We must first smite and slay the extempore bias. From at least the time of Rousseau, we have been taught that that which is spontaneous is that which is honest, fresh, sincere, and untrammeled. On the other end, we have been taught that that which is prepared beforehand is stiff and insincere.
But like many very effective lies, there is an important truth here. You do want it to be fresh. But that is why you have to prepare to be fresh. You will get what you prepare to get. Freshness is no accident. When preparation results in stale messages, that is because you didn’t seal the bag right. You want fresh, then prepare for fresh. This is the discipline of a pianist practicing scales so that she can sit down and play a glorious piece “spontaneously.”
But before the message can be fresh, the man must be. Prepare the man before you prepare the message. The first issue relates to character — confess sin, grow in grace, resist temptation, feed your soul something other than spiritual Doritos.
Then there is your family, the place where the man lives and thrives . . . or not. Love your wife, spend time with her, love your children, give yourself to them. Your household is your first church, your foundational church, your probationary church. Don’t work on your sermon all week, and give your family the dregs of your time. Give yourself to your family in such a way that you have something to say to your second church.
Third, you prepare the man who will preach the Word by concerning yourself with his mind and heart. Feed that part of you that will be doing the preaching. Read, listen, grow. What constitutes the leaf mold of your mind? What is composting there? Don’t read like you were studying for a test. Read like you are covering the forest floor with half a foot of leaves. Don’t bother keeping track of them.
Then we come to the mechanics of sermon prep, remembering that the Holy Spirit doesn’t pop into existence on Sunday morning. In learning about this, don’t copy slavishly. Don’t let a tuba player teach you how to carry your snare drum. Work through this kind of thing selectively.
That said, Wednesdays are my sermon day. I try to have the outline done by late morning or early afternoon. If I have a topic or a fresh idea that has been forming in my mind, then I just do the outline. If I am preaching through a book, then the first part of the day consists of reading in the commentaries, followed by composition of the outline.
My outlines follow this general pattern: 1. Intro 2. Summary of the text, which unpacks the text in such a way that every major teaching is repeated, along with any necessary contextualization. 3. Three or so major points from the text that I want to develop or apply at greater length. 4. Conclusion and application.
This outline is almost always done by Wednesday. I then leave it to sit for a few days. I pick it up again sometime Saturday and read through it. Sunday morning I look at it again, and jot down any additional thoughts I may have in the margins. I then preach from the outline. My outlines are generally around 1,200 words, and an average sermon would be about 5,000 words.
On Sunday morning, I get up at 6 am to spend a couple hours reading in books that I have set aside for Sunday morning only. They sometimes give me something that appears in the message, but their main purpose is to frame my heart. For example, I read from Scripture, Matthew Henry’s Method for Prayer, Pilgrim’s Progress, The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney, George Herbert’s The Temple, Spenser’s The Fairie Queen, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
I also spend time composing prayers for the Lord’s Day. These are written prayers, but are just for personal use, not for use anywhere public. I open a file on my computer, and begin to write out my prayer. After a bit of work on that, I offer it to the Lord. The next week I open the same file and expand that prayer. I do this for some months, until the prayer is a couple pages long. Then I close that file, and start a new one. Everyone once in a while, I rotate through the older prayers. These are prayers for the worship service primarily.
The Spirit is with you as a minister of Christ. There is no reason that the Holy Spirit cannot bless you in the study as well as in the pulpit, if you are rightly seeking that blessing. You are His servant in both the preparation and the delivery. Why would He be with you in one place and not in the other?