Ideas must be Bible-based
If you get your idea directly from the Bible and apply that truth to life, then you have a Biblical sermon. But suppose you're riding along and you see a church sign that gives you a good idea. I did that one time; I saw a sign on a bulletin board—"The High Cost of Low Living." (You know how we steal titles from one another!) That was a good title. But I couldn't have preached on that title and had a Biblical sermon. I had to go to the Bible and find a Bible truth that illustrated what I meant by "The High Cost of Low Living." So, if you get an idea from outside the Bible, you are not to preach on that idea as a Biblical sermon unless it can be found in the Word of God. That is a basic, fundamental concept. When you get an idea, you must go to the Scriptures and find a preaching portion that covers it.
A sermon idea, then, is of no value unless it can be Biblically oriented. A Biblical preacher will keep in mind, first of all, that the only truth he can or will preach is Bible truth. Every idea that you use must have a solid foundation in the Word of God. There is no exception. If you cannot find a scripture that will match the idea, you can, perhaps, give a good talk, but you can't preach a Biblical sermon, because sermons are based only on the Word of God. (A tool that will be helpful to you in matching ideas to texts is Nave's Topical Bible. It is a Bible with the verses arranged topically, with the subjects in alphabetical order.) And once the idea is swallowed up in the text, the important thing thereafter is not the idea, but the text.
Number two, the idea must be a big idea, something that will develop into a strong sermon. The sermon originates at the exact point at which the idea first occurs. If the idea is weak, the sermon will be weak. If the idea has strength, the sermon is likely to be strong.
Number three, the idea must be relevant to the needs of the hearers. Biblical preaching is more than talking about the love life of the Jebusites (as "Biblical" as that topic might be)! The saint in the pew will want to know, "What has that to do with my love life?" Truth from the Bible must always be applied and made relevant to those who hear. What have you accomplished, even if you preach the Bible, if the people go out saying, "So what?" Here's an algebraic formula for Biblical preaching: exegesis (what the Word means) plus application (what that meaning has to do with me) equals Biblical preaching.
Where do these extra-Biblical ideas come from? A preacher has to develop a homiletical mind that is in such constant operation that it becomes second nature to him. He always has to be thinking, How can this develop into a sermon? What can I do with this? As you cultivate this homiletical mind, you will become alert to all kinds of possible ideas. Visiting with your people in their homes, associating with them in the church, you will hear things that will give you ideas. You should have systematic reading habits that will give you lots of splendid ideas from history, biography, and literature. Sometimes a hymn or a billboard or an observation when traveling will spark an idea for a sermon. W. L. Watkins said, "The brain of a true preacher is always in a state of fermentation, and hundreds of potential discourses await their hour."
So, I'm always looking for ideas, and whenever I get an idea I always put it down. I have thousands of them I have never used and probably never will. But as I pick up ideas here and there, I put them on 3-by-5-inch cards. (Actually, I use 3-by-5-inch sheets of paper. Cards are too expensive. Go to a printer and say, "Cut some of your scrap 3-by-5- inch sheets and charge me by the pound." You'll get a great pile of it, rather than going to the store and paying 35 cents for a hundred cards. Cards are too thick, anyway!)
Or you may prefer to use a loose-leaf notebook. Phillips Brooks used a note book. Dr. Torrey had a "thought-book" that he even kept by his bed. No matter what methods you use, the objective is to capture the idea and get it written down. These nuggets do not stay in your mind; they go back to the subconscious and are lost forever. The only way to keep them is to write them down.
Logical units
Now, in developing Biblical ideas into sermons and in matching extra-Biblical ideas to a scripture, a basic principle is that we always deal with a logical unit. A logical unit may be a whole book of the Bible. For example, you can preach on the book of Philippians. The basic theme of that book is joy, and you can run that theme right through the book and preach on joy from Philippians.
A chapter of a book may be a logical unit. That isn't always the case, of course. First Corinthians 13 is not a logical unit; it begins logically with 1 Corinthians 12. The last verse of 1 Corinthians 12 says, "I will show you a still more excellent way" (R.S.V.), and then chapter 13 goes on to tell what that excellent way is. The chapters have not been divided properly. Chapter division is not inspired, nor are paragraphs and punctuation.
A logical unit can be a section of a book. The Sermon on the Mount begins with Matthew 5 and ends with Matthew 7. It is a unit of three chapters.
A paragraph is a basic logical unit. The King James Version is usually arranged verse by verse, and you never know where a paragraph ends and another begins. (I'd like to recommend to you that you add to your list of Bibles the Harper Study Bible, Revised Standard Version. It's beautifully paragraphed. It's hard to find a good paragraphed Bible in the King James Version. The best that I have found is The New Scofield Reference Bible. I'm not recommending the notes, but its paragraphs. Don't get an old one. Get a new one with good paragraph divisions.) You can't preach on half a paragraph, because a paragraph is a logical unit. The Scripture was written grammatically, and you must take into consideration grammatical structure, because that is the basis of understanding. The Bible isn't just a hodgepodge of words. The words are all put together into syntactical relation ships that give thoughts and ideas.
I know one can preach on phrases. But I'm talking about expository preaching, and expository preaching is based on a logical unit of Scripture—a book, a section of a book, a chapter, a cluster of paragraphs that fit together, or a verse.
So, once you have your idea, you must match that idea with a unit of Scripture. Then your entire sermon—whatever it is—is going to come out of this unit, this preaching portion. Expository preaching lays your sermon at full length upon the text.
As you learn expository preaching, it is much better that initially you choose large units. The reason is that the larger the unit, the easier it is to get your out line from it. As you become more familiar with preparing expository sermons, you can select smaller portions and get greater amounts of truth from them.
What does it say?
Once you settle on your preaching unit, you must determine the basic content of every paragraph in that unit. If your Scripture unit is only one para graph, all you have to discover is the subject of that paragraph. But if there is a cluster of paragraphs, you have to decide what each paragraph is talking about and what the overall subject is that ties them together. How do you find that out?
First of all, read the Scripture portion over in several different versions to get different viewpoints. (Every preacher ought to make a collection of Bible versions. You can pick them up in second hand bookstores everywhere.) If you have not forgotten your Greek or your Hebrew, read it in the original. Look at your Scripture portion without preconceived ideas of its content. Ask yourself What actually does this paragraph say? What is its basic content?
Let me give you a little tip. A very important part of sermon preparation is the half sheet of paper. Use the backs of form letters or spoiled mimeographed paper. Tear the sheets in half and put them on a clipboard. Use the good side, and every time you get an idea, no matter how random or how wild, how short or how long, put it down—one idea on one sheet. (I used to list them all on a single sheet, and then I would have to copy them all over again to separate them.) As you read the Scripture portion in various versions, write down any ideas that come to you. You will dis cover that these ideas will begin to pile up and you'll have quite a large number of half sheets. Now when you actually come to putting together the sermon, a lot of these will have no value at all, but you won't know which ones until later. So write them all down.
Determining context
In analyzing the Scripture portion, ask What is its relationship to the entire book? You must know the background of the book, for how can you actually know the significance of the text without knowing its context? Add to your library, then, a few good introductions to the Old Testaments. Halley's Bible Handbook is a very common one. Unger's Bible Handbook is another. These give you the who, when, where, and why of the books of the Bible.
You've heard that a text without con text is a pretext. You must preach contextually. Your scripture is part of a whole, and you must know the relation ship of the fraction to the total. You have no right to lift a scripture out of its setting independently and say it says a certain thing any more than you have a right to lift a paragraph out of a letter and quote it as the contents of the letter. The paragraph may have a different meaning in the context of the letter than it does when you lift it out. So it is important first that you know the broad outlines of the book.
Ask such questions as: Who wrote this book? What is its main theme? Where was it written? When? To whom? What prompted the original writing? Are any particular terms repeated over and over? What does it teach about God? Is the general tone argumentative? Hortatory? Instructive? Prepare a broad general outline of the book. Give special attention to changes in subject matter. Why is this important to know? You will dis cover that as you preach from your text, the setting will also project itself into your sermon, and a lot of the elements that deal with the book at large are relevant to the specific text you are using.
Such an overview of each Bible book can be a delightful thing to work on, and once you have it, you have it forever. If you're going to become a Biblical preacher, may I suggest that you set up a file with a folder for every book of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. When you complete your survey of the back ground of a particular book, put it in that folder. Add any material you come across from time to time, and you'll have it all there for review the next time you preach from that book.
In addition, some books of the Bible are parts of a cluster of books, and you can understand them better when you see them in light of the cluster. The Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are such a cluster. The Pentateuch, the major prophets, the minor prophets, and the Pauline epistles are some other examples.
The next thing you want to know is How does the preaching portion fit in with the material that goes before and after—the immediate context? The speaker of the immediate context may be someone other than the speaker of the book itself. For instance, Luke wrote the book of Acts, but who is the speaker in Acts 26? Paul. So you want to know, What kind of person is he? What is his character? His age? His background? His training? Who is he talking to? When did this take place? Where? Why? As you ask these questions of your preaching portion, you are getting answers and writing them down. As yet you don't know what the subject is. You're trying to find out, under the guidance of the Spirit of the living God, What is the passage actually saying?
Don't indulge in eisogesis—what you think it says. Do exegesis—what it actually says. Here is one of the biggest problems when it comes to preaching. It's amazing how many times we will read into a text something that we think it says, and it doesn't say that at all. Once you have chosen a Scripture portion, lay aside every preconceived idea, every personal prejudice, and try to look at the text as if you had never seen it before. It's hard to do! Only the Holy Spirit can help you to do it. But if you don't approach the Scriptures with a prayer for the Holy Spirit to illuminate your heart to know the text's true meaning, you can get all kinds of things out of the Word of God.
Let's review. You get an idea, either from Scripture or outside. Your idea leads you to a Scripture portion. That Scripture portion must be a unit—it may be a paragraph, several paragraphs, a chapter, or more. But it must be a logical unit. Then you analyze the preaching portion according to these steps that I have given, and at last you learn what is its subject, its basic teaching. You have moved from the idea to the text to the great broad truth, the subject.
The broad truth
Now, let's learn something about the subject. The subject is the main thrust of the sermon, the summarizing core. It covers the passage like a tent. Don't forget that. When you are looking at a paragraph or a chapter, invariably your eyes will light on one scripture and you'll say, "That's the subject." It isn't the subject; it's the text that impresses you the most. The subject is the broad truth that covers the entire passage.
Let's use John 17 as an example of a preaching portion. As we look over these verses, we want to find out, "What is he talking about?" And by the way, when you study John 17, you need to study it in the light of John 13-16, for chapter 17 is the climax to the passion weekend that begins in the upper room with the foot washing and the communion service fol lowed by Jesus' conversation with His disciples, the lessons He drew, and His farewell speech. Then He walks with the disciples toward Gethsemane, and He stops by a grapevine and talks to them about the vine and branches. He talks to them all through chapter 16, and then He begins to pray in chapter 17.
You cannot present John 17 without an understanding of the circumstances. Jesus knows that this is His last opportunity to pray with the disciples, because from here on it is downhill to the cross. So this prayer is an important one. It must cover those things He considered most important.
What's the subject matter? What are these important things? He's talking to His Father about His disciples and their relationship to the world. What did He say that relationship was? Can you see it? "Out of it." "In it." "Not of it." "Into it."
Basically, He is giving guidelines to the disciples and the coming church of how they are to relate to the world. They come out of it. They are totally apart from it, but right in the middle of it, as Christ Himself was. He was right in the midst of the world and its activities, but not of it. He had no connection with the sin of the world even as He mingled with sinners. And He said, "As I have gone into the world, so I send you."
Now, what is the subject of these verses as we read them over and over? He keeps mentioning the world, but He's praying for His disciples. He's praying for them in their relationship to the world. It's a church-world relationship.That's the point, the subject of the pas sage.
Now we have a subject. The subject is in the preaching portion we have chosen. The preaching portion is a logical unit. But we can't preach on the subject, and you will see why in the next article.
