How to Begin to Preach

First of all, I am a Lutheran pastor which means I have been trained to preach on the scriptures, and not topics for the most part. So, I will talk about how one goes about preaching from a certain Bible verse.

I will discus in general now and hopefully in the next months go through how I would do this for a specific verse.

After you have read the Bible verse, you need to see in which setting this verse took place. Luther referred to this as the "Sitz im Leben" or the historic context of the verse. This is important so the preacher gets a feel about the history behind the verse. For example, if the Bible verse contained some mention about women, one would have to look at how women were treated in the Bible.

I find that Barclay's commentaries do a very find job a layout the ground work behind the verse. Sometimes he goes to far in explaining how miracles happen, but for the most part reading him first can give one a good insight in the culture of the day. This whole process is called exegesis, or studying the scripture. One of my pastor friends called this process, "learning to live the scripture" or another said, "it is taking the scripture into your whole being."

The next step for me is to do use a gospel parallel, if it is a verse found in the gospels, to see if the story was found in any other gospel and how it differed from the one I was studying. I do believe in the theory that Mark was the first gospel written, and that in one form or another, Mark can be found in Matthew and Luke. I want to see how the different authors viewed the same story.

Then, though my Greek is not the best, I would do a word study on key or important words in the Bible verses. During this process, I would refer to different English translations, to see how these words differ or are the same.

This whole process could take several hours. I believe that preaching needs to be true to the verse. Preaching is not taking a subject and making a Bible verse fit it. Preaching is making that verse or verses come alive for the hearing, but first it must come alive for me.

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