What The Blues Teaches Us About Preaching
Ok…It is late and you need a sermon. You look at the text and you only see what you always see. What can you do? A simple tip provided by Charles Koller in the book How to Preach Without Notes might help.
When you have a main question or a thesis, you need to translate that thesis into a sermon outline. There are Seven Interrogatives that you can ask of your thesis to help you flesh out an outline.
Check out Pastor Charles G. Adams’ sermon that he preached at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration. The sermon can be found at this link.
My classmate, James Moultry, sent in this link which is on the Big Daddy Weave website. That is a Baptist blog that some of you may want to check out.
Charles Adams Sermon Video Online Read MoreThe Bible Preaching website has a post up on two traps that can work against your preaching moment.
These are two problems that I have seen many preachers fall into virtually limiting the effectiveness of the sermon. The first is not to overqualify.
Before you are ready to preach a sermon, you should edit and polish your sermon. One of the few articles that address sermon polishing is Henry Mitchell’s. He has written a in the John McClure edited book Best Advice for Preaching. I generally speak of editing and polishing a sermon in terms of 3 edits. You might look at each of these edits as a different dimension of a comprehensive edit of the sermon manuscript.
Introduction: This sermon short is basically a pointer to help someone think about a text and turn it into a sermon. It is not meant to be preached now, but needs some beefing up. I have included some helpful pointers in how to preach it in the text of the sermon.
The final source of Biblical Preaching is imagination. Charles Koller notes that imagination alone can turn a dull sermon into one that comes alive. Imagination helps you create connections between the past and the present in interesting ways.
Sources of Bible Preaching – Imagination Read MoreCharles Koller in the book How To Preach Without Notes writes: “Preaching at its best is the sharing of profound personal experience.” He backs up this claim by appealing to the apostles who simply told the story of their interaction with Jesus Christ (Acts 4:20).
What is the Three Points and a Poem Sermonic form? How can I use it in my preaching? Pastor Cox describes a method for doing just that in this Audio post.
Another one of the sources of Biblical Preaching is literature of all kinds. The preacher should have a knowledge found only in reading a wide variety of literature. This would include “devotional readings, some bibliography, poetry, fiction, archeology, studies in arts and sciences, and other general reading.”
After having looked at Scripture, one can find help in preaching the Biblical message from the next source for Biblical Preaching is History. This includes both an understanding of the history of the empires and people who interacted with the Biblical characters.
Sources of Bible Preaching – History Read MoreCharles Koller’s book How to Preach Without Notes is a goldmine of homiletical insight in a short amount of space. Not only does it attempt to teach how to preach without notes, but it also provides information on how to preach any kind of sermon.
Sources of Bible Preaching – Scripture Read MoreWhen one expands the outline of the sermon, one normally uses some processes naturally. Charles Koller in his little work How To Preach Without notes attempts to explicitly show them so that preachers can make better use of them.
The Expository Thoughts Website has an article that graphs the Daily Devotions of to the ESV devotions site. We see that there is, as you might expect, a spike in January and then a drop that only goes up at another huge spike in December.