How to Write a Sermon

Read the passage five times without writing anything. Once out loud. Once in a translation you do not normally use. The job is not to understand it yet, it is to notice what is odd.

Then write down the questions, not the answers. Anything you cannot explain. Anything that seems out of character. Anything a sceptical friend would jab at.

Commentaries on Monday will hand you someone else's sermon before you have found your own. Open them Tuesday.

Now read commentaries, then close them and write one sentence that is a claim, not a topic. "God is faithful" is a topic. "God kept a promise Abraham had already stopped expecting" is a claim.

[your one sentence - if it takes more than an hour, the passage is not the problem, the week's reading was]

Then name the tension in a second sentence: what makes this hard to believe or hard to do. Two sentences and Tuesday is finished.

Write the whole thing start to finish without stopping to improve anything. Leave gaps marked for the illustration and the application. The draft will be too long and partly wrong, and that is the correct output for Wednesday.

Use the nine movements on the sermon outline page if you want the frame handed to you.

Take out everything that does not serve the one sentence. Your second-best illustration. The paragraph you are proud of. The digression into Greek. A third of Wednesday's draft should not survive Thursday.

Then fix the application. Most drafts end with an instruction nobody can act on, and Thursday is when you make it small and specific enough to be done by Friday week.

Say it aloud, standing, timed. You will find sentences that work on paper and collapse in the mouth, and you will find the real length, which is usually four minutes longer than you thought.

Memorise two things only: the first ninety seconds and the last thirty. Everything between can be read. The open and the close cannot.