Sermon Outline

A few weeks ago I posted a sermon outline on my web site at www.bivocationalministries.com. Some of you have told me you used that outline for a sermon and how much you appreciated it. My plan is to post a new outline each month, and there is a new one on the site now.

I encourage you to use these outlines. You probably won't use it exactly how it is written, and you probably shouldn't. Make it your own with your own illustrations and applications. Make it fit your personality and purpose. God may open your eyes to an entire series of messages from this one outline. That would be great for sermon planning!

Speaking of sermon planning...when I was a pastor I would use the fall of the year to plan my sermons for the upcoming year. I would sit down with four sheets of legal paper and write out the dates of each Sunday of the new year. I would have two lines for each date since our church had both morning and evening services on most Sundays. In the margin I would then write in special days from the church calendar so I wouldn't forget them. At that point I was ready to start thinking about what messages I would preach on each Sunday. I enjoyed preaching series of sermons whenever possible because I believe that allows the minister to approach a subject with more depth than is possible in just a 30 minute sermon. If I determined that a subject or text would need four Sundays then I would look to see where that could fit in with the special Sundays such as Mother's Day or the Advent season so a sermon series would not hit on one of those Sundays. For many years I would preach a series on the family between Mother's Day and Father's Day, and this was often one of the more popular series of messages. In the summer I often preached through a book of the Bible or a long section such as The Sermon on the Mount. This gave our congregation a more in depth look at that book of the Bible or the section, and it made my sermon planning a lot easier. I would try to determine what I would preach each Sunday of the upcoming year. Even if some Sundays were left open in my planning I was always able to plan at least one quarter ahead.

The advantage of doing this is that you are not sitting around on Saturday night still trying to figure out what you are going to preach tomorrow. Instead of starting out each week not knowing what you will preach, you can begin your week actually preparing the message. By creating a preaching schedule you can spend more time in sermon preparation which, hopefully, will lead to better sermons. The time you spend upfront in planning a preaching schedule will be more than offset by the time you save each week in sermon preparation. It also gives you the opportunity to be on the lookout for good illustrations or applications for a text you know you will be preaching from next month. You will be surprised how often you will find items you can incorporate in your sermons simply because you are aware of your upcoming sermon topics. Saving time is a good thing for bivocational ministers and better sermons is frosting on the cake.

I know there are some who refuse to plan their sermons or even prepare a sermon in advance. There are still some who believe they are simply to pray and let the Holy Spirit guide them when they step to the platform. I have endured a few sermons that obviously had no thought go into them before they were delivered, and personally I would not want to blame the Holy Spirit for them. I believe that God can guide us in our study even better than He can guide us in our pulpits. If we believe in the omniscience of God then we can believe that He knows what our congregations need to hear from us six months from now. There is no reason we cannot believe that He can guide us in developing a sermon plan in advance.

One final thought. Sometimes a situation occurs that will cause us to change our sermon, and we need to be sensitive to that. A good example of that was 9/11. The Sunday after 9/11 I did not preach the sermon I had planned for that week. People came to church to hear if God had anything to say about that horrible tragedy. I am aware of a pastor who went ahead and preached a message he had planned six months earlier to preach on that Sunday. Members of his church told me that they would have never known 9/11 happened based on what was done at their church that Sunday. That pastor was soon asked to resign. Some things happen that must be addressed, and we should not be so locked into our preaching plan that we cannot speak to those issues when they happen.

I encourage you to begin planning your preaching at least three months in advance and see if it doesn't make you sermon preparation time more productive. Feel free to use the sermons I will share with you each month in your planning. I also hope you will share with our readers how planning has helped you or the techniques you use to create a preaching schedule.