Many sermons today lack structure. They are like a rambling conversation, dense with content, but lacking clarity or impact. Often preachers make this error: they mistake exegesis for exposition. Exegesis is what you do in your study; exposition is what you do in the pulpit. Your Greek work, sub points, and multiple commentary footnotes are like underwear: they are there for support, but no one needs to see them.
What follows is a suggested structure that can help any expositor put together a compelling sermon.
Sometimes at an airport the airplane is too far for the passengers to get to on foot, so they must take a shuttle to the runway. Your listeners may still be thinking about their busy week, so they might need help getting into the text. An opening illustration can be the shuttle that takes them where you want them to go. This can be any brief anecdote or story that arrests attention, proposes a problem that requires a solution, or in some way gives the listener a reason to want to hear the sermon. This illustration shouldn’t be too long. The quicker this opener can grab people’s attention and get to the text, the better.
After the illustration, the context should be given. This may simply remind people of the last week’s sermon, and how it relates to this week’s. Or it can set the historical, literary, and theological setting for the text at hand. It should also be brief. Its there to help your listeners prepare for the beginning of the sermon.
Once I have prepared a sermon, my wife knows not to ask me about it unless she wants the whole message. I refer to a finished sermon as having “one in the chamber.” It’s like a .45 caliber bullet loaded from the magazine of the Bible into the barrel of my mind. When people ask me what my sermon is about this coming week, their question triggers the firing pin in my brain. I start explaining the overall point but end up preaching the whole sermon in miniature. This happens when I haven’t identified a clear proposition.
The proposition is the single sentence which encapsulates the sermon’s essence. This is the nutshell where the sermon resides. It helps the listener know beforehand what is being served for dinner, and what they will get out of it. It should include how many points there are and what they collectively cover, but without exposing the actual points. The proposition should also supply the purpose or target of the sermon.
The format will usually look something like this: “Three aspects/questions/points of this doctrine/account/instruction so that you will repent/understand/appreciate something.” A more concrete example is “Three aspects of Christ’s deity seen in his healing ministry so that you will believe Jesus is the Son of God.” Or “Six characteristics of true repentance so that you will know if your repentance is genuine.”
The statement is enough to convey the purpose and substance of the sermon without punching in the launch codes and sermonizing a congregant who was just making conversation.
Of course, the proposition is not simply a marketing sound bite for Sunday. Crafting a proposition statement forces the preacher to articulate his structure. It also provides the listener with a roadmap of where the sermon will lead. When a preacher omits this step, he probably doesn’t have a cohesive structure. That’s a fancy way of saying he doesn’t know where his sermon is going. If he has a proposition, but neglects to mention it to his listeners, the structure that’s so clear in his mind is a mystery to his hearers. The proposition allows them to pace themselves, it helps with attention spans, and gives the audience confidence that the preacher knows where he is leading them.
Imagine as a kid that your dad loaded the family into the car and started driving without telling you how long this road trip would be or where you were headed. Every time he pulled over at a rest stop his family may think they have arrived, only to be frustrated by the next leg of the journey. No preacher wants his audience thinking, “Are we there yet?”
After introducing the sermon, stating the proposition, reading the passage, setting the context in the listener’s mind and introducing the outline, you need to make a point. This is where you explain the passage, what it meant to the original audience, which is what it still means today.
I love the title of John Stott’s masterpiece on preaching, Between Two Worlds. Stott describes the role of the preacher as one who needs to bridge the gap between the ancient world of the biblical text’s setting and meaning, with the contemporary world of the listener’s pews. The preacher stands between these two worlds and acts as the bridge, transporting his congregants back to the foreign, antiquarian time of the Bible and bringing the Bible into their own stressful, techno-centric habitation.
This part of the sermon is where you display all work you put in preparing that week. Word studies, historical background, theological explanations, and syntactical exegesis all make you the expert travel guide who helps the curious visitors appreciate the grandeur of what they are seeing in the text. Your job is to translate strange words, interpret foreign concepts, and draw attention to subtle details that your hearers do not have time or training to notice on their own. This is where the full-time, theologically trained preacher justifies his salary. If a sermon fails to provide more insight into God’s Word than is readily apparent to anyone toting a decent study Bible, the preacher is being redundant, or at least overpaid.
This is the part where you prove what you have been saying in the previous part. Perhaps you touched on a doctrine that needs explaining. Or maybe you need to further explain something for the sake of new believers in the crowd. For example, if you said “God is not concerned about numbers in your church but your faithfulness to the message” you can bulk that point up by quoting 1 Corinthians 4:2, “It is required of a steward that he be found faithful,” and by referring to the prophet Jeremiah, who was faithful, even though he had no converts.
You must prove the point you make, not by statistics or anecdotes, but by cross references, word studies, grammatical and syntactical arguments, theological reasoning, etc. This is the place to include quotations by other trusted people if you would like, but a quote does not prove anything. Too many preachers tell a story from their life or history which illustrates the truth, but fails to prove it. Experience does not prove anything. Only Scripture can prove your point.
As a believer I am not required to be gullible or believe anything except God’s word. Of course anecdotes, stories, and other word pictures have their place, secondary to the proof, but not instead of it.
Sometimes after I preach, well-meaning people wanting to encourage me will say something like “I loved the story about the dog,” or “I also have a dog.” I usually answer by asking “What truth was that story illustrating?” When they look confused, as if to say “There was a point to that story?” I take the opportunity to re-preach the point without the illustration. Then I go home and pout. Well, just about. If people remember the illustration, but not the truth it was illustrating, I have failed. I have inadvertently created people who come home from the aquarium talking only of the clean glass of the giant fish tank, and not the fascinating creatures within.
The illustration exists to shed light on the point, to help the listener understand and remember the point. Illustrative language is the Velcro onto which the truth needs to be stuck. Every point you make should be phrased in a way that attaches it to a picture. Some people hear the word “illustration” and think “story.” But telling a story or sharing an anecdote is only one of many ways to paint a picture in the mind. A simple turn of phrase can inject pictures into the stream of truth. In fact, the pitfall of stories is that unless the truth it is illustrating is more impressive than the illustration, people will remember only the story and not the lesson. You need to work hard to link the word picture to the truth you want fixed in their minds. Do not judge your success by how rapt their attention is, how many laughs or tears you count, or that people are talking about the story afterwards. Judge your success by how effective you were at helping people understand the point of the text.
In a tennis match, no one notices an effective ball boy; he just gets the job done. If a story takes attention away from the truth, it may be a good story, but a poor illustration. The pulpit is not the place to tell good stories, it is the place to illustrate great truths.
In his book Preaching to Change Lives, Michael Fabarez makes a solid case that the main preaching points in the sermon outline should be imperatives, i.e. commands/instructions. He uses the the Ten Commandments as an example. They are not phrased as propositions, “Stealing is sin, murder is sin,” but rather “Do not steal, do not murder.”
The biblical purpose of teaching is so that people will change. James instructs that Christians “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22). A preacher is not preaching to make hearers of the word, but practitioners. He should package his sermon in a way that tells people what to do.
God does not supply tasty tidbits to satisfy our appetite for trivia. He tells us what we need to know to repent of sin, live godly lives, and spread his glory. All Scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16). Every lesson needs to be aimed at changing lives, not puffing up theorists with pride. You need to aim your arrows at the heart, not just shoot the breeze.
Add Structure to Your Sermon Part 2 by Clint Archer
