The NOW Podcast: Practical Advice for New Pastors - Episode 03: What Should I Preach?

Sovereign Grace Family Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:01

Welcome to Not Only Water.

00:04

This podcast is dedicated to providing practical advice for new pastors.

00:08

In 1 Timothy 5, verse 23, Paul tells Timothy to drink not only water, but to use a little wine for his stomach's sake.

00:16

This short piece of practical advice is the inspiration for this series.

00:20

Get ready to dive into today's topic.

00:23

Here's your host, Keith Foskey.

00:26

Welcome back to Not Only Water, practical advice for new ministers.

00:31

My name is Keith Foskey, and I am your host.

00:35

Today, we're going to be in episode three on the question of what should I preach? Now, in our last episode, we said that the main job of the pastor is to preach the word.

00:48

And we looked at 1 Timothy, or excuse me, 2 Timothy 4, where Paul gives his charge to Timothy, and he says that your job, Timothy, is to preach the word.

00:59

And we talked in our last episode, if you didn't get a chance to watch it, I do recommend that you go back to see it, or to listen to it if you're listening to this on a podcast.

01:09

We talked about what it means to preach the word, and the main goal of preaching the word, again, is we read the text, we explain the text, we apply the text.

01:17

That's what our job is.

01:19

It is to preach the text, the word of God, not our opinions, not what's going on in the world, necessarily.

01:27

We don't want to be guys who are just bringing the newspaper in and reading the latest headlines to our people.

01:33

We wanna be men who preach the word.

01:36

Well, today, we're gonna ask the question of, okay, I understand I'm supposed to preach this Bible, but this is a big book, and there's a lot of things in this book.

01:48

So what am I to preach? What am I supposed to preach on? I remember I said something really foolish in seminary class to one of my professors, and my professor, he was nice to me, but they say there's no such thing as a stupid question.

02:06

Well, I sometimes think that I am the exception to that rule because I know that I have asked stupid questions before.

02:13

And what he said was, or what I said was, I said, what if you run out of things to preach on? And I was being honest because the culture that I had seen in preaching was a culture that was very much committed to what would be known as topical preaching.

02:32

And topical preaching, basically, and people define it differently, but basically is this.

02:37

I'm going to determine a topic that I wanna preach on, and then I'm gonna go to the Bible and find a text that goes along with that topic, and then I'm going to preach.

02:48

And so what I was saying when I asked that question, what if I run out of stuff to preach on, was what if I run out of topics? And I remember one of the guys in seminary that I knew had told me, well, you can get a topical Bible.

03:00

And I was like, wow, okay.

03:02

So literally, and they sell these, they're called topical Bibles, where literally you just go from starting in the A's and A, B, C, D order, and it'll be everything from asking for forgiveness might be under the A's, or F for forgiveness, dealing with adultery might be under the A's, or dealing with prayer might be under the P's.

03:26

And basically what it would do is you would look at this topical Bible, and it would, whatever the topic was, it would tell you, this is the passages you could preach.

03:40

And that's the way some people get their messages.

03:42

They just, they say, okay, this is the topic I wanna preach on, and maybe the topic is the news of the day.

03:48

Maybe the topic is issues that are going on in the life of the church.

03:51

And so they look at the topic, and then they, from the topic, go and choose a text.

03:58

And obviously I have some issues with that now.

04:01

Looking back, I think I was a little incorrect in what I was doing.

04:06

So what I wanna talk to you today about is my method for choosing what I preach.

04:12

And again, I'm not saying that my method is flawless, and I'm not even saying that my method is necessarily the method that you need to employ.

04:19

But again, this is Practical Tips for New Ministers.

04:21

Maybe you don't have a plan, and you need help.

04:25

And that's what I'm hoping that this new program will be.

04:28

It will be a help to those who are looking at, what am I supposed to do? And it's funny, I recently had a friend, one of our deacons, who is now co-teaching with me in a Sunday school class.

04:44

And he's also giving a lesson on Wednesday night to the young people.

04:49

And he came into my office on Sunday, and I was very encouraged by him saying this.

04:53

He said, you know what? This is a lot of work, preparing to teach.

05:00

And he said, and I'm only doing 15 minutes on a Wednesday night, or 20 minutes, or whatever.

05:05

And what we do during Sunday school, 30 minutes on Sunday morning.

05:08

He said, you have a hard job.

05:11

And I said, thank you for recognizing that.

05:15

I've heard people say my job is not that hard at all, or the job of the pastor.

05:19

I heard one guy say, all you do is you get up every week and give a book report for 30 minutes.

05:24

How hard is that? That's not it at all.

05:27

And the guy who said that was joking, so I know that he was kidding.

05:30

But again, looking at the issue of this is rigorous.

05:35

In fact, I'm not quoting directly, but I remember reading Spurgeon, and he talked about the difficulty of what we do as pastors, the difficulty of sitting at a desk.

05:46

And of course, Spurgeon lived well before typewriters and computers.

05:51

So he said, you sit at a desk with an ink pen, and you're hunched over as you're reading, and your hands are contorted as you're writing.

06:02

And he said, and you spend hours upon hours each week in this position.

06:06

And I think about this position because, of course, I'm typing and not writing with a pen.

06:10

And I think, wow, that's right, this position, this isn't like you're out swinging a hammer, which of course manual labor is difficult on the body.

06:19

But this positioning, this sort of being in this, and being locked into your thought all the time is difficult, and if you're focused, and you're studying and you're doing that, it can be a lot on the body.

06:35

It can be a lot on you as an individual sitting all day, and I do recommend if you are studying, give yourself maybe like have a Fitbit or something that tells you every once in a while, get up and walk around.

06:46

I've been in the chair so long that when I get up, my legs don't even wanna move, because I've been studying, or typing, or writing, or doing the work so long that when I go to get up, my legs are just, they're almost like they don't work.

07:00

So all this, getting away a little bit from the topic, but the topic of today is how do I choose what I preach, and being diligent in this, because this is part of what you're doing is making the choice.

07:13

I came up with a little graphic, I hope this is helpful, just to just, not really a graphic, but this is what we're gonna talk about today.

07:20

We're gonna talk first about sermon calendars.

07:25

Should we have one, and are they necessary, and are they important? Number two, we're gonna talk about the type of preaching, and I've already mentioned topical.

07:33

We're gonna talk about the difference between topical and expositional, and I understand there are some others in there.

07:38

You can talk about topical, textual, expositional.

07:40

But I'm gonna simplify that, I hope, in a little bit, and then we're gonna talk about actually preaching through whole books of the Bible.

07:52

Is that something? And some people think that's what expositional preaching is.

07:56

That is a form of expositional preaching, but that's not exactly the definition.

08:01

Expositional means to expose or to draw out from the text.

08:05

You can give an expositional sermon on one text.

08:08

It doesn't have to be the whole Bible, but typically people connect expositional preaching with preaching through books, so we're gonna talk a little bit about the distinctions there.

08:17

So let's go back up to number one.

08:19

The first thing we're gonna talk about today is a sermon calendar.

08:23

Is a sermon calendar necessary, is it important? I have found, in my experience over the last 16 years, that having a loose sermon calendar is helpful, and especially now that I'm doing more sharing of the preaching time with the other elders.

08:43

And because I'm sharing the preaching time with the other elders on Wednesday night and I have them come in like we're fixing to move into Resurrection Week, which has Palm Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, Good Friday.

08:56

They're going to be preaching at those different times and we're gonna be sharing those responsibilities.

09:01

It is very important that at least I have a calendar going so I have an idea of the direction that we're gonna go earlier, so it's not just coming up that week and we're signing duties and things like that.

09:15

So especially if you are in a church where you share the preaching duties on Wednesday night or maybe Sunday morning, whatever, a sermon calendar is gonna be essential at that point.

09:26

You say, well, how do I produce a sermon calendar? First thing is to recognize that when we talk about the sermon calendar, we're talking about something that is a guideline.

09:38

It's not an absolute thing.

09:41

So what I do is I look at the church sort of seasonally, even though I don't have a hallmark church calendar and what that means is some people say, okay, I've got to make sure I've got a Mother's Day sermon, I've got to make sure I've got a Father's Day sermon, I've got to make sure I've got a 4th of July sermon, I've got to make sure I've got a Thanksgiving sermon.

10:04

I don't do that and I'm not saying that that's necessarily wrong.

10:08

If that is the culture that you're in or if that's the way that you choose to do, then you're gonna have to consider that in your sermon calendar.

10:16

However, from my perspective, I don't think that it's necessary that we always are on each of the holidays and that we're, you know, because again, hallmarks should not be the thing that's dictating what we preach.

10:31

The word of God should be what's dictating what we preach and so when I look at the calendar, I do look at it seasonally, but I ask this question, I say, okay, am I going to this year do anything particular for the resurrection season? Am I going to do anything for that? And some years it's no.

10:49

I'm preaching through the book of the Bible.

10:51

Like last year, I've been in Genesis for a long time.

10:54

I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna keep on keeping on and I'm gonna preach wherever I'm at and I will mention that it's Resurrection Sunday.

11:01

I'll mention that it's that special time of year where we take time and we have a special service, a sunrise service that gives the opportunity to preach about the resurrection and of course the resurrection is why we celebrate every Sunday.

11:14

Every Lord's Day is a celebration of the resurrection.

11:16

So I still get to talk about it and celebrate it, we still sing about it, but sometimes I'm just gonna keep on with whatever book I'm in, but I still, at the beginning of the year, I sit down and I look out at the year and I say, okay, what is it that I wanna accomplish? What is the goal of this year? And I usually do that early in the year, if not later in the previous year, looking forward and I say, okay, this year, Resurrection Sunday falls on April 17th and is that something I wanna address? Is that something I wanna stop and camp out on for a while? Or do I wanna make a series that addresses that? Like, for instance, there are times where if I'm preaching through a longer book of the Bible, like I have been in Genesis, there are times where I will stop and I'll say, you know what, for the next six weeks, we're gonna take a step away from Genesis because we've been doing this for three years, we're gonna take a step away from Genesis and we're going to look at this subject for six weeks.

12:16

I'll give you an example.

12:18

Last year, the elders and I decided we wanted to preach on the five points of Calvinism.

12:22

Now, we are a Calvinistic church, we believe in the five points of Calvinism and so we believe that it was important at least every couple of years to preach those messages to the congregation, to let the congregation know this is what we believe about soteriology, this is what we mean when we say we are Calvinist.

12:36

So last year, I think it was September, maybe it was July, but July, August, September, sometime late summer, early fall, I got with the elders and I said, hey, I wanna take a break from the normal routine of Genesis, I'm also gonna be out for a couple of weeks, it just so happened that I had taken my vacation at that time, and so during the weeks that I'm out, I'd like for you guys to preach on these topics and I'm gonna preach on these.

13:01

And really, it was a topical message, but it was on the topic of Calvinism, so it was really a soteriological series and it was a five Sunday soteriological series.

13:13

So when I say a calendar, I'm looking at the calendar and I'm saying, okay, let's say I'm preaching through a book, okay, I'm gonna sit down with my calendar in January, I'm gonna look at where I'm at, like in January, let's say I was in Genesis 25, and I'm gonna say, okay, I've already read ahead, I've already seen about how long it's gonna take me to get through these chapters, and so now I'm going to outline how far am I gonna be by July.

13:44

If I'm going through a book, how far am I going to be by this time? And this gives me a help as I begin to look through the various things and I begin to say, okay, I think that, oh, well, Genesis 22 on the Mount Moriah incident with Isaac and Abraham, there's gonna be more than one week that it's gonna take to get through that chapter, I'm gonna need to spend some time, there's a picture here of Christ and the sacrifice and the substitution, I wanna dig into this, so I'm gonna take some time with this.

14:18

Or let's say there is a, I know that there's coming a time where we're going to be doing something special in the church, like just a few weeks ago, we commissioned a new deacon, and I said to the elders, I said, you know what, I'm gonna take a break from my normal preaching and I'm gonna preach on the role and responsibilities of a deacon so that we know when we commission this man, we know what we're commissioning him to, he knows what is expected, all those things.

14:42

So we did that as part of that service.

14:46

So there's nothing wrong with step, if you're in a, especially in a longer book, there's nothing wrong with taking a break and doing something different periodically, but when you're looking at your calendar, you're giving a loose idea of how far you think you're gonna get, what you think you're going to accomplish, and again, I just literally, I take out my calendar on my computer, I put down the dates for the Sundays, I say, okay, this is how many Sundays I have, this is how many Wednesday nights that I have.

15:18

Now, in our church, we also have Sunday evenings where we have an academy, but I do that differently because the academy is in eight-week terms, and so I don't coordinate that with Sunday morning at all, it's different, but I still have another calendar.

15:32

So I have a preaching calendar for Sunday, Wednesday nights I share with Brother Andy, so he and I come together, we do a preaching calendar for that, and then I do a preaching calendar for Sunday evening.

15:43

Again, all of these are subject to change.

15:45

If something happens within the congregation that we need to preach on, let's just say, for instance, a situation arises where everybody in the church is facing some terrible ordeal, maybe there's an issue of church discipline that's come up, and we need to address church discipline as a congregation, and we need to preach on a certain subject.

16:08

Well, I'm gonna abandon the calendar at that point.

16:10

The calendar is not the rule, right? The Word of God is the rule, and understanding that when I'm preaching, I need to be preaching to the people what God has for them, and given to us as the shepherds, as the leaders of the church, what do they need? So I'm gonna be, that calendar is nothing but a guide, and the calendar, again, is subject to change.

16:31

But I do think calendars are important.

16:34

I think having a understanding of where you're going and what you're hoping to accomplish, it's easy to get into the weeds.

16:41

It's easy to not make much progress when you're, when you don't have a goal, when you don't have an outline of where you're headed.

16:53

And again, I do look at the year, but I know when I start in January and I put a year together, I understand that that year is subject to change.

17:02

And like right now, I'll give you a glimpse as to what my calendar looks like.

17:07

I am in the 39th chapter of Genesis.

17:11

I just preached Genesis 39 last week.

17:14

Now, this coming Sunday, I'm going to be out of the pulpit.

17:17

I'm going to be away.

17:18

I've been invited to preach at a friend's church, and the elders have given me the time off to go do that.

17:23

So I'm going to go preach at a friend's church.

17:25

When I come back, I'm going to have the opportunity to, it's going to be Resurrection Sunday.

17:32

So I've got to decide, am I going to preach Genesis 40 on Resurrection Sunday, or am I going to preach a resurrection message? Brother Andy's already preaching a resurrection message during the sunrise service, so I may just go back and do Genesis 40 and just keep on trucking.

17:45

But the idea is wherever I'm at that next week, I'm going to be right back in Genesis, whether I go back to Genesis on Resurrection Sunday or not.

17:54

And that gets me back into my calendar.

17:56

The way my calendar has it laid out, that I will be done with this series in Genesis by the summer.

18:05

Now, again, loosely calculated, probably somewhere in June, I will be finished with the book of Genesis, maybe July.

18:16

Now, again, this is the end of almost three years of preaching because I have taken some breaks and we went through COVID and there was a few weeks where I got out of the series completely, dealt with some things that were going on in the church.

18:27

And there was a lot that I had to deal with in that and that our elders had to manage.

18:31

So I'm not saying I did three straight years in Genesis, but we've been in Genesis for a long time.

18:36

And I am looking forward to that last chapter when we can close the book and say, okay, we have preached every verse of this book.

18:43

Now this gets to the next thing on the list, and that's the issue of topical or expositional, because after I finish Genesis, I have to decide what I'm gonna do next.

18:54

And I'll be honest with you, I haven't decided yet, but I have talked to the elders.

18:58

And one of the things that we talk about when we begin to discuss is what is it that we believe God is impressing upon us as the need of the congregation? What is the need right now that our church have and understand? What's always to preach the word? The word is paramount, but is there a particular subject? And this is where I would take an issue when somebody says, I don't like topical preaching.

19:27

I think topical preaching is fine, but I call it something else.

19:32

I call it subject preaching, because it's not just I'm looking at a topic like, oh, marriage, okay, I wanna talk about marriage today, or, oh, David and Goliath, I wanna talk about that story today.

19:43

No, a subject-based message is a systematic approach to preaching, and I would say it's akin to the difference between biblical theology and systematic theology.

19:54

Biblical theology follows the narrative of Scripture and comes to an understanding of theology that way, whereas systematic theology looks at the headings of theology like soteriology or ecclesiology or pneumatology and those things become the subjects that you study and you formulate what the Bible says about those subjects.

20:16

And preaching can be the same way.

20:17

Preaching can be subject-based, preaching can be verse-by-verse expositional, and that's what most people think of expositional.

20:25

So as long as it's always from the text, then it's fine.

20:30

And so one of the things that I have talked about doing when I finished Genesis is I have talked with our elders about the possibility of maybe doing a short series of sermons before I get back into another book, because my typical routine, and I'm gonna talk about this in a minute, is preaching through books, but before I get back into another book, what I think I'm gonna do is I think I'm going to focus on a subject, and the subject I'm looking at most likely is going to be looking at the development of doctrine in church history, because I do think that there is somewhat of a disconnect, especially in the modern church, between what happened in the early church and what happens today in church, and those 2,000 years in between have a lot of significance.

21:19

And so what I'm probably going to do is look at a few subjects down through the ages, such as in the early church, the focus was very much on Christology, and then later was on the subject of anthropology, what is man, and then on the subject of salvation during the time of the Reformation.

21:39

And so each of those may be a major subject that I preach on, but it's still gonna be drawn directly from the text.

21:48

It's still going to be, if I'm looking at the nature of Christ, I'm gonna be looking at those major Christological texts, John chapter one and Colossians and different places that directly deal with who Christ is.

22:01

So it's still going to be expositional.

22:05

It's not going to be that I'm exegeting a topic, I'm exegeting a text, but it's the subject that's creating the direction that I head and what texts we look at.

22:18

So that would be one way of looking at the topical or expositional.

22:21

I would simply say, you can do subject-based or you can do text-based, and text-based is where you're following a particular text.

22:29

And this gets to the last thing, and I wanna begin to draw to a close.

22:31

I don't want today's episode to go too long.

22:33

And that's preaching through books.

22:35

I personally believe that one of the best ways that you can, as a minister, continue to be faithful in preaching the Word of God is to preach through books of the Bible.

22:44

Since I started preaching full-time in 2005, I actually began January 2005 preaching full-time.

22:51

I didn't become the pastor until January 2006, but for a whole year before that, I was doing all of the Sunday morning preaching.

22:57

That's a story for another time.

22:59

But I began to preach through the Gospel of Luke, and I preached every verse of the Gospel of Luke.

23:05

Now, that was a expositional sermon series that took me, I think, two years.

23:10

I think it took me a couple of years, maybe three, to get through the Gospel of Luke.

23:14

And you may not be ready to do something like that, and that's okay.

23:19

If you don't think you're ready to do a whole book, take a section of a book.

23:24

Something else I did later was, I didn't wanna do the whole Gospel of Matthew, but I wanted to look at the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 through 7.

23:31

And I think that took me right at maybe eight, 10 months.

23:35

I forget.

23:36

I'd have to go back and look at the series.

23:38

But those three chapters alone was enough to fill almost a year of preaching, because there's so much meat in those chapters.

23:46

And so it doesn't have to be a whole book, but letting the Bible outline your sermon calendar is a wonderful way to stay focused and preaching the whole counsel of God.

24:04

That's your goal.

24:04

That's your job.

24:06

Preach the whole counsel of God.

24:07

And so whether you start in a book of the Old Testament or a book of the New Testament, I would say this.

24:12

If you're new to this, I would say go to the New Testament, pick a smaller book.

24:19

Maybe Philippians would be a good book to begin with.

24:21

Maybe the book of James might be a good book for you to begin with.

24:25

But later in this series, I'm gonna talk about how to begin your study of a book, how to outline a book and things like that.

24:32

And I'm actually gonna bring some stuff up on the computer screen.

24:34

I'm gonna show you how I do the initial study and the initial breakdown and all that.

24:39

But for right now, hopefully this has been enough.

24:42

This has been a little longer episode than I intended it to be.

24:44

Things to think about.

24:46

Produce a sermon calendar, but don't be married to it.

24:50

Decide whether you're going to do subject-based or text-based studies.

24:55

I recommend the text-based studies that go through longer portion of the text.

24:58

It's gonna be better for you.

24:59

It's gonna be better for your people.

25:00

I can tell you this.

25:01

My wife has especially recently talked about my series and Genesis and she says, it has just come alive.

25:07

Genesis has changed for her because of preaching verse by verse through that book.

25:12

And she says, it's like, it's brought to light so many things.

25:16

It's gonna do that for you.

25:17

It's gonna do that for them.

25:18

And if you do choose to preach on a subject, still make your subject come from the text and don't simply impose upon the Bible something that's not there.

25:29

All right, so those are my thoughts for what you're to preach on.

25:32

I hope this has been helpful to you.

25:34

And again, if it has been helpful to you, please like, subscribe.

25:38

And if you know somebody that this would benefit, please share with them.

25:40

I want this to be a benefit to as many new and younger pastors as it can be.

25:45

Thank you again for listening to Not Only Water.

25:48

My name is Keith Foskey and thank you for being with me today.

25:52

May God bless you.