Keith's Colorful Sermon Notes (Tutorial)

Sermon Notes as a Visual Blueprint for Preaching

Hey guys, it's Keith. Several of you have asked me about those strange-looking sermon notes that I put on Twitter. Well, today I'm going to show you how I put those together. Real quick, I want to make mention of the shirt I'm wearing.

How do I know God exists the same way you do? Romans chapter 1, verses 18 to 21 is on the shirt. This shirt is available in our Teespring shop. This quote actually came from Cy Tim Brugengate back when I was creating shirts for my screen printing company.

I made this shirt for him, and now I'm making it available to all of you. Sometimes on Sunday, I'll post a picture of my pulpit called, View from the Pulpit, and you'll see my sermon notes there. And I do that to share with others, and I like to see pictures of other people's sermon notes.

So I do it as sort of an encouragement for pastors to share their notes. And several of you have asked about my notes. You've said they look unique, and you've wondered how I put them together and how I use them.

Some of you have made jokes saying they looked colorful. Some of you say I use too much ink in my printer. All those things have been funny. I appreciate the comments. But ultimately, today is just a simple run-through of why I do the notes the way that I do and why I've structured my sermons the way that I structure my sermons.

Now, I want to say I'm not encouraging anybody to write their sermons like this. I'm just responding to a request. Many of you have asked me how I do these sermons and why I do the notes the way that I do.

Practical Sermon Preparation in the Not Only Water Series

Well, this is it. And I didn't talk anything today about exegesis or about any of that. If you're interested in sermon preparation, how to get to the point where you're actually writing your notes, I have done a series of videos on that called Not Only Water, and I'll link them in the description below.

That's taken from Paul's letter to Timothy, where he talked about not only drinking water, but drinking wine for his stomach's sake. I use that as a springboard to talk about the idea that we need practical advice as ministers.

So I did an entire series on practical advice for new ministers, including how to begin sermon preparation, how to do exegetical study, how to use commentaries, how to use illustrations, and how to put it all together as a sermon.

And once you've done all that work, that's the preliminary work, if you want to come along and then produce a set of notes that's helpful, you've got to find the notes that are going to work for you. And I found the notes that work for me are this one-page set of notes that I can reference while preaching.

It's very comfortable for me to have one page to look at rather than having to turn pages. And because I look at it like a set of blueprints, like I'm looking at a house, I can see the whole visual and I can preach my entire message from this single page.

And that's the other thing. My messages run anywhere from 45 to 50 minutes. So you may preach longer, you may preach shorter, and one page may not be enough for you, or one page may be perfectly fine.

But the goal in all of this is simply to show you what I'm doing and what works for me. I always begin like this. You'll notice that there is a simple table. I make this in Mac pages. You can do this also in Microsoft Word.

It's simply a three-column table, and I use as many rows as I need to. I always start out with three or four just to give me a place to start with. And I start with this and I end up with this. I'll make it a little bit bigger if you want to see it.

So it always begins with a blank canvas. Just like an artist, I start out with a blank canvas. And I usually begin right here putting in the title of the sermon. Oh, messed up there. Title of the sermon and the text.

If I have a subtitle, like if this is like a three-part sermon, I'll put in a subtitle right here and that's it. Now, this next portion, if you notice right here, the different colors, the next portion is my introduction.

Sometimes I have some words prior to the preaching or prior to the reading of scripture. So this might be the prior to reading section. And then I have my actual intro here, which would include some exegetical notes, some context notes, especially if we have people that are new.

Like right now, I'm going through the Book of Colossians. This would be where I would introduce the Book of Colossians to people who maybe haven't been a part of the study. I don't spend a ton of time with that, but I do want to make sure that everybody's up to speed on where we are.

And then there will be, like I said, maybe just more to the intro here. And at a certain point, I'm going to add in a transition box. And that transition box will usually, I'll come in here and I'll merge some cells and make a transition box.

And that transition box, just in my mind, takes me from the introduction to the actual outline. And I can come over here and I can add some more rows if I need to. So this might be 0 .1. And I might do 0 .1 in, I might go across this way and go like this, 0 .2.

Or I may take and do, I may do it in columns. So I may do 0 .1 here, 0 .2 here, 0 .3 here. If I have three points, I like to do it this way because it's visually appealing for me. And that's sort of the way this sermon is.

The Three Main Points of the Sermon on Colossians 3

If you go down here, you'll notice my three main parts of the sermon are these three points right here. Our condition, what the passage says of us, what the passage says of Christ, and what the passage says to us.

It says of us, you have died, you've been raised, your life is hidden with Christ in God. And then over here, it says of Christ, Christ is seated at the right hand of God, Christ will appear one day, Christ is our life, and then our command.

Seek the things that are above, set your mind on the things that are above, and don't set your mind on earthly things. So that is the basic body of the messages found right here. And so again, that's done in a three-point way across there.

And I just had to sort of go down the page like this, putting in my notes. And then at some point, I'm gonna come in at the end down here. I'm going to merge these cells together, and I'm gonna create my conclusion.

So the way I'm doing this, basically, is I'm building a house. I'm starting out and considering each room, and each room is a point from the text. And I wanna make sure that I exhaust that room before leaving that room and going to a different room.

And in my mind, I'm visualizing walking through a house. My introduction and my conclusion are like the front porch and the back porch. My introduction brings me into the house. My conclusion takes me out of the house.

And then while I'm in the house, each room gets its own attention. And so when I build this, it's like the blueprint of a house. And that's the way I'm creating this message. Now, some people have said, isn't that hard for you to see?

It's really small. And yes, it is really small. And somebody the other day called me Laser Eye Foskey. I do have pretty good eyesight, even though my eyesight in my right eye is going bad. I can see the notes, but I don't often have to see everything.

I just have to get the idea of what's in the box. And my mind is remembering what I put in that box. And if I forget something, I can look a little closer and see it. Or if I need to quote something, I can do that.

But ultimately, each one of these boxes is just something, an idea that is reminding me of what I studied and what I wanna talk about in that section. Also, I do have to make mention of this. If you go to the second page, you'll notice, if you ever look at closely at my notes, you'll notice sometimes there'll be a P2.

P2 means page two. Page two is where I put my cross-references. I put cross-references in so that I don't have to turn in my Bible to everything that I wanna quote, but I wanna make sure I get the quotes right.

So I actually print them on a second sheet, as well as any longer quotes that may not fit on the single first page. You'll notice one of the long quotes I have here is from the Apostles' Creed. And so if I wanna quote the Apostles' Creed or anything else, I will include it in page two.

Sometimes I'll even have a hymn verse or something that I wanna quote that doesn't quite fit on the first page. A lot of people ask me about the color, why I use the colors that I use, and there's not really a rhyme or reason with the colors that I'm using except this.

Why the Color-Coding Helps Him Preach

My yellow is always my introduction. My light blue is usually contextual information. And any of these long, solid bars that go across here are usually transitional points. Down later, you'll notice that I use a tan, white, tan, back and forth.

And that's simply so that my eye can move from box to box without, if it was all white or if it was all tan, it would be hard for my eye to pick up on the differences. And the differences are sometimes subtle when you look from box to box.

If I'm looking at, if I know I'm doing all of the tan first and then all the white and then all the second tan, that's just helpful for me. And I usually put the last box as blue as well because what I'm starting in is basically blue, ending in blue, and that just sort of is, in my mind, is symmetrical.

And I like symmetry, I like things that are colorful, and the colors actually are encouraging to me to look down and understand what I'm looking at. So there's not really a system for the colors, it's just the colors that I'm using.

I tend to use bright, bold colors for my transition points like purples and reds, and then I use the tan-white-tan for the major outline of the sermon. So hopefully that'll explain that. Now I wanna be clear, I'm not asking that anybody write their sermons the way I do, and I don't expect anyone to use this method, but I have had people ask me if I got this method in seminary or from a book, and no, I didn't.

I actually came up with this on my own over my years of preaching. So if it's helpful to you, I think that's great. And if you would like to ask me more questions or like me to go over something in more detail, you can send me an email at calvinispodcasts at gmail .com.