It is somewhat difficult to answer the question as to how I prepare my sermons since the preparation of sermons has over the years become practically a full-time task on my part, during both my conscious and unconscious moments. Much of what I see turns into homiletical fodder and much of what I hear has a way of being transformed into amplifications of God's divine truth.
However, I can say that in general there are two kinds of preparation—the longterm preparation, which goes back into the past as far as memory can carry one, and the short-range preparation, which is the immediate attention paid to the particular things that will be dealt with on the following Sunday. For long-range preparation I like constantly to be reading, although it does not furnish many quotations since I do not look particularly for quotations. It has a way of fertilizing the imagination, of prodding one's dead vocabulary into new life, and of lifting one's ability to articulate the gospel into a new fluidity.
There is nothing in the world in the preparation of sermons that can take the place of continuous prayer. Prayer is the inspiration from the Godward side that awakens a man to the various sensitive areas of human need in himself and in other people. It also has a way of linking his knowledge of Bible truth to contemporary themes so that the two will marry and have children that walk into the hearts of people who are lonely, afraid, and in need of living redemption.
Also, during the summer, before my preaching year, I spend much of the two months of my vacation in solemnly considering the Biblical messages that will best fit into the church year and also feed the hearts of people and bring the challenge of belief to those who have not yet accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Redeemer and Master. I like to work in such a way that before Christmas we are, in general, thinking of Him who was prophesied of old and who then historically arrived under His star at Bethlehem in the humble stable.
After Christmas I work in the direction of the cross; and after Easter I like to plan my sermons toward Pentecost; and then into the more general areas of Old Testament Biblical truth as we work on toward summer.
As for the actual, deliberate work on a particular context and text, I like to read and reread the text and its context many, many times. An actress who had a big part in the film The Ten Commandments told me that she ,fiently reads her parts in a motion picture to herself seventy times before she even dares speak the part aloud. In that fashion I let the Bible speak to me in the silences before I speak about the Bible in public.
Added to this study of the Bible there is the constant parallel labor of meditation. I call it labor because it is hard work and leaves me more tired very often than difficult pastoral duties. Someone, when asked how he prepares his sermons, said, "I sit in my study staring at the backs of Lange's Commentaries." Notice he was staring at the backs of the commentaries and not at the inside of them. I find that this is very, very helpful. If I look into a commentary before I have prepared my sermon, I invariably paralyze my own initiative and my own creative thought. I always like to go to the commentaries after I have prepared my message, to check and see if I have gone wrong anywhere.
In this meditation on the text I constantly use a notebook—a notebook into which there filters observations and illustrations that come to me as I travel, think, work in the parish, and in general do my reading. In the back of this notebook I jot down salient ideas that occur to me during my meditation on the text. Presently I go to my typewriter and bang out some sort of a provisional outline, as fully as I can make it. After some hours I go back to the typewriter again, and without consulting my previous notes at all, I type out another outline. After several hours I type out another. Very often in the course of three days I will have typed as many as twelve, fifteen, or twenty outlines, all of them written independently of outlines written ahead of them. What this does is to throw me back on myself and fling me away from the paper.
In my own experience it is fatal to try to recall in a verbatim way the preparation I have made. I need to be free of all fetters, even the fetters of phrases that at the time of the preparation I thought were quite right. I have found that if one can get free from his preparation, the preparation comes back and helps a man without having the memory strain itself too much. What takes place, I suppose, is something like the work of a spring that flows spontaneously from the waters backed up behind it in the hills that rise in majesty toward the sky.
When I finally get to a place where the message has simplified itself into three or four trenchant central words in a structure that I feel is strong, and illustrations have attached themselves almost without conscious effort, then, after further prayer, I feel I can go into the pulpit and preach without manuscript and without notes. This permits the mind to continue to be under the influence of the Holy Spirit. I find that the Holy Spirit comes in very often and takes over, and employs what was prepared and gives it a new urgency, energy, and application.
I admit that this statement of my sermon preparation is a mysterious thing, but then sermon preparation and sermon preaching are both exceedingly mysterious.
I cannot overemphasize the need to spend at least an hour of preparation for every minute of public address. I cannot overemphasize the necessity also of being so impregnated with the message, so saturated with love for your people, so acquainted with the Biblical references, the context, and the text, that all of these will work together in providing a new synthesis of spiritual forcefulness and the projection of a message that will, as much as possible, hide the speaker and reveal Jesus Christ, cancel the human element and elevate the divine element, decrease the mortal apprehension and increase the immortal comprehension.
