I have an outside speaking engagement or just an unusually busy week of meetings and activities. It affects when things get done, but I can't cheat the process. The process is the process, and you've got to do whatever you've got to do to get your heart and mind ready to preach the word of the Living God.
And so, for me, it starts with selecting the text. Usually, that process is done for me week to week because I plan my preaching and I know weeks in advance what I plan to preach. Sure, the Holy Spirit may interrupt my plan and lead me in another direction, but I don't use that as an excuse for a failure to plan. And so I know where I'm going. The text is selected, and most weeks, a file is created for me that, um, includes all of the research material that I am going to need. Sure, I have Logos and other online resources that are available to me, but I'm a dinosaur, and so I learned best with pen and paper and books. I, I learned through that physical process of marking and highlighting and circling, um, and so again, as I said, this is my slingshot. These are my stones, and I have to go to war with what God has made me good with.
And so I get that file most of the time going out the door on Sunday afternoons after I have just finished preaching. After my nap, I usually just begin to just poke around in the file just to see that everything there that I need is in that file. And it's, it's the first step of just kind of putting my eyes on the text. I am not one of those guys who prepares sermons weeks in advance. I am working the week of for the sermon that is coming on that Lord's Day.
And when I get down to it, it begins with prayer. Sure, I don't say that just because it's what you're supposed to say. I pray for illumination and insight. I pray for humility before the text and openness to the truth and submission to the authority of God's word in my life. I pray that God, with Psalm 119 verse 18, "open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things from his word."
After prayer is observation. I don't, my process is basically the inductive study Bible process: observation, interpretation, application, correlation. So I begin with what I call sanctified brainstorming. I basically open a Word document, open my Bible, and I just note what I see. I raise questions. I do diagrams. I note repeated things, emphasized things. I list words and people and places to know. I am just going to work through that process until I have thought myself empty.
During this stage of my ministry, during the observation period, is also when I am thinking through cross-references. There are times when I used to use reference books to look up cross-references, but I've spent enough time with God's word that as I am reading my text, I am thinking about the correlating passages that relate and affirm the truth of the text that I am studying. And it's also during this observation period that I am doing word studies. At this stage, I consider the word study process as a part of my observations.
When I get through with that part, what I do next is I read multiple study Bibles. I'm a fan of study Bibles. They are concise, they are text-focused, and they are clear statements of meaning. And so it just begins to, by reading these various, um, study Bibles, it begins to put in my mind what I need to be looking for or looking at or what I may be missing that I need to pay attention to.
After I read through those, I then begin to work through commentary. At this point in time, I usually have a structure of the text grammatically and exegetically. I have an exegetical outline, if you will, and I generally have my arms around the passage. But now I'm gonna dig, dig, dig, and I'm going to read commentaries to help me better understand, to make sure I'm checking, to ensure that I am playing in bounds, that I'm not drawing any clue in conclusions about the text that are out of bounds. And to be honest, I'm sure I read more commentary than I should read. I read more commentary, most definitely, than I would recommend you to do.
But I do read commentary work, and I consider it in three categories. I'm going to read exegetical commentaries, homiletical commentaries, and devotional commentaries. Along the way, as I am studying, I am recording my thoughts, notes that, um, maybe things I just want to remember, context and background material. I'm putting in a document, commentary references, I'm putting in commentary, and sermon ideas. And so when I finish reading, I kind of review the work that I've already done, and I craft a sermon skeleton. It's a one-page summary of the purpose and the structure of this message, along with objectives of the sermon.
And from there, I write a complete sermon manuscript, word for word. Typically, about 2,500 words is what I am shooting at, and I revise it along the way. It's longer than that, usually by a thousand words when I write it, and I'm editing it down by about 2,500 words most weeks.
I then take those that sermon manuscript and then kind of take it and pair it down to a set of notes to take to the pulpit. If I feel comfortable with it, I may go to the pulpit with nothing at all but my Bible. And then I end my process right where I began, praying that God would give me faithfulness, clarity, authority, wisdom, passion, humility, and freedom to preach his word and exalt his Son.
So I hope those steps are in some way an encouragement to you, a help to you, a roadmap for you. For more resources like this on preaching, you can go to hbcharlesjunior.com, and then you'll find the articles there, sermons there, and manuscripts there that'll help you in your devotional times and in your own sermon preparation process. You can also contact me on hbcharlesjunior.com if you have any questions or comments about the video and ways that you might be able to help me in return refine my process so that we are at our best when we preach God's word. Thanks for watching. Preach the word. All the best.