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

Welcome to Not Only Water. This podcast is dedicated to providing practical advice for new pastors. In First Timothy chapter five, verse 23, Paul tells Timothy to drink not only water, but to use a little wine for his stomach's sake.

This short piece of practical advice is the inspiration for this series. Get ready to dive into today's topic. Here's your host, Keith Foskey.

First Steps in Sermon Preparation

Welcome back to Not Only Water. Practical advice for new pastors. My name is Keith Foskey and I am your host. 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 wanna say from the beginning, this has changed from when I started to what I'm doing now. 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. I've gleaned a lot from men like Steve Lawson, who gave a wonderful series of lessons on expository preaching at the Master's 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 gonna say from his experience and a little bit more in depth.

It's a multi-class video series that you can watch. And so this is only gonna be 20 minutes. 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. Lawson does is Dr. Lawson uses still pen and paper a lot, and I'm much more used to using my computer.

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.

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. Lawson does it a little different way, and when I get to how I do this, I'll tell you 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.

Using Sermon Software and Text Layout

So the first thing I'm gonna do is I wanna mention, if you are listening to today's podcast, you may wanna 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 gonna 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, so I may try to get the video on there as well, but Spotify specifically, or Apple Podcasts or something like that, if you're only listening to today's podcast, you may find yourself a little bit lost because I'm gonna be bringing something up on the screen for you to see, and if you can't see it, then obviously it's not gonna be as much of a help to you.

So the first thing I wanna 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 wanna 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 gonna use, and it's money that I don't wanna spend. But I'm also gonna tell you a trick. If you have hard copies of commentaries, I'm gonna talk about that in a little while as well.

So let's move on quickly, get to the screen capture, see how well this is going to look for us. All right, so here we are. Here is Accordance. Now, this is what it looks like when I pull it up again. This is gonna 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. The same thing will work regardless of the software that you're using.

But in Accordance, I pull up 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, okay? So I bring that up, and we'll say I'm doing John 1 .1 and 2.

The first thing I'm gonna do is I want to pull up a blank file. And if you're on a Windows computer, you're gonna be in Word. If you're on a Mac, you might be in Pages. This is a Pages file. And so I'm gonna bring this up, and I'm going to go back into my Accordance, and I'm going to highlight the passages I'm gonna preach.

So if I'm preaching verses 1 and 2, I'm gonna copy those, and 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.

That'll 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 what the King James says in case it says something any different 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.

And I'm gonna make it the same size. So 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 gonna 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 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.

Observation, Original Languages, and Marking the Text

So, and again, and I like to highlight the name of the text. Now, when I'm done with this portion, I'm gonna just make a little line here, and that's just for me, for my own benefit, showing that above this point up here is where the text is, and 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 gonna happen is I'm actually going to use, I'm gonna switch over to my iPad at some point so that I can begin to make marks 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 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 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 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 is in this text, what are they doing, what's an indicative, what's an imperative.

All those things are going to be at the beginning because I want to begin my observation phase and remember we talked about observation, interpretation, application. Well, I'm in my observation phase and 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 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 arche, which is here, is the word for beginning.

And so if I have my pen, if I could draw with my iPad, I might draw a line from arche to the word beginning there just to remind myself, or I might go through and mark out 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 different. So this isn't a big deal, but there are times when the King James is gonna use a really different word or it's gonna 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 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 one of the places where, maybe I'll talk about this on a different program. This is one of the times where having different translations is a little difficult because if you're saying, you see this word, this word here is beginning, but 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 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 you provide, like we put the ESV in the seats.

So at least when a visitor comes, if they don't have a Bible of their own, they pull out the ESV. In fact, the same Bible they're reading from is the same Bible I'm preaching from. 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 same Bible that's in the backs of the seats.

Not that that's a have-to, it's just something that I did. Okay, so getting back to your sermon preparation. Once you have put your text on the page, and here's where Dr. 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, draw a circle.

When I'm done, this looks like one of those conspiracy theory maps with the lines drawn. I mean, 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.

Commentaries, Study Bibles, and Avoiding Plagiarism

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. Lawson. What Dr. 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 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 mine usually ends up being about 20 to 25 pages, 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, like you'll notice right here, it has Waltke on Genesis. Right now I'm preaching through Genesis. So I did buy Bruce Waltke's commentary on Genesis so that I would have it 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 gonna pull up here and 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 and 2. Now this is a whole Bible commentary. So it's not gonna say a lot. It's not a real deep exegetical commentary, but I'm just go in, copy, no superscript here.

I'm just gonna 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 is 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 wanna go citing commentaries. You don't wanna 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 you may get called out on it.

And even if you don't, even if you skate by and 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 gonna show how I do quotes and how I put together these citations.

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's good for, if nothing else, just for my own sake of having those records. All right, so let's just say this is an example of what I would do.

And 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 gonna tell you something that's really cool. I have 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, 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 Boyce's 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 than 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, esvbible .org, yep. So if I'm in John 1, okay, and I hit ESV right here. So right here is the prologue of John. And see, this actually, this study Bible, just this section has more information than the commentary that I just showed you.

And it's good information. So all the way down to verse two, 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. Lawson said, and again, some of this comes from him, what he said was, you know what, I'm a beggar looking for crumbs. At this point, I wanna get as much good information as I can.

And one thing that a study Bible does do that a lot of people don't realize, study Bibles, because of space, they have to condense what they put in them, which means often they put less information, but often they put the most important because they have limited space.

So if there are things in the text that are controversial, if there are things in the text that have questions, oftentimes a study Bible is going to highlight those because it only has a certain amount of space.

And what I often do when I'm putting my commentaries in is I start with the study Bibles first, and then I put in the commentaries later. That way I get highlighted earlier, the issues of the text, issues with the text, anything like that highlighted.

And then later, when I'm getting into the deeper commentaries, the more exegetical commentaries, I'm able to work some of those things out through that. So again, all of this is to say I'm creating a document, and another thing I like to do, and this would be up to you, I like to insert a page number.

See, right now I'm already at four pages, and I've just been sort of just doing this on the fly. If I were serious about this, I could easily, just in these two verses, I could easily get 20 to 30 pages worth of good, solid commentary material put into this document for this purpose.

And the purpose is simple. The purpose is so that I have as much information about this text as I can get to study in the amount of time that I have. Remember, my time is limited, because every week I have to prepare a sermon.

And my sermon preparation, which I'm gonna do another show on this, is what my week looks like. My sermon preparation actually begins first thing Monday morning. Some pastors take Monday off, they start Tuesday, either way, doesn't matter.

Whatever day is your day to begin, that's your, you got that amount of time between then and Sunday to put everything together. And the goal is we begin by reading, and then we write, and then we edit, right?

So that's the steps. And so what I'm doing is I'm producing something to read. And let's say I know that next week I'm gonna be out of town or something. Well, I can produce this document two weeks in advance, because all I'm doing is cutting and pasting into this document.

So I put everything in this document that I need so that when it's time to study, if I know I'm gonna be out of town, if I'm going to a Bible conference, I can put all this into one document. I can print it out and put it in a folder, or put it on a document on my iPad, carry it with me.

I can be studying while I'm in the car if somebody else is driving. I can be studying while I'm sitting at lunch. I've got all of this information. But again, going back, I wanna stress one more thing before we conclude.

This first page is the most important page that I have, because this first page is my study. This is before I get to the commentary. And that's very important, is I do not wanna jump down here and start reading all of these things before I have done my study in the commentary.

I'm sorry, before I've done my own study, my own prayer, my own investigation into the text. And this is why I bring up the original language. I wanna do my own exegetical work in the text. That way, when it's time to read the commentary, I have an idea already of what I am working with.

Usually, before I read the commentaries, and I'm gonna switch back to just my screen now. Usually, before I read the commentaries, I've already got my outline. I've already outlined the sermon. I already know the direction that I'm headed.

I already know what the text says. And really, what it means at that point, at least the basic meaning. And I've already begun to develop an application. Then, when I'm reading the commentary, all I'm doing really, at that point, is adding in good information, because there's gonna be things in the commentaries that I didn't know that are now going to become meat for the bones, because I've already created the bones with the outline.

The meat is gonna be placed on the bones. But also, more importantly, it's gonna check me, because I'm not perfect. And I might say something about the text that just isn't true. And as I'm reading through the commentary, the commentaries come along like older, wiser ministers, mentors, who are going to possibly bring a correction to me as I'm studying a text.

Conclusion and Next Steps

All right, so we're well past 20 minutes now. So I said I wanna keep these shows around 20 minutes. So I'm gonna go ahead and get ready to sign off. I hope today was helpful. I hope this whole show was good for you, to help you to begin to learn how to put together your notes so that you can start to prepare a sermon.

Now, next time, we're gonna talk about how to take that and make your outline. All right, thank you for listening today to not only water, practical advice for new pastors. My name is Keith Foskey. I thank you for being with me today, and may God bless you.