Mark Dever: On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

Here is a great article / interview by C.J. Mahaney, with Mark Dever of 9 Marks Ministries: On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons.

Reading this interview reminded me of a blog I wrote on John MacArthur’s preparation routine. It often amazes me how much effort the Man Of God must go through to bring God’s Word to His people. I am so thankful for my pastor, and other men like these, who labors each week to “feed their sheep.”

Here are some highlights from this interview:

I assume that my mind is in too many ways a stagnant swamp that needs the fresh water of God’s Word constantly being poured in to understand him better, to understand myself better, to understand life better. So I want to give myself to preaching on a certain passage of Scripture. I usually don’t preach because I am looking to talk about a particular problem. This year we are going through Luke’s Gospel, and so I want to work specifically on the passage I am going to be preaching Sunday. I want to read it over and over and note things.

After a neat story of studying a fish, he says:

All of that to say: Rather than reading all the commentaries, I spend my first day in sermon preparation just reading and rereading the text and praying about it and noting things I see (any structures or questions that are answered). I find this to be the most fruitful way for me to have my soul freshly engaged by God about his Word.

And I also think of it in the context of where I’ll be preaching it—to this congregation. So I assume my exegesis should be very similar to what other people have done, but I will be looking at it with certain questions in mind from my own life, from the lives of those people in the congregation, and from the congregation as a whole.

So the most fundamental part of the sermon preparation for me is this reading and rereading of the text.

In response to C.J.’s question: “Do you do recommend pastors consult commentaries?” he says:

Yes, particularly when there are things I’m not sure what to do with—but only after I have completed all this work on the text myself. Otherwise I will just become an echo chamber for somebody’s commentary rather than talking with the commentary, as it were. When I have a text, I will put a question mark by a certain thing that I have a question about in my Word doc. I will write out my question and then I make myself answer it. Then I will type in “Answer” and insert the best answer I could think of at the time (even if it is not a very good one).

Then once I have this in mind, I try to answer all the questions I have about the text. Only then do I feel it’s safe for me to look at a commentary. Hopefully a lot of the things commentators will have thought of are some of the questions I have considered as I have been reading and rereading the text and praying over it. So I am able to have a conversation with the people who have written the commentaries, rather than just let them sort of type on my brain.

In conclusion he discusses involving his staff in his preparation as well:

They will have been reading over the text of Scripture. We will sit and talk about the Scripture. So they will ask me any questions they have. And that helps me sometimes, because they will have questions—as someone who hasn’t done all this study will have. Sometimes I’m thinking, “Well, you don’t need to explain about the Samaritans. Everybody knows.” They’ll say, “Well, no, actually I don’t know. Who are the Samaritans?”

These things are very helpful as a reality check for the preacher, I think.

But then we labor in giving our time to application where I have various categories set up, which can change from series to series. But generally for each point of my sermon I try to ask,

* What is this saying to the individual Christian? This is the category I think most evangelical preachers preach from—and only this one. But there are others.
* How does this point to Christ?
* What is this saying that is unique in salvation history that I need to articulate?
* What is this saying to the non-Christian?
* Are there any public implications?
* What is it saying to Capitol Hill Baptist Church? How should we as a church, as a congregation, be challenged, encouraged, or shaped by what we are hearing?

These categories provide me a structured meditation on the text. And it is really helpful for me to have someone else to talk through these categories with.

Wow. A lot of work, but pays off and glorifies God!