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So today at church I taught on the first part of the third chapter of First Corinthians. I’ve been doing sermons for about a dozen years now. Our church does expository teaching, going through an entire book of the Bible at a time, but when I started I did topical sermons. That was easy for me because it was similar to how I have taught about marriage and sex for decades.
Eventually, I decided to stretch myself and do whatever passage was up on the day I was scheduled to speak.
And it was very much a stretch. I mean I knew the tools, but putting together a sermon is far different from doing a study on your own. With a topical sermon, I would write an outline first, then do research which would get added to the outline, and then clean it up. That doesn’t work when you’re handed a chunk of scripture.
At first, I struggled with it. Now I have a pretty good system. I read the passage in several versions of the Bible. Then I look at commentaries and listen to a few sermons others have done the passage. Next, I do research on things I find in the passage. For today’s sermon, I studied the Roman patron system, which I knew almost nothing about, and the Greek’s love of wisdom, which I was familiar with. All of this results in pages of data which I group by idea before deciding what makes the cut and what doesn’t. Only then do I write an outline.
So what does this have to do with marriage? We tend to stick to what we know in life, including in marriage. We keep doing what we’ve always done, even when it’s not working very well. Building or maintaining a solid marriage requires us to stretch and do things we have not done before. As our lives change we need new tools and skills to keep our marriage strong. You will struggle with these new things at first, but if you keep at it you will get better and better.
Be open to the changing needs of your wife and your marriage, and be willing to do what it takes to meet those changes.
Photo by Michael DeMoya on Unsplash
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Expository preaching is very good and very important. I was very happy to read that it is done in your church, and it has made me appreciate and respect your ministry even more.
It is interesting that John Calvin used that same method of systematic preaching in the XVI century at Geneva. He would sometimes take several months, yea, even more than a whole year, to go through one book of the Bible. When he was banished from Geneva for three years, his first Sunday back in the pulpit he picked up with the next verse following his previous sermon three years before (T. H. L. Parker, John Calvin [Lion], p. 108)
So this is to say you are in good company for faithfully exposing God’s Word. May He give you grace to bless the sheep under your care, both at the local church and in your marriage ministry.
@João Armando Coelho – I think the occasional topical message has its place, but it needs to be the exception. I’d say it’s no more than 10% at our church.
Well done Paul.
We come from a church that did expository teaching in it’s messages which gives the full picture of what God is telling us on the entirety of the book. We moved to a new area of the state several years ago and found that none of the churches in our area use expository teaching and only do topical sermon “series” for their messages. In comparing how God uses these different methodologies, the conclusion in my mind is that you have pastors that “talk about God’s word”, where the congregation mostly sit and listen, and pastors that teach you about God’s, where the congregation takes a deep dive into God’s word to understand what was true about the scripture then, what is always true about scripture, and how the scripture applies to our lives now.
We, as a society are so blessed as we can get all kinds of teaching online, but God wants us to come to church not only to be fed, but to fellowship. Fortunately for us, God willing, we are moving to an area where the church does expository teaching and to attend a congregation of like mind followers of Christ.
Thanks for writing on your process of creating a sermon message and how it indeed stretches you and how it works to build a stronger marriage.
God bless.
-Steve