sermon preparation

Help for New Expositors: How to Find the Main Idea for Preaching (part 3)

/ Richard Bargas / Leave a comment

In my last two blogposts (which can be found here and here), I walked the reader through the process of becoming familiar with the preaching text to the point where you should have a solid grasp upon what the preaching text says, although you still might not be sure how to preach it or organize the sermon.

The next step is to form the preaching proposition, sometimes called the “big idea.” That’s easier said than done, and a lot of well-meaning teachers assume that finding the proposition comes naturally. If it doesn’t come naturally to you, then you aren’t alone and I’ll try to help you here. Now, I need to say that if you haven’t first done all of the exegesis that I mentioned in my last two posts, then you won’t be able to do this, or you may come up with a preaching proposition, but it may not be the main idea of the text or accurately reflect the author’s meaning. Be the approved workman and don’t be ashamed that you preached a sermon that doesn’t reflect the meaning of your text.

Before we go down this road, some of you might be wondering, what is a proposition? In simplest terms, a proposition is a statement or assertion. So, a preaching proposition is a statement that you are making about your text that you are going to explain or prove. Some examples might be: “Jesus Christ is the Son of God” or “We are no longer under the Mosaic Law, but under the Law of Christ.” A “plural noun” preaching proposition would include a plural noun, and is probably familiar for anyone that has heard a sermon. Some examples of these might be: “Three Reasons Why Jesus Christ is the Son of God” and “Four Proofs that We are Not Under the Mosaic Law.” As you might be able to see, these examples of plural noun propositions are different forms of the same statement made earlier, and the content of the explanation would be the same, although each sermon might be organized differently.

Forming the Preaching Proposition

I’m going to walk through several steps to reach a preaching proposition. These steps are heavily influenced by a chapter in Wayne McDill’s book 12 Essential Skills for Great Preaching. If you need more help, I’d recommend you pick up this book.

  1. Write out the main subject of the text you have studied in one word. For example, if you were preaching 1 Cor. 13, you might write down, “Love.” This I can be hard to do because it requires that you crystalize your thoughts from study down to this one idea. Don’t give yourself more words. Limit it to one word only. This will assure that you are certain about the main idea of the text.
  2. Next, find a word that clarifies and narrows your one word main idea. For our example, “love,” you need to narrow down this large subject. Does 1 Cor. 13 speak about romantic love, brotherly love, Jesus’ love, marital love? How about “Christian love?” That fits. Let’s move on.
  3. Write out a sentence that includes the two words you chose from steps one and two. We can consider this a sermon title, or maybe something you’d put on a church sign. Make this a single sentence or phrase only. How about, “What Christian love looks like?” Sounds good.
  4. In this step you will need to expand your sentence again, using the same two key words (for our example, “love” and “Christian”). This time, you will write a sentence that includes what I’ll call “Bible dress.” This refers to the human author, his audience, and the scenario that is taking place in the context. Make sure it is only one sentence again. For our example, we might write about 1 Cor. 13: “Paul is concerned that the Corinthians are failing to show Christian love to each other and so he teaches them what this looks like.” Notice how we have the writer, audience, and even a little about the context (failing to show…”). This could of course be expanded to refer to the greater argument of chapters 12-14, and we could mention the place of spiritual gifts involved. But hold back the need to include so many details because we are only trying to get a crystalized summary for now–the details will come out as we unpack our proposition in the sermon.
  5. Now we are going to do a little trimming. We need to figure out what we want to leave in the last sentence because it is universally true, and what we want to remove because it is contextually true, but doesn’t fit our context. This new sentence will be stripped of the Bible dress (context, specifics, etc.) so that it becomes a universally true statement for today. For our example, it might look something like this: “God is concerned when the Church fails to show Christian love and He shows us what it should look like.” Notice that I replaced “Paul” with “God” because God is also the Author, and I replaced “Corinthians” with “Church” because the Scriptures written to the Corinthian church were also written to be applied to the whole church. Is this new sentence universally true and unbound by time and context? I’d say, yes! Let’s move ahead.
  6. Now, we are going to change our sentence into a questions: “God is concerned when the Church fails to show Christian love and He shows us what it should look like” becomes “What happens when the Church fails to show Christian love, and what should it look like?” We turn this into a question to test our propositional statement. Can we find the answer in our text? If not, we have made a mistake somewhere and need to go back and see where we went off track. If we can find the answers to our question in our text, we got it right. Make sure you choose the right words to form the question: Who, what, where, when, why, or how?
  7. Next, we will look for those answers in the text by choosing an appropriate plural noun–if we asked “Why?” we might find “reasons” in our passage. Maybe we will find steps, examples, reasons, examples, ways, proofs, thoughts, questions, prayers, solutions, etc. For our 1 Corinthians 13 passage, we might choose “Ways:” “Ways the Church fails to show Christian love, and what it should look like.” Another possibility might be, “Ways the Church fails to show Christian love, and Ways we can love like Christ would.” When we find these “ways” in our text, this makes up our outline and gives us the number of “ways.” We might find Four ways the Church fails to show Christian love, and Five ways we can love like Christ.” Each “Way” would be a sermon point, and with each point we would prove our propositional statement and explain the text before us. At this point, we might even see that we have two sermons here and would break it into two sections to be presented at two different times.

Why are we doing all this? I want you to understand a couple of things that are important. First, take your time to craft these sentences–refining your word choices so that you have clarity and an economy of words. But it is also important to know that this is a process, and so you don’t need to worry too much about each sentence being perfect. If you need to, go back and adjust if something doesn’t quite fit. Secondly, the reason for this process is to make sure that the preaching proposition is firmly based upon the text and its meaning. We are sticking with the heart of the text (the subject and its modifier) and building upon it, instead of what many preachers do–start with a sermon idea and find a text to make it say what they want.

Although this process does take a lot of time and effort, the results are satisfying and assure you that you are basing your conclusions on the text of the Word. take your time and learn to develop the skills needed to do it right, and over time it will become easier and you will move much faster through the steps. Of course, when we have the propositional statement we aren’t done. We still need to come up with an introduction, conclusion, illustrations, applications and transitional statements. But the meat of the sermon is now outlined and we are well on our way to preaching a biblically centered expositional sermon. Congratulations!

Help for New Expositors: How to Find the Main Idea for Preaching (part 2)

/ Richard Bargas / 1 Comment

enIn my last post (you can read it here:https://always-reforming.com/2021/10/25/help-for-new-expositors-how-to-find-the-main-idea-for-preaching-part-1/ ), I walked through my method for becoming more familiar with the biblical text through the process of reading, translating, and diagramming. Although at this point much progress has been made, there is still more work to do before we can confidently say we know the main idea of the text. Up to this point the study has been with the Bible alone–no commentaries should have been used thus far. This is important because we want to hear from God what His word says to us without the contamination of outside voices. Although we will need to fight against our own personal ideas and presuppositions being imposed upon the meaning of the text, this would be much more difficult if we had the input of others at this early stage. Now that we have listened to the Word with dependence upon the Holy Spirit, we are now ready to begin answering some of the observation questions we have developed in our reading and translation.

The next step we need to take is to tentatively identify the main theme of the passage. This may be changed as we continue studying, but we should have a good idea of a major theme that has risen to the top of our understanding from our studying at this point. Write this down and set it aside.

Next, choose several commentaries that will speak to the text you have chosen to study. If you need help knowing how to choose a commentary and the differences between some commentaries and others, read my post on how to select a commentary, and just as important, when to use them. You can find that post here: https://always-reforming.com/2021/02/08/how-to-use-bible-commentaries-more-effectively/ Now, take out that list of observations and questions that you gathered from reading through your Bible 25 times, and with your commentaries handy, go looking for the answers to the questions and curiosities that you found. Background commentaries will help with the cultural issues you observed, exegetical and critical commentaries will help with linguistic issues that popped up when you translated or read various translations. Try to avoid reading expositional commentaries at this point because they might tempt you to short-cut the process of self-study by giving you the answers too easily. In these types of commentaries, usually built off of sermons, you would find an outline, illustrations, and even application. Plagiarism is still a sin, and is especially grievous in a minister of the Word.

Hopefully as you read the commentaries you had several conclusions confirmed from your own study. It is a special satisfaction that comes when you read the same things you found in your study in the pages of commentaries. It helps you realize that you too can study the Scriptures for yourself! If you find that you had unique ideas or were in disagreement with all or most of the commentaries regarding the main ideas or interpretation of the text, you might want to go back and re-study the passage again. It is possible that you got it right and everyone else got it wrong–possible, but highly improbable. Commentaries act as a check on our study to make sure that we aren’t far off in our conclusions. If you are certain you got it right, make sure that you have strong reasons that are defendable by the text of the Scriptures. God has given to the church many excellent Bible teachers (Eph. 4:11), and we shouldn’t ignore the wisdom given by the Spirit without very good reasons.

After your review of commentaries, you should be ready to put together a textual or exegetical outline. What is a textual or exegetical outline? It is an outline that follows the contours, storyline, or argument of the author. Sometimes this is done through textual markers seen in the original languages or grammar. Sometimes it is suggested by the flow of a narrative and the changing of scenes. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it just needs to accurately hit the high points of the text. Don’t try to alliterate or be fancy–just get the main ideas down. This outline should reflect the totality of the text you have studied. At this point, you may begin to see how you will break up a longer passage to be preached in larger chunks as multiple sermons.

Next, looking at the main theme you wrote down earlier, and your textual outline. What would you say is the doctrinal theme? In other words, what main theological idea rises to the top of this passage? Try to be brief and accurate–“love” is too generic, but “the love of God for the Church” would be more accurate. Think of this as a label for a box that your whole sermon text will fit into. If some of the text doesn’t fit this theological theme, then you need to adjust it and make sure it covers the whole text.

When you have come to the doctrinal or theological theme, ask yourself how well you know this doctrine. Perhaps it is one that you have studied well and in depth and you know what the whole of Scripture teaches about it. Wonderful! You can move on. But if you are lacking in your understanding, it would be best to take a look at a good systematic theology (or two) and read up on the subject. It might be that the doctrine is found in a few places that you will need to review, like our above subject “the love of God for the Church.” There you should look up the “love of God” under the attributes of God, and under “the love of Christ.” You probably would also want to look up this love under the subject of “the Church.” Additionally, you might want to check and see how God’s love for the Church is different from his love for other entities like Israel, unbelievers, and “the world.” Once you have armed yourself with what the whole Bible teaches on your doctrinal subject, you can be assured that you will not say something about your passage that is untrue in another passage you might have been ignorant about. That’s always embarrassing.

Now we are ready to consider forming the preaching proposition or main idea of the sermon. That will need to wait for the next post.

Help for New Expositors: How to Find the Main Idea for Preaching (part 1)

/ Richard Bargas / 2 Comments

Whether you call it the “main idea,” “big idea,” “propositional statement,” or something else, we are going to be looking at how to make sure you preach the main idea of a section of Scripture so that you are not preaching about an ancillary idea or worse, force your own idea upon the passage. In this post I will be walking through a process I have developed for myself. To help myself with this, I have made a worksheet. In a previous post, I shared it on this blog. You can see it and download it here: https://always-reforming.com/2014/07/24/a-simplified-sermon-preparation-checklist/

The first thing that you need to make sure you do is to be as familiar as you can be about the portion of text you are preaching from. Make sure you have included the whole pericope (pəˈrikəpē), which is the whole unit of thought—in other words, don’t choose only a few verses within a section, or half a narrative section. The pericope will be at least a full paragraph, but might be more. Don’t worry if there is too much to preach at one time. You will be able to break the section into smaller preaching units later, but for now, you need to study the whole section together as one unit. If you are able to read Greek or Hebrew, those texts will also help you see the major units of the text.

To familiarize yourself with your text, you need to begin by reading it over and over again. I’d suggest you do this in your preferred English translation for preaching. Read it over at least 25 times. As you read through, take notes about what you see, questions you have that will need to be answered, and other observations about the text. Don’t stop to do research at this point, but rather set aside these questions and observations for your study later. When you are finished reading the text repeatedly, you should almost have it memorized—or at least be very familiar with it. Why 25 times and not more or less? Although this is only my suggestion, I think that 25 times will yield more in observations and the flow of the textual outline than less readings will. More reading will be helpful, but with limited sermon preparation time and diminished return for your time investment, reading more times is a luxury many cannot afford.

After having read the chosen text over and over you need to read it in multiple English translations. Bible software makes this easy to do. Read it in the most common translations and paraphrases available—ESV, NASB, NIV, KJV, NKJV, CSB, HCSB, The Message, TNIV, etc. You only need to read each of them once, but note the places where there are significant changes or disagreement. This might clue you in to translational issues or manuscript variants that you will discover later.

The next step will not be possible for everyone. If you can, translate the passage from the original languages. If you do not know Greek or Hebrew, you can use aids and software, but please understand that this is not the same as knowing the languages—recognize that tools are helpful but they are not the same as knowing the language. I have seen some students of the Word who do not know the original languages say wrong things, even embarrassing things, while giving the impression to their congregation that they know more than they do. Since most pastors are not linguistic scholars (even those who do know Hebrew and Greek), we need a strong dose of humility in this area and to know our own limitations.

While you translate your passage, note key words, repeated words, word plays, hapax legomenon (words that occur only once in the Bible), inclusio (a type of textual “envelope”), chiastic structures, and other linguistic markers that your text might have. These are the hidden gems of the text that expositors are blessed to see firsthand. Some of these we may expose to our congregation because they are helpful to them to understand the passage, while others we may not include in our sermon but will enjoy their richness and depth for ourselves.

Next, diagram your text either from the original language or in your preferred English translation. The practice of sentence diagramming will help you to see subordinate clauses and phrases, controlling verbs, and other grammatical clues to the structure and the intended emphases of the biblical writer. By doing this, you will make sure that you are not emphasizing a minor idea when the author is emphasizing something else. If you don’t know how to diagram a text, I would highly recommend you learn how to do so. A book like Walter Kaiser’s Toward an Exegetical Theology can help and give examples. For further help, Lee Kantenwein’s book Diagrammatically Analysis is also a good place to look. Both are available to purchase from places like Amazon.com

If you have done all of the above so far, you will have deeply immersed yourself into the passage and will have becoming aware of the theme(s) of the passage you are intending to preach—textually, and theologically. You aren’t there yet and this exegetical data isn’t yet a sermon ready to preach, but you are well on your way.

My next post will pick up from here and move on to the next few steps that will help us on our way to finding the main idea of a passage before we put together our sermon and proclaim, “Thus says the Lord.”

The Pastor and His Schedule

/ Richard Bargas / Leave a comment

No matter where you serve the Lord, whether in a city or rural setting, it is easy to become overwhelmed with the many responsibilities that are required of a minister. For 12 of my 17 years as the pastor of a small church in an urban inner-city area of Los Angeles, I juggled two sets of responsibilites—leading our church in many of the main teaching responsibilities, which consisted of preaching for about 45 minutes three times a week from three different books of the Bible, along with men’s discipleship, and counseling. There were, of course, many other responsibilities which we could sprinkle in along with those, but those took up major chunks of my time.

Additionally, I taught pastoral ministry courses at a nearby seminary twice a week during the regular semesters. Because of Los Angeles traffic and the distance to the seminary, I would spend about 4 hours each day on congested freeways as I travelled to and from the school. That meant that on the days that I taught, I would spend most of my days either commuting to and from the seminary as well as teaching. When I returned I would most often drive straight to my office at church and pick up my duties there.

These two worlds, church pastor and seminary professor, required that I have a very good grasp of time management and discipline or else I knew that all those involved—my wife and children, my church, and my students—would suffer and I would not be able to faithfully discharge my duties.

Because of this, I understand the time constraints that are placed upon any servant of God as they seek to make the best use of their time to bring glory to God. To help those that might be working at doing this very thing, I’d like to share with you how I did this, even thought it was imperfect, in hopes that you might benefit from the lessons I learned.

I remember reading several years ago in a book by the famous productiviy guru Stephen Covey, the illustration of the big rocks and little rocks. It helped me to see the importance of prioritizing the big responsibilities in my life and ministries, and was a help in looking at the big picture.

In this illustration, Covey says he invited a seminar attendee to the front of the room to a table with a glass jar and several bowls with rocks, pea gravel, sand, and a glass of water. He asked the woman if she thought she could fit everything on the table into the jar. She said she’d try and made a few attempts, trying to put the sand and gravel in first. By doing this she found that the larger rocks wouldn’t fit. After a few more attempts she said that she didn’t think it was possible. Covey thanked her and then proceeded to take an empty jar and added in each element one at a time. He started with the larger rocks, then added the pea gravel, shaking the jar to settle in the gravel as much as possible. Then he added the sand. At each step he asked the women who had failed if she thought the jar was full. At first she said it was, then as she caught on, she answered that somehow she knew more would fit in. After the gravel and the sand, Covey once again shook the jar so the sand filled in all the spaces between the large rocks and the gravel. Finally, Covey added the water, which filled the microscopic spaces between the grains of sand, assuring his audience that the jar was now truly full.

Covey used this illustration to show that unless the large rocks, which represent the important things in our lives, are put into place first, we will never accomplish what matters most. And when what matters most is our families and our ministry to the Lord, we want to make sure that these things are placed in the most important place of priority in our life and limited time. The other stuff, the small stuff, can be added afterwards if we so desire.

So, for me, I set up a general day by day schedule that looked like this:

Mondays—Family Day. This was time that unless absolutely necessary due to a real emergency, I did not work or neglect the family. These focused days were filled with great joy and helped me to relax and spend time with my wife and children. I understood that if I lost my family, I lost my ministry.

Tuesdays—Seminary teaching in the day, church administration and counseling appointments in afternoons and the evenings.

Wednesday-Study and sermon preparation for Wednesday night, and teaching in the evenings.

Thursday– Seminary teaching in the day, study and sermon preparation for Sunday mornings.

Friday-Continue study and sermon prep for Sunday morning if not finished, study and sermon prep for Sunday evenings.

Saturday-Men’s Bible study and/or evangelism; finish sermon prep for Sunday nights if not done.

Sunday-Worship in the morning and evening, monthly leadership training and board meetings in between services.

This was my regular “big picture” schedule for most of my 17 years as pastor of my church. When the seminary had a break, then usually my involvement at church increased and I was able to divert my attention to other necessary needs at church.

And although I can’t say that I never struggled with being exhausted at times, or having too much on my plate, my schedule helped me to fit the big things into my days, and then the smaller “pebbles, and sand,” like phone calls, visitation to homes and hospitals, and pop-in-visits, fit in without losing sight of the important responsibilities that needed to happen.

Most people within your church will never have any idea how many hours and how much time you put into serving them—and that’s as it should be. We are servants after all. But the Lord knows, and we will all have to give an account for how we spent our time as ministers of the gospel. So, if you are a pastor of a church, take that seriously. The pastorate is no place for lazy men.

The Danger of Cutting Off Our Doctrinal Roots

/ Richard Bargas / 2 Comments

“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” 1 Corinthians 2:1–2 (ESV)

Set in a backdrop where the church in Corinth was filled with many Christians who had a strong taste for ear-pleasing speakers, Paul addresses his intentional plan to not be seeker sensitive in his preaching. The words “lofty speech” and “wisdom” (ESV) both reference the exalted form of rhetoric that the preferred speakers used in their addresses to the church.

When Paul came, however, he did not speak in this way. Paul isn’t embracing crude speech or speech that is intentionally dumbed down in order to sound less educated. Many seeker sensitive preachers do that today, and they are in the same vein as those that Paul is speaking against.

Paul’s comments instead are meant to point out to the Corinthian church that the focus of the message that Paul preached was not primarily focused upon the listener, but rather was focused upon the message. In saying this, Paul does not dismiss the need to be clear and doctrinal. What he is saying, though, is that the particular tastes and preferences of the listeners is not of primary importance, but rather getting the right message was of the highest importance.

This attitude toward communicating the gospel wasn’t something that Paul stumbled upon when he came into the city. In verse 2, Paul clearly says that he decided what his message would focus on instead. The Greek word ekrina comes from the root word krino and this root means to judge. Paul has selected, or set out as separate the way one chooses among many choices, his methodology. What did he decide? That of all the subjects, focal points, and sidebars that he could potentially run after, he would stay firmly planted upon the subject of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion.

Of course a simple reading of the Pauline Epistles shows that Paul didn’t only write or teach about the gospel. His range was deep and broad. But in Paul’s process of thinking through what the church needed, the gospel was his home base and starting point. Whereas the false teachers in Corinth had little concern for the ABC’s of the Christian faith, Paul built his theological superstructure upon these critical truths.

When we leave the fundamentals of the faith and become enamored by other ideas or doctrines where we leave the cross behind, we can not only expect that we will soon be lost in the weeds, but we will also find that we have lost our power. The gospel is the deep root from which all our preaching, teaching, discipleship, and faith come from. To cut ourselves off from this root is a fatal flaw. Paul wouldn’t mask it with big words and ideas. He put out his message in words and ideas that were plain and simple. And that was his plan.