The 7 Steps to Preparing a Sermon

# The 7 Steps to Preparing a Sermon

Sermon preparation is not mysterious, but it is sequential. Most of the pain preachers describe comes from doing the steps out of order: researching before reading, structuring before knowing the claim, writing an introduction before there is anything to introduce.

Here are seven steps in the order that works, with what each one is actually for.

What are the 7 steps in preparing a sermon?

Step 1: Choose the unit of text

Not the topic. The unit.

A preaching unit is a stretch of Scripture that makes one complete move. In a narrative it is a scene; in an epistle it is an argument; in a psalm it is a whole psalm or a clear stanza group. The test is simple: can you state what this stretch does, as a unit, without borrowing from the verses on either side?

Getting this wrong is the most expensive error in the whole process, because it is invisible until Saturday. Too much text and you will skim; you will get through it, but nothing will land. Too little and you will pad, which is where the twenty-minute sermon with four minutes of content comes from.

If you preach in a series or from a lectionary, this step is partly done for you, which is one of the main practical arguments for both.

Time: 15 minutes, or 2 hours once a quarter if you plan a series in advance.

Step 2: Read the text before you read anything about it

Read the passage out loud. Read it in a second translation. Copy it by hand if you have twenty minutes. Mark the connectives (therefore, but, so that), the repetitions, the shifts in person and tense, and the things that puzzle or bother you.

The reason to do this before opening a commentary is that a commentary will answer questions you have not yet asked, and a sermon built on someone else's questions has no pulse. Your marginal notes, especially the ones that say "why does he say that?", are where the sermon usually comes from, because the congregation will trip over exactly the same places you did.

Commentaries come in at the end of this step, as a check. Use at least two, and prefer two that disagree. When you find they disagree with your reading, decide deliberately rather than defaulting.

2 Timothy 2:15 (KJV) is not a bad description of the work: "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."

Time: 90 minutes to 3 hours. This is the largest block and the one most often stolen by other steps.

Step 3: Write the one claim

One sentence. Present tense. No semicolons.

"This passage says that ____."

Then a second sentence, which is the sermon's aim rather than the passage's claim:

"So I want these people to ____."

If step three is hard, the usual cause is step one: you took too much text and it is making more than one claim. Go back and cut rather than pushing through. A sermon with two main ideas is remembered as a sermon with none.

Write both sentences at the top of the document and leave them there while you write. Anything in the sermon that does not serve one of them is a candidate for deletion in step six, no matter how good it is.

This step is the one every preaching mnemonic agrees on, whatever else they disagree about. It is the one claim the five parts of a sermon are built around, and it is the first thing to settle before the rest of the structure.

Time: 20 minutes, and it feels like the least productive twenty minutes of the week. It is the most.

Step 4: Find the structure in the text

Let the passage divide the sermon. Scenes in a narrative, stanzas in a psalm, the turns of the argument in an epistle. Two or three movements is the working range; four is rare and usually means two sermons.

Then write your transitions before you write your points. A transition is the sentence that carries a listener from movement one to movement two, and it is where sermons come apart. If you cannot write the transition, your two points are not actually related, and the structure is imposed rather than found.

Which of the four types of sermon you are preaching mostly shows up here: expository takes structure from the passage, narrative from the story's tension, topical from the logic of the subject. If you want to see the movements marked out on a passage, our Psalm 23 outline shows one way that psalm divides and why.

Time: 45 minutes.

Step 5: One illustration and one application per movement

Illustrations are windows, not decoration. The test for keeping one is whether it makes an idea visible that was invisible without it. If the point is clear already, the illustration is costing you two minutes and the congregation's attention.

Applications should be specific enough to fail. "Be more generous" cannot be obeyed or disobeyed on Tuesday. "Give away the thing you have been meaning to sell" can. Aim at what a person can actually do before next Sunday, and vary the target across the sermon: something to believe, something to stop, something to start.

A caution learned the hard way by nearly everyone: do not use other people's private lives as illustration material without permission, including your family's. The congregation notices, and the trust you spend is not recoverable.

Time: 45 minutes.

Step 6: Write it, then cut a fifth of it

Write straight through without editing. The draft will be too long, which is correct; you cannot cut what you have not written.

Then cut. Everything that does not serve one of your two sentences from step three. The second illustration on point one. The paragraph of background you enjoyed researching. The qualification defending you against an objection nobody in the room is making. The introduction's first two paragraphs, which are almost always throat-clearing.

Cutting a fifth of a finished draft feels like loss and is the step that most improves the sermon. It is also the step that most reliably gets skipped when preparation runs late, which is why the sermons written on Saturday night are long.

Time: 2 hours to write, 45 minutes to cut.

Step 7: Preach it out loud, standing, with a timer

Silent reading tells you nothing about how a sentence sounds. Stand up, speak the whole thing at pulpit volume, and time it.

You will find three things every time: sentences too long to say in one breath, a transition you cannot make without looking down, and a section that is two minutes longer than you thought. Fix all three now, in the study, where fixing is free.

Do this even if you are not memorizing anything. A rehearsed sermon delivered from notes is a different experience than an unrehearsed one, and every listener can tell the difference without being able to name it.

Time: 45 minutes for one pass, and one pass is enough.

How long does sermon prep take?

The steps above add up to roughly eight to twelve hours for a preacher working on a fresh passage. That is the honest figure for a sermon prepared carefully rather than a sermon prepared adequately.

Three qualifications, because a raw number is misleading:

It drops sharply on familiar ground. The second time through a book, step two takes a third of the time.

It is not one block. It is closer to six sittings of an hour or two, and it works better that way. The passage needs time to sit in you between sittings.

It is not the whole job. Anyone telling a solo pastor with hospital visits, a funeral and a leaking roof that they should protect twelve uninterrupted hours has not been a solo pastor. The realistic version is the week laid out below, built around interruption rather than pretending it away.

If you consistently get four hours, spend them on steps two, three and six. Reading, the claim, and cutting. Those three carry most of the sermon's quality.

What comes first, text or topic?

Text first, in nearly every case, and here is the practical reason rather than the theological one.

When the topic comes first, you have already decided the conclusion, and every passage you open is being auditioned for a role. That is the mechanism behind proof-texting, and it operates on sincere people who would never do it deliberately.

When the text comes first, the passage can still surprise you on Thursday. Nearly every preacher can name a week when the sermon they planned died mid-week because the text turned out to say something else. That is the process working.

The honest exception is the occasion. A funeral, a wedding, the Sunday after a disaster, a stewardship season: the topic is given by the situation and pretending otherwise is a pose. Even then, choose your text early and let it lead, rather than assembling verses under headings you wrote first.

When should I start next week's sermon?

Before you preach this week's.

That sounds like an efficiency trick and it is really a psychological one. The single hardest step is step one, choosing the unit of text, and doing it while your head is already in the material costs fifteen minutes instead of an hour on Monday facing a blank page.

The practical pattern most preachers converge on:

• Sunday afternoon or Monday: choose next week's text and read it once. Nothing more.
• Through the week: carry it. Read it again on a walk. The passage works on you when you are not working on it, and this is where the good lines come from.
• Midweek: the heavy block, steps two through four.
• Thursday or Friday: write and cut.
• Saturday: rehearse, and nothing else.

Choosing a series a quarter ahead extends the same benefit further: every text is chosen weeks before it is needed, and step one disappears from the weekly cycle entirely.

Finally, if you preach weekly and have never listened to yourself, listen to one. Recording your own sermon and reading it back is the cheapest feedback available to any preacher, and it makes the cutting in step six far less painful, because you can see for yourself which two minutes lost the room. If you would rather read than listen, our tool at sermon-transcription.com turns the audio into text you can mark up, and the first sermon is free. If you preach a few times a year, listening on your phone is enough and you do not need anything else.