How to Write Your First Sermon: A Step-by-Step Guide for New Preachers

# How to Write Your First Sermon

Somebody asked you to preach. Maybe it is a Sunday evening, a youth service, a nursing home chapel, or the week your pastor is away. You said yes, and now there is a date on the calendar and a blank page in front of you.

This guide walks the whole distance from that blank page to standing up and speaking. It assumes nothing except that you can read a passage of Scripture and that you care about the people who will hear you.

One encouragement before the mechanics. A first sermon does not have to be impressive. It has to be true, clear, and about twenty minutes long. That is a much lower bar than the one in your head, and clearing it well is worth more than clearing a higher bar badly.

How do I write my first sermon?

Here is the short version, and then the long one.

1. Pick a short passage you already love.
2. Read it thirty times before you read anything about it.
3. Write down, in one sentence, what the passage says.
4. Write down, in one sentence, what you want your hearers to do or believe because of it.
5. Find two or three natural divisions in the text and make those your points.
6. Add one illustration and one clear application per point, not per paragraph.
7. Write the introduction last and the conclusion second to last.
8. Read it aloud, on your feet, twice, with a timer running.

The long version is the rest of this article. Work through it in order and you will have a sermon.

Step 1: Read the passage until you are bored, then keep reading

The single most common mistake in a first sermon is going to commentaries too early. A commentary answers questions you have not asked yet, and the sermon that results is a book report.

Read the passage out loud. Read it in two translations. Copy it out by hand. Notice the connecting words: therefore, but, so that, because. Notice what repeats. Notice what surprises you or bothers you, and write those things in the margin. Those marginal notes are usually where your sermon actually lives, because the thing that surprised you will surprise your hearers too.

Only after that should you open a commentary, and then use it as a check on your reading rather than a source for it.

Step 2: Say the passage in one sentence

Homileticians call this the big idea, the proposition, or the main claim. The name does not matter. What matters is that you can finish this sentence without a comma splice:

"This passage says that..."

If you cannot say it in one sentence, you do not yet understand the passage well enough to preach it, or you have taken on too much text. Both problems are solved the same way: read more, and cut the passage down.

Step 3: Say what it should change in one sentence

Now finish a second sentence:

"So on Sunday I want these people to..."

Believe something. Repent of something. Stop being afraid of something. Thank God for something. Keep it specific. "Be a better Christian" is not an application; "call the person you have been avoiding" is.

Nehemiah 8:8 (KJV) describes the job exactly: "So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading." Read it clearly, explain what it means, make it land. Those two sentences you just wrote are steps two and three of that verse.

Step 4: Build the simplest structure that carries your idea

Do not invent a clever structure. Let the text give you one. In a narrative, the scenes are your points. In a psalm, the stanzas are. In an epistle, the argument's turns are. Two or three points is plenty for a first sermon; four is usually two sermons wearing a trench coat.

If you want the full anatomy of introduction, body, illustration, application and conclusion, the five parts of a sermon breaks each one down. And if you are not sure which overall approach you are taking, the four main types of sermons is worth ten minutes before you write.

For a first sermon, expository is the safest choice: take one passage, explain it, apply it. The text does the heavy lifting and you are far less likely to say something you will regret.

Step 5: One illustration per point, and make it small

New preachers either use no illustrations, so the sermon feels like a lecture, or they use six, so the sermon feels like a comedy set with verses attached. One per point is right.

The best illustrations for a first sermon are small and true: something that happened this week, something you watched a parent do, something ordinary that everyone in the room has also experienced. Do not tell a dramatic story about someone else's suffering to make a minor point. Do not make yourself the hero. Do not make your spouse the villain.

Step 6: Write the introduction last

You cannot introduce a sermon you have not written yet. Write the body first, then the conclusion, then go back and write an introduction whose only job is to make the congregation want to hear the body.

A good introduction does three things in ninety seconds: raises the question the passage answers, names why it matters to a person sitting in that room, and reads the text. It does not include your life story, an apology for being nervous, or a joke that has nothing to do with anything.

Step 7: Read it aloud on your feet

Silent reading lies to you. Sentences that look fine on a page collapse when spoken, and you will not find that out at the pulpit if you have not found it out in your study. Stand up, read the whole thing out loud, and time it. Then cut whatever you stumbled over. A sentence you trip on twice is a sentence to rewrite, not a sentence to practice.

How long should a first sermon be?

Twenty minutes is the number to aim for, and eighteen is better than twenty-five.

Two reasons, both practical. First, whoever invited you has a service order, and a guest who runs long is a guest who is remembered for running long. Second, a short sermon exposes weak content less than a long one does. Twenty focused minutes on one idea will be received far better than forty minutes covering everything you found.

Also expect to speak faster than you rehearse. Nerves speed most people up, so a manuscript that times at twenty-two minutes in the study often comes in at nineteen live. Build in that margin rather than fighting it. If you want to convert a draft's word count into minutes before you ever stand up, our sermon length calculator does the arithmetic, and how long should a sermon be covers the longer question of what different settings expect.

Whatever you do, do not plan to fill the time. Plan to say the thing, and sit down when it is said.

What text should a beginner preach?

Choose a passage that meets four conditions:

It is short. Eight to fifteen verses. A whole chapter is too much for a first outing unless it is a single tight narrative.

It is self-contained. You want a passage that makes sense without forty minutes of background. Narratives and psalms are friendly here. Half of a complicated argument in Romans is not.

You already love it. Warmth in the pulpit is nearly impossible to fake and nearly impossible to suppress. Preach something that has actually done something to you.

It is not a hobbyhorse. Avoid the passages that sit at the center of live disputes in that congregation. Your first sermon should not be a position paper.

Concretely, these tend to work well for a first sermon: Psalm 23, Psalm 1, Luke 15:11-24, Mark 4:35-41, John 4:1-26, Philippians 4:4-9, 1 Kings 19:1-18, and Ruth 1.

Psalm 23 is the classic first-sermon text for a reason. It is six verses, it has natural divisions, everyone in the room knows some of it, and it is deep enough that nobody outgrows it. "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1, KJV) is a whole sermon by itself. If you want to see the shape a worked outline takes on that passage, our Psalm 23 sermon outline lays out one way to divide it. Use it as a model to argue with, not a script to read.

Should I write it out word for word?

For a first sermon, yes. Write a full manuscript, then decide separately how much of it to carry into the pulpit.

Writing every word is a discipline, not a delivery method. It forces you to finish your sentences, it exposes the places where you were going to wing it, and it shows you that your third point is thin while you can still fix it.

What you take up with you is a different decision, and there are three honest options:

Full manuscript. Safest for nerves, and the option most likely to make you sound like you are reading. If you use it, mark it up: short lines, wide margins, bold on the sentences that must land, and never turn a page mid-sentence.

An outline of one page. Your points, your transitions, your Scripture references, the first line of each illustration, and the last sentence written out in full. This is where most preachers end up after a year or two.

Nothing. Do not do this for a first sermon. Preaching without notes is a skill built on top of hundreds of hours in the pulpit, and it is not what your first congregation needs from you.

Whichever you choose, write out two sentences in full and know them cold: your first sentence and your last. Those are the two moments where nerves are highest and where fumbling costs the most.

If you have preached a few times and want to build outlines faster, the sermon outline generator will rough one out from a passage and a theme, which is useful as a starting point to react against. It is not a substitute for the reading in step one, and a sermon that skips step one shows it.

The week before, and the morning of

Finish the manuscript two days early. Not because you will not fiddle with it, but because the sermon needs to sit in you for a day. The best lines usually arrive on a walk on Saturday, and they cannot arrive if you are still writing paragraph nine.

Sleep. Eat something. Get to the building early enough to stand where you will stand and see what the room feels like from there. Find out whether there is a lectern, a mic, a clock you can see, and where the light is. Small unknowns become large distractions.

And then preach it. It will not be the best sermon anyone in that room has ever heard, and it does not need to be. It needs to be a true word, delivered by someone who cared enough to prepare. That is a gift, and people know it when they receive it.

A note on recording it

Record your first sermon, even on a phone in your pocket. Not for the archive: for you. Nearly everything you would change about your preaching is audible in the first recording and invisible from the pulpit. The verbal tics, the sentence you started three times, the illustration that ran two minutes long.

Listening back is enough for most people. If you would rather read than listen, our tool at sermon-transcription.com will turn the audio into text you can mark up, which some preachers find easier for spotting patterns. It is genuinely optional for this purpose, and if you are preaching once or twice a year it is not worth the trouble. It starts to matter when you preach weekly and want the text for the church website or for your own review.

The craft is built in the reading and the rewriting, not in the tooling. Go read your passage again.