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Reprinted with permission from As I See It. AISI is sent free to all who request it by writing to the editor at dkutilek@juno.com. Read Part 1.

5. Begin a chronological list of every Bible message you teach or preach, noting text (or topic), date, place, occasion and attendance (estimate this latter figure). Again, this can be kept manually or on computer (but be sure and regularly back up and keep a copy remotely if you do). This list is valuable for a number of reasons—it will keep you from giving the same message to the same audience (I’ve done that before!); negatively, it will show you what subjects you have neglected to teach or preach. I did not start to keep such a list until the early 1990s when I began going to Romania (there it proved essential, since I speak so often in so many places—in some places just once, in others hundreds of times). Your list can also be consulted when you are looking for a message topic or text—in the nature of the case, I taught the same lesson to jail inmates about once every 7-8 months when I was active in that ministry, since there was constant turnover in the jail, and many Biblical passages are ideally suited for such an audience. When I was preparing for a Bible study at the jail and was stuck for a text or topic, consulting my list brought ideas immediately to mind.

And keep on file a copy of every outline you prepare, though I will admit to having trouble deciding how to file them—in Biblical order by text? In chronological order by date? In logical order by topic? A copy under each of these orders? Because I often have trouble deciding, many of my hardcopy outlines are conserved in a jumbled stack several inches thick.