Message Prep and 3 Rhythms to Avoid the Agony of a Blank Page

Breaks, spreading the effort out, and intense times of study are a great way to get going, but one thing I've found as well is that a great place to start is to follow the model of the early church, and even of the New Testament era synagogues, and simply walk through the Scripture.

When one one teaches exegetically, especially if one has a broad knowledge of the Scriptures, a lot of the lesson/sermon almost writes itself as one contemplates what is already there. We might wonder whether sometimes we make our lives too difficult by overdoing topical lessons and sermons, in part because we tend to quietly insert our own views upon the Scripture where the text does not actually go.

Geiger’s advice is good all around on this topic. We’re all wired a little differently, but I have often found that study under pressure is harder work than “rabbit trail” study… so why not harvest those rabbit trails?

Agree w/Bert, though, that there’s a huge benefit to committing to a book series, then using your energy on prep rather than trying to decide what to do next.

Still, you’re going to get to the end of the series eventually, then what? This is where things like study breaks and strategic rabbit trailing for actual or potential future series is great. By the time you wrap up your current series, you already have two or three you’re excited about diving into next.

I want to add, though, that you can get a lot of the series-momentum benefits from topical series as well. Topical work takes more discipline to avoid repetitive hobby horsing and eisegesis, but it’s far, far from impossible to do it well. I really think 90% of solving that problem is embracing the truth that “I, too, could become an eisegetical hobby-horser.”

If you know you’re not immune, and know the importance of not falling into that rut, the rest is taking the trouble to listen to yourself and employ the imagination to ask “how do I sound to my listeners?” or just “how often am I hitting this subtopic in my messages?”

We become a bit blind (deaf?) to topics we feel strongly about. What feels like “not enough emphasis” can actually be “way too much emphasis.” So part of the cure/prevention is putting yourself in your listener’s shoes. What do they think they’re hearing too much?

Even if the emphasis is truly needed, there is this thing called nagging. It doesn’t work, so there’s no point in trying to get results that way.

So there is discipline to avoiding getting stuck on the topics we care a lot (too much?) about. It’s well worth the effort.

I really think study breaks and tangential studies are a help with that, too, because you have more time to reflect in a relaxed way on whether your topic variety is good.

There are times when topical works well, to be sure. If you've got a huge issue breaking out in the church, by all means address it. There's a nice balance between "go topical never" and "go topical because it allows you to ride your theological hobby horses", which is "go topical when the situation requires it." And the rub, of course, is that one can have a lot of trouble figuring out when that is.

And maybe, then, a good thing to do is after a certain preponderance of topical teaching, go back to exegetical and see if a more "line by line" exegesis of Scripture confirms you, or puts doubt on the hypothesis.

I am always thinking about what’s next. And I am always ready to take breaks. I regularly have a short series for Christmas. I usually start thinking about that in the summer and this year have my series settled. Can’t believe it, but I’ve never done the Servant passages in Isaiah so that is the plan for this year

Topical and exegetical are not really at odds with eachother.

You can teach/preach a topic and perform thorough exegesis of every passage you use (though I don’t recommend including all your exegesis in your delivery!).

You could grid the options like this…

Some other rows could be added for “topical-textual” and various other hybrids.

I guess people use a range of descriptors for “verse by verse preaching through a book of the Bible,” but “exegetical” is not the best term for it. It’s most useful as a term for where your content comes from and how you derive it.

Every “sermon shape” comes with tradeoffs. Verse-by-verse approaches (many use the term “expository”) often suffer from lack of thematic unity—so they tend to be perceived/received as a kind of random information dump. Topical messages are a bit easier to slip into “repeat favorite rant” mode, but even expository/expositional preaching is not fully immune to this.

In the end, there is no substitute for discipline on key questions like these:

• Am I fairly representing what this passage (topical: these passages) means?
• Am I overemphasizing one or two ways in which this passage (these passages) applies?
• Am I understanding my audience well enough to emphasize what they most need (in both meaning and application)?
• Am I packaging the whole message in a why that optimizes my audience’s ability to take it in?
• Am I delivering the package in a way that is similarly effective?

I was going to say, “whole books could be written,” but of course many, many have been! I’m just putting the spin of my own experience on it.