Time and the Text – The Preparation Hack That Changed My Preaching

Sunday is coming. Every preacher knows this reality. Each week, a new passage, a new sermon, and six days to finish it. There are no extensions available. In my first few years, I tried numerous ways to get ahead and make the weekly prep feel less overwhelming. My biggest problem was always time. Here’s the preaching hack that changed everything for me.

Practice – Read the Text, not Your Texts

A friend challenged me to read my sermon passage more and look at my phone less. So, I made a change to my daily habits. I printed the passage on a single piece of paper and carried it in my pocket with a pen every day during the week. Every time I looked at my phone, the next time I reached into my pocket, I had to look at the text. If you’ve ever tracked how often you take your phone out of your pocket, you know the shame of the sheer number—not to mention the screen time notification that Apple sends me inconveniently right before the Sunday gathering starts.

The challenge: look at the text as often as you look at your phone. The benefit: the passage gets ingrained in your mind and heart.

Mark Up the Passage

Around the tenth time you read the passage on a Monday morning (I wish I was joking), you start to notice things. You find repetitions and themes. I found the structure; I saw the context for the phrases I was overly familiar with. By Tuesday morning, I found that I could scribble an outline on the back. I would write applications that hit me in my daily life for others too. And it solved one major problem I didn’t know I had.

Preach the Text, not the Commentary 

Commentaries are fantastic, and I’m grateful for the number of world-class scholars I can access, but in my first years as a lead pastor, I preached the commentators’ ideas more than the text. Only one of those is the inerrant word of God given to save and to sanctify his people.

Commentaries had become a crutch for me—instead of sitting and reading the passage over and over, allowing God’s word to pierce my heart, I went to someone I trusted more than myself to get the ideas to preach.

The new practice proved productive. By looking at the passage over and over again, I had an outline of the text and my sermon by Wednesday.  After I was familiar with the passage myself, I could go to commentaries—not to figure out what’s going on in the passage, but to find answers to the more difficult questions I discovered, and to test my ideas against what experts saw. Commentaries had become a crutch for me—instead of sitting and reading the passage over and over, allowing God’s word to pierce my heart, I went to someone I trusted more than myself to get the ideas to preach. Commentators will always know more about a book than I do, but they will never know my people the way I do. Commentators can help me determine how a Greek word functions, but they can’t help me know relational dysfunctions in the pews. Commentaries can identify the idols of the audience of a New Testament letter, but they cannot identify the idols of my own heart. Use commentaries for what they can do, but never let them take the place of the passage, the Holy Spirit, or time with your people. Give the text your time and attention, more than your phone, more than a commentary, and let God get to work.

My challenge to you: for every time you look at text messages, emails, or social media on your phone, take a moment to read your text, letting the passage’s message hit your heart. Time is precious in pastoral ministry; passages hold the treasure of the knowledge of God. Give God and his word your best and watch what can happen.