It is Saturday night. Your week has found you spending so much time at the hospital with church members you are thinking about stopping by Human Resources to pick up a paycheck. You woke up this morning with every intention to get started on your message early — yet here you sit, looking at your Bible to find a passage, or your computer screen, with a blank document staring back at you. It is too late to ask someone to fill in for you, and who would you ask? These weeks come into the lives of every pastor. But you don’t have to spend your Saturday nights preparing sermons. In fact, you will consistently preach better if you don’t. So here are some benefits of planning your preaching schedule:
1. Helps You Prepare Better and Quicker
You have seen it happen in the lives of your church members. They get overwhelmed by circumstances and can’t make good decisions. You are no different. By having a preaching schedule, you will know what you are preaching ahead of time. Having a schedule three months out, or more, will help you be on the lookout for illustrations and applications. Your brain is an amazing thing! It will work in the background, looking for things that will apply to or illustrate your message. It will also help you not shoehorn into a message that great illustration you heard this week, but rather save it for the right message that it fits.
It helps you preach more of the Bible. Think about what you do when you get into a situation where you are regularly preparing on Saturday night. Perhaps you go to a familiar … well, perhaps you dust off a previous message, hoping no one will remember. Why should they? You don’t. Maybe you put more into it, and you stick to your favorite books or passages. Or worse, you just hope inspiration hits you and you talk about sports, family, politics, evolution and how you believe the Bible is God’s Word … all in the same message … on the 10 Commandments! It is hard, Brother, to make the case that you believe the whole Bible, when you only preach out of a handful of passages or topics. If you do this, you should not wonder why your church is scripturally Illiterate.
2. Helps Others Prepare Better
I have never met a music leader who didn’t want the music to complement the message. If you don’t know what you are preaching, how can they? It helps your secretary, who is typing the order of worship in the bulletin. It helps the person who is running the multimedia, or the children’s sermon or the drama, or even special music. If you let your congregation know, they can even prepare by studying the same passage. That might help with scriptural literacy, too.
3. Allows for Greater Leadership of the Holy Spirit
I know this sounds almost counterintuitive, but wouldn’t the Holy Spirit be working overtime if you step into the pulpit with no notes and no direction? Wouldn’t being unprepared help your prayer life? Wouldn’t preparing and having notes stifle the work of the Spirit? Perhaps, but think about it this way: If you have a preaching schedule, the Holy Spirit has time to preach the sermon to you, before you preach it to the congregation. Think back through the messages that garnered the greatest response over the past year (maybe I should clarify: positive response). Have any of those messages followed a time when God was working in an obvious way in your life and you shared those experiences with your congregation? Why are those messages so effective? Because you are not preaching to the congregation at that point; you are telling your story about how God used this passage in your life recently. They connect to it because it is real to you.
Now this is not to say that you should make a schedule and never deviate from it. Built into the schedule should be Sundays that are not part of a series, or a holiday. Plan on at least one a quarter. That way, if something special comes up — or something bad — you can address that, and then return to the schedule without having to rearrange everything. Then you save that message for a time when your schedule hasn’t been interrupted. By the way, I had one message wait almost two years for that to happen.
— Hans Wunch is pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, Ware Shoals.