Someone Will Pay the Price

Someone will pay the price for your sermon. Either you pay the price in preparation or the people will pay the price on Sunday. Here’s a couple things I do to ‘pay the price’ so the people of New Day don’t have to:

1. If I’m teaching on divorce for example, I will look up all the verses in the Bible that relate to divorce. Then I’ll usually read a book or two on divorce. Then I’ll usually listen to a sermon or two by other preachers that have taught on divorce. This of course requires you develop a preaching calendar so you know what you’re speaking on way in advance – but I’ll cover that in another post.
2. Once I’ve compiled and organized everything I’ve learned into a helpful teaching, I preach my sermon to my staff on Thursday at 1pm (late enough in the day to give me more time to work on my sermon if it’s not quite ready, and early enough in the day to have time to make tweaks after I get feedback). After I get feedback from my staff I make tweaks.
3. I’m off on Friday and Saturday. I don’t do anything on Friday because that’s my Sabbath Day’s rest, but on Saturday I will review my message anywhere from 1-3 more times. Often, as part of my Saturday review, I will also break down each point into a blog post (I then share each post with our church via Facebook throughout the week as a way by which I can reinforce the lesson from Sunday).
4. On Sunday morning I’m up between 4:30am and 5am. This gives me time to review the message two more times before I head to the church for setup at 7:30am. This is also when I type up the outline of my message (this is what I actually preach from). After we pray together I head upstairs to review my message one final time while the staff and New Day Crew work together to set everything up.

You shouldn’t practice your sermon on your people! 🙂 My method of preparation ensures the message is practiced, at a minimum, six times (1x on Thursday, 2x on Saturday, 3x on Sunday). There is nothing worse than listening to someone who is staring at their notes the whole time, but with as much review as I’ve just mentioned, you won’t have to. Again, someone will pay the price for the sermon. Either you pay the price in preparation or the people will pay the price on Sunday.