#sermon presentation

                         More often than you would guess, people tell me, with droopy puppy expressions on their faces, “It must be so hard to have to preach every Sabbath,” or something similar, to console me for the grueling task I must endure every week: sermon preparation and presentation. I completely understand that perspective. Most people conjure up images of their high school or college term research paper that they had to orally present to a bunch of disinterested and coerced audience. They remember the agony of coming up with a semi-interesting topic, throwing in the requisite scholarly quotes from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, laboring over the Intro-Body-Conclusion structure, eliminating passive voice, and summing up a point that hopefully is coherent, all the while engaging the other students and the teacher enough to warrant an A (ok, a B-).

Sermon preparation and delivery can certainly resemble the above, and I’ll be the first to admit that it still does at times. The bulk of my experience, however, has been vastly different, completely due to the Holy Spirit’s beneficence. In what other profession (if we were to compare ministry with other secular activities) are you required, even paid*, to dwell deeply on the infinite subject of God’s nature, character and grace—the very topic which launched (I dare say, all of) Western philosophy? While busy work drones office employees of The Man important corporations rush off to their cages cubicles with little more than 3 minutes of Bible reading, you, as a pastor/lay church leader, are asked to spend time being inspired by the Originator of Thought, drawing lungfuls of the same breath that sparked life on this planet.

In the next few articles, I’d like to share with you ways that I have cultivated a rich and profoundly satisfying sermon preparation experience in my personal life. I don’t claim to be a preacher on par with the likes of Spurgeon, Graham, or H.M.S. Richards; I only claim that my time in sermon preparation is enriching and spiritually fulfilling, a true “perk” of my personal service to God.

*Money is not the best payment one can receive. You know this, right?

Perks of Sermon Preparation - by Pastor David Kim