What Are You Going to Say?

This is one of the final steps before you preach. For some it involves a full manuscript, for others a detailed outline, and for a few odd ducks, a small note card. You need to think through how to synthesize and organize all the content you have gathered for this message. You understand the text in its details and in its context. You have built an outline that is derived from the shape of the passage. It’s time to pray for your audience and ask God to give you clarity, discernment, and creativity. You need to think through how to use the limited time you have. What percentage of your time is going to be explanation? And what percentage illustration and application?

For each point, you should be explaining, illustrating, and applying the text to your listeners. How much time you spend on each of these will vary from point to point and sermon to sermon. But just be sure that you are doing these three things: explaining, illustrating, and applying.

How will you know that you are doing them well? Ask yourself this question: are you conveying understanding well? That is the test.

In your explanation: you are telling your listeners what the text says, and why it’s written the way that it is. You are also explaining the pertinent theology the text teaches.

In your illustration: you are giving examples of what the text is teaching in order to expose greater understanding.

In your application: you are answering the question, so what? Why is this text relevant to your listeners? What are the implications of the text? How are the transcendent truths taught in this passage to be implemented in the hearts, minds and  lives of the hearers?

For each point of your sermon, you should be doing these three things. And the goal is understanding. So you must filter the details and information from your exegesis through the test of understanding—will this information really help my listeners understand the text? Or will it just make me look insightful?

After each point, you want your listeners to say, “I see that in the text. I could have seen that on my own.”

So you have to edit and cut things out of your sermon so that your listeners will have a simple message to understand.

In his Lectures, Spurgeon described how captivated George Whitefield’s hearers were when he preached:

‘…when I listen to Mr. Whitefield, I cannot even lay the keel.’ And another, a weaver, said, ‘I have often, when I have been in church, calculated how many looms the place would hold; but when I listen to that man, I forget my weaving altogether.’ You must endeavour, brethren, to make your people forget matters relating to this world by interweaving the whole of divine truth with the passing things of every day, and this you will do by a judicious use of anecdotes and illustrations.

Preach the text, simply and clearly. Explain the Bible to God’s people, show them what it means with illustrations, and expose its relevance to their Christian life.