Putting the sermon together week after week is, probably, the single most time-consuming thing I do. Sermons simply do not fall together on Saturday night or Sunday morning. Sermons do not come easily, even to the best and most experienced of preachers. I’ve been preaching on a weekly basis for many years, and most sermons still take many hours of consistent research, thought, prayer, and reflection.

Different preachers have different ways of preparing their sermons on a weekly basis. My sermons usually begin on Monday morning, just after breakfast but before I go to the office. I sit down in my study at home and look at the lectionary for the following Sunday. The lectionary is a 3-year-long schedule of scripture readings which follow the seasons of the Church Year (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost). I use the lectionary to help guide me in what Scriptures to preach on. I read all the passages which are listed for the next Sunday, and give a little thought to what’s going on in the congregation while I drink my coffee and listen to Good Morning America. By the time I get to the office I’ve usually made a tentative choice as to which of passages of scripture I’m going to preach on, although at this point I still have no idea as to what the sermon will actually be about.

Sometimes the Scriptures readily reveal the theme for the sermon; sometimes (most of the time) developing the theme takes much more work. I generally spend about 3 to 4 hours translating, reading, studying, and interpreting the passage(s) I am going to be preaching on before I even try to give form to a sermon theme or topic. In seminary I was taught that the Scriptures should be allowed to form as much of the sermon as possible. Few things are worse than a preacher trying to force a theme upon a passage of Scripture, but it is often done -- and I am guilty of it myself.

At any rate, by Tuesday evening the sermon topic is usually well solidified, and the general theme and flow of the sermon is usually well underway. Wednesday is often the day in which I spend a significant amount of time outlining my sermon, deciding what the illustrations are going to be, and trying to give it some body.

My weekly objective is to have my sermon finished and ready for preaching by Thursday night, but I manage to succeed in doing this only about half the time. Indeed, come Saturday afternoon, when I sit down at my desk to practice my sermon, I discover that I’ve got some more work to do. I’ve either left out some important point or I have not succeeded in making a complex idea clear, and so I hop back on the computer and do a fast rewrite of whatever it is that is bothering me. All in all, a good sermon takes me about 10 to 12 hours a week to produce, and that doesn’t count the actual 20 minutes that it takes to preach it. Some preachers take less time, some take more. And, of course, there are some weeks when the sermon falls together in 5 hours or less . . . but that doesn’t happen very often.

You may ask: "But what about God? Why can’t you just let the Holy Spirit speak to you when you stand up to preach? Why do you have to spend so much time in preparation?"

I often say that if I didn’t do all of the preparation I probably wouldn’t be able to hear the Holy Spirit speaking to me. Indeed, I believe that the Holy Spirit can and does move through those hours of research and study to guide in the preparation of the message.

I can remember one Sunday I had prepared to preach on baptism, and a significant portion of the sermon depended upon the congregation having just seen a baptism take place. But, 30 minutes prior to worship time I was informed that the baptism wouldn’t be happening that day. Well, this threw all my carefully laid sermon plans out the window. However, I had a good 4 hours of scriptural work behind me on the specific passage for that Sunday, and many many hours of thought and reflection on the meaning of baptism to draw upon, and so when I got up to preach the words just flowed with an ease that is often rare with my best planned sermons. I am convinced that it was God’s working in and through my preparation time that made it possible for me to get up and preach "off the cuff."

Oh, and to answer one of the most frequently asked questions: Yes, my sermons are memorized; and, no, I don’t always stick to my memory.