Tag: sermons

Preach Through The Bible In One Year

June doesn’t seem like the right month to be thinking about preaching through the Bible in one year. However, my assumption (sadly, I’m likely wrong on this) is that most pastors plan ahead. I would hope that most have already figured out their summer preaching schedule, and many have planned their fall and even their advent preaching calendar.

If you need help putting together a preaching calendar, here are 4 Simple Steps to Create a Preaching Calendar.

Perhaps 2020 is the year you will preach through the entire Bible. You could even do some neat play on the 20/20 them by naming the series “Perspective” or “Perfect Visions” or something more clever than I can create.

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Below are three lists which can help you think about preaching the entire Bible in one year.

LIST ONE: Choose the 52 Key Chapters in the Bible

  • Genesis 2
  • Genesis 3
  • Genesis 12
  • Exodus 12
  • Exodus 20
  • 1 Samuel 16
  • 2 Samuel 2
  • Psalm 19
  • Psalm 119
  • Psalm 150
  • Proverbs 6
  • Ecclesiastes 12
  • Isaiah 52
  • 2 Chronicles 36
  • John 1
  • Matthew 1
  • Luke 2
  • Luke 4
  • Matthew 5
  • Matthew 6
  • Matthew 7
  • Mark 2
  • John 11
  • John 13
  • John 15
  • Luke 23
  • Acts 1
  • Acts 2
  • Acts 9
  • Acts 11
  • Acts 15
  • Romans 1
  • Romans 6
  • Romans 12
  • 1 Corinthians 1
  • 1 Corinthians 12
  • Galatians 5
  • Ephesians 4
  • Philippians 2
  • Colossians 1
  •  Colossians 3
  • Hebrews 8
  • Hebrews 11
  • James 1
  • James 2
  • 1 Peter 2
  • 1 John 1
  • Revelation 4
  • Revelation 12
  • Revelation 20
  • Revelation 21
  • Revelation 22

 

LIST TWO: Choose 12 Themes And Preach One Of Them Each Month

  • Beginnings / The Prologue
  • Patriarchs
  • The Law of Moses
  • Judges
  • The Monarchy
  • Captivity
  • Poets and Prophets
  • Parables of Jesus
  • People who Met with Jesus
  • Jesus’ Last Night
  • From Jerusalem to the End of the World
  • The End of the World

LIST THREE: Choose 12 Books And Preach One Of Them Each Month

  • Genesis
  • Exodus
  • Ruth
  • Samuel
  • Kings
  • Ezra
  • Mark
  • Acts
  • 1 Corinthians
  • 1 John
  • 2 Timothy
  • Revelation

There are other options as well. Many people wiser and more experienced than myself have probably created their own lists which would be worth a look. Have you ever done this? I’d love to hear how you planned it out.

How I Find Illustrations While Preparing To Preach

Illustrations are important in a sermon. Jesus used parables to drive home powerful kingdom truths and although I am not half the story teller He was, I like to use stories to illuminate kingdom truths for those I teach.

However, it can be tough to find fresh and stimulating material week after week after week. I shy away from the old-school sermon illustration books. When younger, I would sometimes refer to the “1000 Sermon Illustration” type books. However, I’ve discovered that many of the stories in these books are portrayed as true but not verified. They are “pulpit-legends”, passed from pastor to pastor without every being fact-checked. I try to never tell a story as if it is true if I haven’t done the research for myself to know it is valid.

So, how do I come up with illustrations?

I begin with my own experience and knowledge base. I read through my sermon material making a mental list of the key ideas I would like to illustrate. Then I refer to the following list while asking myself if I can illustrate this point using:

  • Bible stories
  • History
  • Science/Medicine
  • Google
  • Music/Movies/TV
  • Relationships
  • Animals
  • Employment
  • Hobbies (Sports, Hunting, Fishing, Quilting, Scrapbooking, etc.)
  • Poetry/Literature

As an aside, using my own experiences and stories about myself is good as it allows people to know me a little better and feel a more personal connection to me. This opens them up a little more to the truths I’m teaching. However, I have two simple rules about using myself in illustrations:

  1. In any given sermon, my illustrations cannot be exclusively about me. At least one of my illustrations has to come from another source. This keeps me from appearing narcissistic.
  2. I can never be the hero of the story. Allowing others to learn from my mistakes and shortcomings enables them to acknowledge their own mistakes and shortcomings as opportunities to grow. I am also setting the example that we can learn from one another if we are willing to share the bad as well as the good.

Sometimes, I don’t need a process to discover illustrations for my sermon. Sometimes, I’ll see or experience something during the week that smacks me in the face and is obviously a powerful story for my upcoming sermon. Sometimes, I work through my normal process and still don’t have the illustration I want. Usually, my fall back source for illustrations is two obscure websites.

https://www.randomlists.com/topics

topics

This is a simple resource for authors who are struggling with writers block. Everytime I refresh the page, I’m given eight new topics about which I write. Often these words trigger a memory or an idea for a story I can use in my upcoming sermon. The central illustration for my Christmas Eve sermon a few months ago was the result of seeing the word “sign” on this site. It inspired a memory of one of my favorite stories and one for which I had a ready made picture which reminded us that God doesn’t leave us on our own.

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https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/

This site is actually a robust thesaurus. I use it several times in my sermon preparation process (as well as when I’m writing or creating resources). I also use it when I’m really stuck and struggling to find an illustration. I review my sermon, identify 4-5 main themes and then plug one keyword for each theme into the thesaurus. This week, I used the word “eternal” (We’re looking at Jesus and Nicodemus and the promise of eternal life in John 3:15). Two words that popped up were “lasting” and “permanent”. This reminded me that we all long for permanence in life. This deep longing for things that last is a powerful reminder that we were created for eternity. I’m still working out exactly how that will be expressed in the sermon, but it was a helpful tweak that will likely make it into the final product.

I am not Jesus, but I want to be like Jesus. He mastered the art of using everyday experiences to draw people into spiritual conversations and eternally significant discussions. I want to do the same.  I hope you do also.

Who Are The Preachers I Learn From?

I watch and listen to 10-15 sermons a week from other preachers. This is not part of my sermon preparation, it is part of my personal growth plan.

I listen to other preachers because I need someone to preach to me. If spiritual nourishment only flows out of me and never into me, I will quickly be emptied.

I listen to other preachers because I learn from their technique. Every preacher is different and every sermon is different. I learn about structuring a sermon, extracting truth from a passage, presenting a message and more by watching and listening to others who do it differently than I do.

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I don’t align perfectly with the theology or practice of all these preachers. Yet, we’re all playing on the same team and I find I learn a great deal from them even when my ears perk up due to a minor doctrinal difference.

Here are a few of my favorites to watch:

Keith Sandison. Calvary Church, Muskegon, MI. Keith is an old friend, a former team-mate and a one-time student of mine. His passion for Jesus and desire to point others to Him is matched by few.

Jason Tovey and Josh Tovey. Grand Rapids, Michigan. These two brothers have been around my life since they were in middle school and high school. Now they are both lead pastors in the same city. Their styles are different, but they both feed their people solid biblical content every week.

Paul Robie. South Mountain Christian Church, Draper, UT. Paul planted a church in the middle of Mormon country and over the past few decades it has grown into a thriving multi-site church. He doesn’t preach as much anymore, but when he does his messages are practical and accessible with an unexpected depth.

Mark Driscoll. Yup. him. His style is unique and his past is checkered, but Balaam even learned from a donkey, right? Actually, I like Mark. He is unapologetically committed to the authority of Scripture, and while that is not as popular a place to be anymore, I still appreciate it.

Doug Sauder. Calvary Chapel, Ft. Lauderdale. I have a secret crush on the Calvary Chapel movement. I love that they are fully committed to verse-by-verse teaching. Doug’s church is one of the largest in America. His preaching is to-the-point and conversational and his delivery has just the right amount of energy to keep you interested without overwhelming you.

Rick Warren. Although Rick isn’t a regular of mine, he has an unending supply of sermons on Youtube and I can often find a sermon of his that deals with a topic I’m wrestling through. I don’t preach exactly like Rick but I greatly appreciate his systematic approach and his willingness to pack his sermons with helpful and growth-oriented content.

Here are a few of my favorites to listen to: (these are the preachers currently on my phone’s podcast app)

Jonathan Misirian. Southbrook Church, Franklin, WI. Jonathan and I were freshmen together in college. He’s done an incredible job of pastoring the people in his church and turning around a church that had become stagnant. Jonathan’s delivery is pastoral, you can sense the love he has for the people in his church. His messages are always relevant for today and he has found a way to strike a healthy balance between being gospel-focused and missionally active.

Vince Black. The Town Church, Fort Collins, CO. Vince and I worked together at a summer camp 20 years ago. Since then we’ve stayed in touch and tried to encourage each other through the different phases of ministry. He planted the Town Church several years ago with the Acts 29 group. His sermons are Christ-centered and thoughtful. He draws great insights out of each text he covers.

Community Christian Church. Chicago. CCC was one of the pioneer churches in the multi-site movement. They have mastered a process of building every week’s sermon with a team. The result is a finely tuned presentation that focuses people’s attention on one Big Idea (which is the name of their book about this process). This is not a slight, but I listen to these sermons less for the content and more to learn about their structure. They do a great job of illustrating their main point and then creating practical and achievable next steps for their listeners.

This is just a taste of what is available today. Technology has provided us with a goldmine of resources we can share with one another. It is now possible to have sermons playing in the background of your study all day long if you like (I rarely listen to music as I feel more inspired if I’m listening to others preach). If you don’t like the list I’ve created, make your own and learn from them!

And… if you want to watch/listen to my sermons, you can do it here.

 

 

Sound-Bite Sermons

Over the past several years, I’ve noticed political speeches include increasingly more “sound-bite” type statements. Speechwriters know the media will only play short clips of the speech, so they feed them ready-made lines to appear on the evening news. These sound-bites are driven by the campaign’s foundational “talking points” which is why you feel like you hear the same speeches over and over again.

The problem is that most political speeches have become a constant stream of sound-bites without any effort to provide substantive content. On the rare occasion a politician takes time to explain the “why” behind his campaign goals, they get killed by pundits for being “boring”. As a result, most political speeches are pretty shallow these days.

I prefer a speech that mixes important content with memorable sound-bites.

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Often, when I preach, I try to have several sound-bite type statements sprinkled throughout my sermon. Not because of the media, but because a short, memorable statement is a good way to wrap up a point and help the hearers take it with them. These statements are usually the last piece of my sermon to develop as they are in many ways the transitions and summations of the key points of the sermon. The danger I have to avoid, however, is the temptation to develop a sermon full of short, witty statements that inspire people and get them excited, but don’t really teach them anything new or direct them toward life change.

As an example of sound-bites in a sermon, here are some of my transitory statements from a sermon on 2 Timothy 2:14-22:

  • How disappointing is it to God when the feuds and drama within His church are mirror images of the workplace fights that happen among those who don’t even know him?
  • Handle the Bible in such a way that there is no question as to the RIGHT way to live.
  • Whatever your talents, resources, position, or possessions; use them in ways God would approve.
  • If we are not willing to rightly handle the gifts God has given us, we cannot be useful to him.
  • We need to discipline ourselves so that our first response to temptation is to flee.
  • Because of faith, God has already declared me righteous, so when I pursue righteousness, I am simply living up to the person God has already declared me to be.
  • Faithfulness is demonstrated by consistency over time.
  • Faithfulness is choosing to consistently rely on Christ every day. This kind of faithful life is the catalyst for righteousness.
  • When I’m consistently relying on Jesus to provide my righteousness, I have no need to take care of myself. Therefore, I can focus my attention on others… on loving them.
  • The greatest obstacle we face in pursuing loving relationships is too great a sense of self-love. I cannot completely love you the way Christ loved me if I am worried about fulfilling my own needs and desires.

An added benefit of creating these sound-bites is that they are ready made for social media. I can tweet these, put them on Facebook or create Instagram and Pinterest graphics with them. I might use them to spice up my YouVersion live event or in an all-church email the week after I preach. If my church members follow me on social media, these quick statements are a great reminder throughout the week of how God has spoken to our community.

These statements are not the “meat” of the sermon, they are the seasoning. They won’t provide the protein, but they make the meal memorable. If one of these sound-bites sticks with someone and enables them to receive God’s truth so that It changes their life, then my time spent developing them was well spent.