Good Bible Sermon Preparation Tips

Some Simple Steps to Preparing a Sermon

As a Pastor or Bible teacher, you're being called upon to write a sermon. It can be a quite intimidating project, especially if you’ve never composed one before. Where do you start? What are you going to preach about? What Bible passages do you use? How do you tie everything up in a neat little bow? Can you even do that? After all, so often scripture is open to interpretation. Well, if you’re busting up your brain trying to write that sermon, these good Bible sermon preparation tips should serve you well.

At the top of your "do list" is to make certain that you have a passage of scripture that you want to preach off of. Many times, this will lock you into a subject. For instance, if you’re preaching on the Lord's Supper, you’re not going to digress and start discussing the sermon on the mount. Having specific Scripture verses in mind will make the sermon itself go much smoother and even, in some cases, write itself.

Another thing you want to do is start the sermon off with a related personal story. Try to make it a humorous one if you can. The reason for this is because you don’t want the congregation falling asleep on you. If you plunk right into the theological material right off the bat, you’re going to lose a lot of your congregation before you even reach the second paragraph. Adding the human element will greatly help in keeping the parishioners interested.

Finally, you would like to keep your sermon brief. A wise and experienced pastor used to say, if you can not get your point across in below 20 minutes, then it probably wasn’t worth getting across in the first place. One way to keep your sermon brief is to make a list of bullet points that you would like to cover in the sermon itself. Try to keep them to 3 or 4 points in total. If you limit each one to about 3-5 minutes talking time, you should have no difficulty limiting your sermon to about 20 minutes.

There are other things you will be able to do to improve your sermon, but we’ll cover those in future articles. Meanwhile, if you conform to the tips I’ve outlined above, getting a specific passage of scripture, starting off with a personal story, and keeping the sermon to about 20 minutes, you'll find that your sermon will come off a lot better with the congregation and they won’t end up dozing off on you.

 
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