3 Simple Sermon Preparation Tips

So, you want to write a sermon. It can be quite a daunting task, especially if you’ve never written one before. Where do you start? What are you going to talk about? What passages of scripture do you use? How do you tie everything up in a neat little bow? Can you even do that? After all, a lot of scripture is open to interpretation. Well, if you’re wracking your brain trying to write that sermon, these 3 simple sermon preparation tips should help.

At the top of the list of things to do is to make sure that you have a passage of scripture that you want to preach off of. A lot of times, this will lock you into a subject. For example, if you’re preaching on the Last Supper, you’re not going to stray and start talking about the sermon on the mount. Having specific bible verses in mind will make the sermon itself go a lot 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 dive right into the theological stuff 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 want to keep your sermon brief. A wise minister used to say, if you can’t get your point across in under 20 minutes, then it 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 want 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 minutes talking time, you should have no problem keeping your sermon to around 20 minutes.

There are other things you can do to improve your sermon, but we’ll cover those in future articles. In the meantime, if you follow the tips I’ve outlined above, getting a specific passage of scripture, starting off with a personal story, and keeping the sermon to about 10 minutes, you will find that your sermon will go over a lot better with the congregation and they won’t end up falling asleep on you.
Bible Lessons and Sermons