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Peter Mead ofthe Biblical Preaching Blog has a post up on how to get more work from your sermon exegesis. This is an important post in that it has been said that 20 hours may be needed to preach a good sermon. With that kind of investment we can’t afford to just preach once and be done.
Preach More than One Sermon
The first option is to Preach more than one sermon. Mead suggests possibly preaching on the same text from a different angle. Perhaps use the first sermon to speak more on the background and the next sermon more on application. This is a very valuable way of making double use of your sermonic material. This is basically making a series out of it.
Produce Study Notes
The Second option is to Produce Study Notes. Meade suggests creating a study out of your sermon exegesis material. This is a really good idea. You could give the material to the people to help them continue thinking on the subject. You could also create just a Bible lesson for future “Wednesday night Bible Studies” or even provide a basis for a devotional Bible commentary.
Present a Forum
The next option is to Do a Forum on the Text. Why not have a question and answer session on the particular text. You are in a much better position to discuss it after your exegesis for preaching.
Publish it
The next option is to Publish it in some way. I think this is an important idea. Make your research and work available to the universal Church. Among the options not spoken of by Meade but that I think one should consider is to publish it on the web. There are many preachers publishing materials on the web, today it is much easier to do this.
Preach it Again
The final option is to Preach it again. I remember one of my homiletics professors saying that you should not preach the same sermon twice. Another one of my professors said once that it is a waste of a good sermon to only preach it once. I think that the first professor was emphasizing the need to “rework” the sermon for “representation” to a different group. If one re-preaches the sermon, one should take into account that this is a different people and/or time and thus would require some modification to the sermon. But in general I tend to agree with the idea that a great sermon should be preached more than once.
These are some good ideas. Exegesis is hard work. Because of this we should try to get as much mileage out of that work as possible.
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