The Invaluable Role of Writing [Your Sermon] (A Guest Post)

Once you've sat with the texts and prayed and listened and researched and brainstormed and defined your grid and settled on your one message of Good News, the difficult work begins.

You must synthesize your ideas, exegesis, and knowledge of your listeners’ context into a sermon.

You must gather and connect, from first word to last, the way God entered the world through the text and is entering our world now—so your listeners see and grasp for themselves this good news.

And writing may be your most valuable tool in this effort.

On Twitter, organizational psychologist Adam Grant shared the following wisdom:

Writing is more than a vehicle for communicating ideas. It’s a tool for crystallizing ideas.

Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic. It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments.

One of the best paths to sharper thinking is frequent writing.

May I gently suggest that when writing your sermon feels hard, that’s a sign you're engaged in the important and necessary work of "crystallizing" your message.

What the Writing Struggle Reveals

As you go to write your sermon—that collection of words that will bring your listeners along for a journey that concludes at the same understanding of the Good News you now have—you'll encounter gaps. You'll discover contradictions. You'll bump up against assumptions. You'll realize the conclusions that felt inevitable in your own mind need more support or several layers of explanation to make sense in your sermon.

This is good, necessary, holy work.

Sometimes, the writing process may lead us to revise or update our message. The gap is a sign that we've misunderstood or misinterpreted something.

Sometimes, our message is confirmed, but this encounter with the page will help us better articulate how we got from biblical text to conclusion.

Surrender to this work. Embrace the process. Let yourself encounter the shortfalls of the message in your draft.

The opportunity to build trust

By engaging those places where the logic doesn't follow or the theology is fuzzy or the connections don't connect, you have the opportunity to get ever-more clear and specific about your message. 

You'll have the opportunity to define terms, offer evidence, add texture, and connect ideas so there's no confusion about how you arrived at your central idea. 

Most importantly, by wrestling through your draft to the point of absolute clarity, you'll build trust with your listener. 

Because they'll be able to see for themselves—rather than take your word for it—how you reached the conclusion you preach.

And this trust will enable them to BELIEVE the Good News you've offered. Because you've shown, beyond question, how that Good News appeared in the text, what it means, and how its implications matter to their lives now.

The work is yours, not your listener’s

I once had an English professor advise that readers (in this context, of essays or literary analysis) shouldn't have to do any work. 

They shouldn't have to suss out the connection between two ideas. They shouldn't have to guess at the reasoning. They shouldn't have to read between the lines to understand the argument.

Rather, the writer's work is to move the reader—word by word, sentence by sentence, with clear evidence, explanation, and analysis—from initial claim to conclusion.

Wrestling your message onto the page is a true gift of love and service to your listener.

All the exegesis in the world falls flat if we cannot then package the ideas into a clear and compelling message.

Let the writing be hard.

Let the drafting be messy.

Let the page provoke you to think and rethink and reconsider.

Even if you don’t use a manuscript when you preach, the process of crystallizing your message on the page will make your sermon clearer, stronger, and more compelling.

Persevere until you know what you think and your sermon says what you mean—so your listeners can encounter the life-changing Good News of your message.

What do you think? Does writing help you solidify your ideas? Where in your process do you wrestle with the message?

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This post originally appeared as a “Monday Reflection” in our
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