Help for New Expositors: How to Find the Main Idea for Preaching (Part 1)
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Whether you call it the “main idea,” “big idea,” “propositional statement,” or something else, we are going to be looking at how to make sure you preach the main idea of a section of Scripture so that you are not preaching about an ancillary idea or worse, force your own idea upon the passage. In this post I will be walking through a process I have developed for myself. To help myself with this, I have made a worksheet. In a previous post, I shared it on this blog. You can see it and download it here: https://always-reforming.com/2014/07/24/a-simplified-sermon-preparation…
The first thing that you need to make sure you do is to be as familiar as you can be about the portion of text you are preaching from. Make sure you have included the whole pericope (pəˈrikəpē), which is the whole unit of thought—in other words, don’t choose only a few verses within a section, or half a narrative section. The pericope will be at least a full paragraph, but might be more. Don’t worry if there is too much to preach at one time. You will be able to break the section into smaller preaching units later, but for now, you need to study the whole section together as one unit. If you are able to read Greek or Hebrew, those texts will also help you see the major units of the text.
To familiarize yourself with your text, you need to begin by reading it over and over again. I’d suggest you do this in your preferred English translation for preaching. Read it over at least 25 times. As you read through, take notes about what you see, questions you have that will need to be answered, and other observations about the text. Don’t stop to do research at this point, but rather set aside these questions and observations for your study later. When you are finished reading the text repeatedly, you should almost have it memorized—or at least be very familiar with it. Why 25 times and not more or less? Although this is only my suggestion, I think that 25 times will yield more in observations and the flow of the textual outline than less readings will. More reading will be helpful, but with limited sermon preparation time and diminished return for your time investment, reading more times is a luxury many cannot afford.
After having read the chosen text over and over you need to read it in multiple English translations. Bible software makes this easy to do. Read it in the most common translations and paraphrases available—ESV, NASB, NIV, KJV, NKJV, CSB, HCSB, The Message, TNIV, etc. You only need to read each of them once, but note the places where there are significant changes or disagreement. This might clue you in to translational issues or manuscript variants that you will discover later.
The next step will not be possible for everyone. If you can, translate the passage from the original languages. If you do not know Greek or Hebrew, you can use aids and software, but please understand that this is not the same as knowing the languages—recognize that tools are helpful but they are not the same as knowing the language. I have seen some students of the Word who do not know the original languages say wrong things, even embarrassing things, while giving the impression to their congregation that they know more than they do. Since most pastors are not linguistic scholars (even those who do know Hebrew and Greek), we need a strong dose of humility in this area and to know our own limitations.
While you translate your passage, note key words, repeated words, word plays, hapax legomenon (words that occur only once in the Bible), inclusio (a type of textual “envelope”), chiastic structures, and other linguistic markers that your text might have. These are the hidden gems of the text that expositors are blessed to see firsthand. Some of these we may expose to our congregation because they are helpful to them to understand the passage, while others we may not include in our sermon but will enjoy their richness and depth for ourselves.
Next, diagram your text either from the original language or in your preferred English translation. The practice of sentence diagramming will help you to see subordinate clauses and phrases, controlling verbs, and other grammatical clues to the structure and the intended emphases of the biblical writer. By doing this, you will make sure that you are not emphasizing a minor idea when the author is emphasizing something else. If you don’t know how to diagram a text, I would highly recommend you learn how to do so. A book like Walter Kaiser’s Toward an Exegetical Theology can help and give examples. For further help, Lee Kantenwein’s book Diagrammatically Analysis is also a good place to look. Both are available to purchase from places like Amazon.com
If you have done all of the above so far, you will have deeply immersed yourself into the passage and will have becoming aware of the theme(s) of the passage you are intending to preach—textually, and theologically. You aren’t there yet and this exegetical data isn’t yet a sermon ready to preach, but you are well on your way.
My next post will pick up from here and move on to the next few steps that will help us on our way to finding the main idea of a passage before we put together our sermon and proclaim, “Thus says the Lord.”
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Reposted, with permission, from Always Reforming.
Richard Bargas Bio
Richard Bargas (BA, Biola Univ.; MDiv, DMin, The Master's Seminary) is the Executive Director of IFCA International and the Editor of the VOICE magazine. He blogs at Always Reforming.
A little much, IMO. I knew some pastor friends who were taught something similar at Grace Seminary years ago. They estimated 40 hours study per sermon. To me, this is ridiculous and unrealistic. Pastors who try to do this have time for little else, which is ultimately an escape from the people-intensive nature of ministry, family, and community and an imbalance.
I think if most pastors spent 10 hours preparing a sermon, it would be plenty deep and studied thoroughly enough. Reading it through several times, maybe listening as well. Copy and paste text on a document. Since much of Scripture is written with chiasm, find the center point if you can (Dorsey’s book here is great for the OT, but you can even search online). Then outline it based on a literal translation, roughly. Then use Rogers or other language aids, then commentaries, etc. Correct outline if warranted by languages, to which Rogers will alert you (in NT).
Now you have time to counsel, visit, plan, prep your Sunday School lesson and perhaps Sunday evening sermon/lesson, schedule service participants, attend board meetings, and the loads of administrative stuff that solo pastors have to do. And don’t forget to pray about the message and keep reading, especially in a variety of subjects, to build up what Howard Henricks called a “reservoir” or knowledge that will help you in future sermons and ministry.
"The Midrash Detective"
All of this work has already been done for us in the best commentaries. I use multiple commentaries per passage to make sure I’m not just following one guy’s ideas, but you get a very good sense of what is going on in the passage by using good commentaries.
Lately, I’ve discovered the Exegetical Summary series by SIL which alert you to issues in the text phrase by phrase, comparing the views of many commentaries. This saves a ton of time and helps me know what to look for or drill down on in the text.
As to preaching “pericopes” only - is that what the author means in his comments above? If yes, I don’t agree with that. There is far more truth to mine in a passage than that. I wouldn’t hold that as the rule for preaching (while not ignoring it either). I want to show the forest and the trees.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
That is similar to the methodology we were taught at Grace Theological Seminary back in the 70s and 80s. I don't think it took 40 hours but 20-25 is certainly realistic. It is good to do as much of the independent study as you can before consulting commentaries, but as Ed mentioned above, for the solo pastor of a small church, one had to also plan on teaching Sunday School, preaching/teaching Sunday evening, Leading a short Bible study at prayer meeting on Wednesday night, often doing a nursing home ministry, and sometimes meeting with the youth as well as counseling, etc. Always a challenge to find the right balance of time spent (including family time). Even a typical work week of 50-60 hours makes doing this difficult.
I'm with Ed here on the pitfalls of excessive academic preparation; it's a lot like the PhD who gets into management, and discovers that all those hours spent writing his dissertation actually make him worse at the job because he's gotten used to ignoring the people around him. Same basic idea with a pastor.
Going further, there are times when an excess of preparation can make one's work worse--this is also seen among academics, where the proverb I've coined is "no one gets his PhD, tenure, or big promotion by retaining the null hypothesis." That is, if the finger is on the scale in academia, it is generally on the side of the novel, which often means it is flat out false. There is very often a need for the pastor to say "that's good enough" and give a good, workmanlike sermon that addresses the basic points of the passage with a little bit of historical and linguistic context, and the pastor who over-studies things often ends up inserting his own ideas into the text--just like the one who under-studies things.
So I can't say that a pastor who is going to do a sermon and a Wednesday night lesson every week ought to be spending 25-40 hours on each. More study than some do, yes, but at times, I think the biggest need is "are you going to listen to what the text actually says?". A lot of the biggest fights out there are, really, when well-meaning people (or ill-meaning) decide that the text can't possibly mean what it says, and they spend incredible amounts of time to argue around the plain meaning.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I appreciate the commentaries, etc., but have usually found translation comparison to be a handy shortcut. But that’s assuming the student has already assimilated a lot of Bible knowledge. Scripture is its own best interpreter, so if you come to it with the context(s) front of mind, you land in a good place more quickly—then do some translation comparison to see where the uncertainties are or where your assumptions might be wrong.
By ‘contexts‘—plural—I mean the context of Scripture as a whole, the context of OT/NT, the context of genre, the context of book, the context of section/chapter/pericope, then finally the context of the sentences at hand.
My advice to young pastors: you’ll save a ton of time in sermon prep if you invest all the time you can in reading through the Bible over and over and over, and listening to top tier preachers and teachers. The power here is “synthesis.” You can eventually intuitively tie together all those contexts, and then you are half done already when you begin looking at the text you are going to preach.
Of course, if you preach one sermon a week, it’s a very different rhythm from if you are in the “small but pulpit busy” church where you might do SS, AM and PM on Sunday, and occasionally a nursing home Sunday afternoon, then some kind of midweek study. If you’re in a one-a-week groove (or even less than one a week), you have the luxury of more methodical and time consuming study.
A final word on commentaries… the old debate question is “look at them early or look at them late?” I lean toward late, because—depending on how you’re wired—looking at them early can just be overwhelming. Too much information. You are going to preach for, what, 30 to 40 minutes? And you want them listening the whole time, right? So you can only include so much “data,” and if you go too deep too soon you’re going to spend half your time deciding what to toss overboard so your sermon can actually float.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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