The NOW Podcast: Practical Advice for New Pastors - Episode 04: First Steps in Sermon Prep

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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Welcome to Not Only Water.

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

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

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

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Get ready to dive into today's topic.

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Here's your host Keith Foskey.

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Welcome back to Not Only Water.

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Practical advice for new pastors.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am your host.

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On today's episode we're going to be talking about the first steps to planning and preparing to write your sermon and I'm going to be giving you some advice that I have used over the years and I want to say from the beginning this has changed from when I started to what I'm doing now.

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Over the years I've made little tweaks here and there about the way that I would write a sermon and I don't always do it every time exactly this way but this is the pretty standard way that I do it.

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I've gleaned a lot from men like Steve Lawson who gave a wonderful series of lessons on expository preaching at the Master Seminary which was made available online and you can go and look that up just look at Steve Lawson expository preaching class and you can look that up and find that and he will talk about some of what I'm going to say from his experience and a little bit more in depth.

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It's a multi-class video series that you can watch and so this is only going to be 20 minutes.

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His is a lot longer and a lot more intensive but I hope to show you some of the things that I've gleaned from him some of the things that I've learned myself along the way because I will say this the difference between what I do and what Dr.

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Lawson does is Dr.

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Lawson uses still pen and paper a lot and I'm much more used to using my computer.

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I bring my computer just about everywhere I go and that way I always have my office with me because my notes and my library and a lot of those things that I need for study are there so if I'm out and I find myself having to sit somewhere for 30 minutes or an hour maybe I'm waiting on my car to be repaired or maybe I'm somewhere doing a hospital visit and I've got to sit in a waiting room as long as I have my laptop with me or my iPad I can at least get some work done and kind of redeem that time if you know I mentioned in the last program about keeping your knees under your desk and focusing on your study but there are things that pull us away family church ministry all those things can pull us away from the desk but if you have a computer or an iPad then you have a way to bring those with you now Dr.

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Lawson does it a little different way when I get to how I do this I'll tell you the where you can do it his way if you want and his way doesn't require any electronics which in a sense that's pretty good as well so the first thing I'm going to do is I want to mention if you are listening to today's podcast you may want to switch over and watch now this is going to be available on YouTube and sermon audio on video sermon audio on video that sounds funny it's going to be available on both of those platforms in video format but if you're listening to this podcast through Spotify which I know Spotify is now doing a video service I may try to get the video on there as well but Spotify specifically or Apple podcast or something like that if you're only listening to today's podcast you may find yourself a little bit lost because I'm going to be bringing something up on the screen for you to see and if you can't see it then obviously it's not going to be as much of a help to you so the first thing I want to mention again and just say that I'm using the software to bring this up on my screen this is the first time I've ever done anything like this so please bear with me as I am going to do my best to bring up the screen capture so that I can show you first thing I want to mention is I am going to be using my software that I purchased to write sermons with the software that I use is called Accordance they have basic packages and more expensive packages I have one of the lesser expensive packages because I didn't want a lot of commentaries and things I'm gonna talk about that later even though I do use commentaries I tend to buy them individually I don't buy a lot of bundles because I tend to find that a lot of stuff in there I'm not going to use and it's money that I'm I don't want to spend but I'm also going to tell you a trick if you have hard copies of commentaries I'm going to talk about that a little while as well so let's let's move on quickly get to the screen capture see how well this is going to look for us alright so here we are here is Accordance now this is what it looks like when I pull it up again this is going to be different for you you may be using some online services you may be using something like Blue Letter Bible or you may be using some other service like that and if that's what you're using great not a problem did the same thing will work regardless of the of the software that you're using but in accordance I pull up this this workspace and I'm going to put in the text that I'm studying again what do we say we said our sermon is read the text explain the text apply the text and so it begins with the text even if I were doing a subject-based or topical message it would still be the text needs to come first I need to study the text and so let's say that I'm doing a study of John 1 1 ok so I bring that up and we'll say I'm doing John 1 1 and 2 the first thing I'm going to do is I want to pull up a blank file and if you're on if you're in a Windows computer going to be in Word if you're on a Mac you might be in pages this is a pages file and so I'm going to bring this up and I'm going to go back into my accordance and I'm going to highlight the passages I'm going to preach so if I'm preaching verses 1 and 2 I'm gonna preach I'm gonna copy those I'm gonna bring this over here and I'm going to put these into my document now I want to make this bigger I'm gonna make this 25 there now to make that nice and big now I preach out of the ESV so I have my software to go right to the translation that I use but if I were preaching from let's say the King James Bible or let's say I do have people in my church that I know enjoy the King James Bible they use it so I want to know the King James says in case it says something any any different than than the text so I'm gonna go in here I'm gonna copy this as well and I'm gonna bring this over and put this in my word file so and I'm gonna make it the same size so now I've got now I've got the same text now this may be a little different if this is a really long text like in Genesis I do sometimes a whole chapter at a shot I would still copy it in here I just wouldn't make it as big because I want to be able to look at the whole text that I'm preaching on one page and that's going to be important in a minute when we begin to talk about what I'm doing here all right so we have these two texts now if I'm in if I am in the New Testament I will bring up the Greek and copy that as well so I'm gonna go over here and copy the Greek and that way I can at least look at the Greek while I am doing my study so and again and I like to highlight the the the name of the text now when I'm done with this portion I'm gonna make a just make a little line here and that's just for me for my own benefit the showing that above this this point up here is where the text is and this is where this is where I'm gonna be doing my study now something else I might do is I might come in and I might create spaces between just like this because what's going to happen is I'm actually going to use I'm going to switch over to my iPad at some point so that I can begin to make marks on this on this text now if I am in a situation where I don't have an iPad which I didn't for a long time I may just use my cursor and make marks like for instance I may go up here and I might begin to mark out the the words that really stand out to me such as the word beginning I might underline that I might underline the or I might highlight the the the word word which I know in Greek is the word logos so I might go in and I might highlight that just for my own just so that when I'm looking back at it I see how many times that word pops up because I know that word is very important in this particular text and again the word beginning comes up there so I might underline that as well and also of course the word God is very important so I might bold that and again I'm only I'm just showing you you can do this however you want but basically what I'm doing is I'm making connections here I might begin to start scoping out immediately the verbs verbs show action so I might immediately start scoping out where my verbs are who who is in the who is in this this text what are they doing what is what's an indicative what's an imperative all those things are going to be at the beginning because I want to I want to begin my observation phase and remember we talked about observation interpretation application well I'm in my observation phase and this this is I'm gonna be with this for a while especially I'm gonna do it to all of these I'm gonna do it first in my the text I'm preaching in and then I might immediately compare that with the Greek and start looking around okay I know the word RK which is here is the word for beginning and so I might if I have my pen if I could draw with my iPad I might draw a line from RK to the word beginning there just to just to remind myself or I might go through and mark out all these were all these times where logos comes in here and again this is just an example of some of the things that I'm doing to begin to make my observations right here's all the times that I see that word logos coming up and I know that word logos means word and it's translated word here now the King James at this point doesn't really say a whole lot any any different so this isn't a big deal but there are times when the King James is going to use a really different word or it's going to say something that's really unique to its language a few weeks ago that happened I can't remember exactly right now but there was a after I had finished preaching my sermon I went back later and realized that the King James used a word that was completely different than the word that was in the ESV and and I wish at the time that I had actually made that note and said something about it in the sermon particularly for the folks who are using the King James version now you may find it different in your church you may have a group of people that use the ESV you might have a group of people that do the NASB and this is this is one of the places where maybe I'll talk about this on a different program this is one of the times we're having different translations is a little difficult because if you're saying you see this word this word here is beginning but in the let's just say in the King James it was a totally different word then you might have some folks that are lost and this is one of the arguments that King James only is used to say well everybody should use the King James because that makes it the standard and everybody knows what word you're talking about when you're preaching and I do understand that argument I really do I don't I don't necessarily agree with it from the position of saying you have to use this but having a church translation what I mean by that is a translation that that you provide like we put the ESV in the seats so at least when a visitor comes if they don't have a Bible their own they pull out the ESV in fact the same Bible they're reading from is the same Bible I'm preaching from it's same page numbers and everything and I did that specifically we bought these Bibles I think I don't know somewhere around 2009 somewhere around there 2008 when we bought them I bought one especially for me so that I would have the Bible the same Bible that's in the in the backs of the seats not that that's a have to it's just there's something that I did okay so getting back to your summer preparation once you have put your text on the page whether and here's something here's where dr.

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Lawson and I would be slightly different he would print it or he would take his Bible and he would photocopy the page in his Bible that way he could sit down and write on it and I do like that with the iPad having the ability to write on the page make connections and draw a circle when I'm done this looks like one of those conspiracy theory maps with the lines drawn I mean I that's an example of what it would look like in the beginning but you notice this line right here that I put underneath the text once I have the text in I also begin to add in commentaries in this same document and this is again something I gleaned from dr.

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Lawson what dr.

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Lawson does is he has his secretary photocopy his commentaries that way he's not having to carry around an armload of commentaries and he doesn't have to be in the office to study he can take that he has her give him a manila envelope with all the commentaries just the pages that are relevant photocopied in a binder a little manila envelope I think you know 20 30 pages I forget how many he said but but mine usually ends up being about 20 to 25 pages but it's in a but it's in a document file and so what would that look like well as I said I don't have a lot of commentaries in this particular program even though I do have a few I can go up here and I can I can I can like you'll notice right here it has walkie on Genesis right now I'm preaching through Genesis so I did buy Bruce walkies commentary on Genesis so that I would have it in in a digital form and so I do have that but I'm not preaching through John right now so I don't have one readily available but I do have several resources that are available reference tools here's my commentaries right here so I could go down and I could pull out the new Bible commentary the Bible knowledge commentary in fact let's just do that let's go to the Bible knowledge commentary so that's going to pull up here and I'm gonna I'm gonna close these windows out to make it a little bigger and make it easier for you to see all right so here is what the Bible knowledge commentary has on Genesis 1 1 & 2 now this is a whole Bible commentary so it's not going to say a lot it's not real not a real deep exegetical commentary but I'm just go in copy no superscript here I'm just going to put this over here control V there now I've got it in my document and again later when it's time to do my commentary reading it's already there notice I put a little line and usually what I do under that as I put new Bible commentary that way I know what commentary this is because it doesn't always come with a little marking and that way if I cite this for any reason in my sermon I know what I'm citing we're talking about plagiarism later you don't want to go citing commentaries you don't want to go citing other people's sermons or works or anything like that if you don't give proper attestation because if you don't cite your work eventually may get called out on it and even if you don't even if you skate by nobody ever notices it's a little bit dishonest to pass something off as your own and so later on we start talking about writing sermons I'm going to show how I do quotes and how I put together these these citations and I and I try to always note that way later if I ever come back to this because I keep all my sermons I have sermons that I preached 15 years ago they're still in my digital files that I can go back and look at and I can see what I was quoting at the time what commentaries I was using and that that's good for for if nothing else just for my own sake of having those records all right so so let's just say this is an example of what I would do and I would do this I would do this with if I was teaching to a book like in Genesis right now I have specific commentaries that I use and like I've already mentioned Bruce Waltke I would go and I would copy Bruce Waltke's the section of his commentary that deals with what I'm preaching and I would put it in this document file now I have some other commentaries on Genesis that I don't have digitally and this is where I'm going to tell you something that's really cool I have the the commentaries by James Montgomery Boyce on Genesis which are wonderful and they're in paper format they're not in digital format and so I have a choice I can either carry those books around with me or what I was able to get and this is something the church did purchase it was a book scanner what it is and if I can if I can I'll post a picture in the video of what it is it basically looks like a big arm and you lay your book out flat like this and it has a pedal and you lay your book flat you press the pedal it scans the picture then you turn the page hit the pedal again it scans this page and you just keep going and it scans the next page scans the next page and not only does it create high-quality PDF images but it also does something called OCR which is optical character recognition which means it takes all of the words and it puts them into a document file that I can cut and paste so what I do is I scan the pages of voices commentary that I need for that amount of time and I put those I copy and paste those into this file so at this point it becomes the question of well how many commentaries are necessary how many do I need and that's something that you're going to have to figure out on your own usually when I start a book I start with more commentaries and I end with because what I find is I find that over time I begin to use less and less material from certain ones and more and more from others and like I said like with Genesis I'm now in chapter 40 so I'm toward the end of the book and at this point Bruce Waltke has been tremendously useful and there are some others that have been useful as well and here's another little sort of not a trick but here's another little thing that people often forget and that's study Bibles study Bibles can also provide good information as well so I have the English Standard Version study Bible in fact I might be able to pull that up let me see ESV Bible org yep so if I'm in John 1 okay and I hit ESV right here so right here is the the prologue of John and see this actually this this study Bible just this section has more information than then the commentary that I just showed you and it's it's it's good information so all the way down to verse 2 I can I can highlight this copy it go back over to my file type in ESV study Bible and control V and there there's the information that comes over from the ESV study Bible now again it's not a ton of information but like dr.