When I graduated from seminary, I never expected to preach sermons as much as I have. But in the past fifteen years, I’ve been called upon to preach more than a few times a year; one year, I was asked to preach once every month. Preaching with such frequency, I’m grateful for the two courses in seminary that provided me with training in many guidelines for good preaching. Often my experiences of preparing and delivering sermons have been refreshing for me alongside my normal work of lecturing in theology. I now feel comfortable as a preacher practicing the methods I learned from my training: get the truth accurately from the passage, construct ways of presenting the truth with relevant and interesting illustrations, and make it all clear for the listener to grasp.
Somewhere along the line in my learning, I missed something in preaching preparation. It is only recently that it occurred to me that this step is a vital part of sermon preparation if I hope my sermons to resonate the truth of biblical revelation, and I have found this tool to be necessary in order to bring my preaching from the level of a “Bible study” to a “sermon.” The “tool” or “method” I speak of is meditative substance. It’s likely that I was taught about this, and just missed it. (There’s actually a lot in seminary that I missed and had to re-learn later.) Keep reading
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