Sermon writing

Let's be honest here, I've been walking around the house for quite a while now, instead of getting to work on my sermon for Sunday. Hey, I even baked muffins and picked up the living room. I would like to be all spiritual with you and tell you that every week God absolutely inspires me and I know exactly what to preach and it just flows all naturally. Truth is, doesn't happen that way for me. Some weeks it does! Most weeks, it does not. I usually have a theme or a verse or a general idea, but when it comes to putting it down on paper, I end up fighting with myself to type it out.

Which brings me to my next point. You know those people who can write 2-3 verses down and then stand in front of a church and preach for 30 minutes... how do they do it? I have a hard enough time finding things to say to people in general conversation for more than 5 minutes, never mind coming up with a whole sermon unprepared. I have been taught that a good sermon requires at least a good 8-10 hours of preparation. Some people even say that you should spend one hour per minute of speaking. (that's impossible unless sermon prep is all you do in a week!) I like to think that normally I put in quite a bit of work into my sermons and I believe that it is very important to come prepared if I am going to have the opportunity to share about God and have complete attention from people for 25 minutes week after week. However, I'd like it if I could have the same kind of depth in a sermon with the 5-20 minutes preparation it takes to write down 2-3 verses on a piece of paper.

I was talking with people yesterday about this. And, to be honest, while the girl (here's to you Melissa) who writes down 2-3 verses was explaining how easy she finds it to come up with a sermon that people remember even after a number of years, I got a little jealous. I then attempted to prove why I needed to spend more time in preparation and try to show why my sermons had to be more profound because of the crowd I was preaching to. While all of this was happening, I was fighting with myself to stop trying to prove I was better and let it go. The battle with pride is such a hard one to fight...

And so I wonder, maybe pride is one of the reasons why writing my sermons is so hard. You see, I want to write something that sounds good, that is deep, that is going to change people, that is going to inspire them to leave the place and be amazing witnesses for Christ. That is so much pressure on my shoulders for one sermon! I constantly fight with my pride when writing. I forget that it is not what I say that changes people, it is the living Word of God that changes people. Perhaps if I focused on that instead of on sounding amazing, writing would come easier. But... as I said, it's a constant battle.