If you’re a preaching pastor, you know what it means to feel the burden and the joy of preparing and preaching a sermon every Sunday. No matter how many years we’ve done it, we can always use a little more help to do it better.

Karl Vaters talks with Austin Carty about the craft of writing and delivering a weekly sermon, based on Austin’s latest book, Some of the Words Are Theirs: The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon. Austin is the pastor of Boulevard Baptist Church, a small congregation in Anderson, SC.

Karl and Austin talk about several of the aspects that go into sermon prep, including:

• The weekly call to biblical self-reflection
• How to decide what passage to preach from
• How to hook the listeners into the essence of the message
• Setting enough time to seriously prayerfully read, study and ponder the text
• Preaching from a posture of humble conviction rather than blind certainty
• And more

Links:

• Some of the Words Are Theirs: The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon
• The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry
• Why Reading Matters for Ministry, with Austin Carty (Ep 61)
• Vanderbilt Revised Common Lectionary

Five Questions to Help You Preach a Well-balanced Sermon, with Austin Carty

One of the most important aspects in sermon prep and presentation today is making sure you know and acknowledge that there are points of view that are different from yours. But how do we recognize these points of view, while preaching the truth from God’s Word?

Austin Carty helps us negotiate this potential minefield in a short conversation with Karl Vaters, based on Austin’s new book, Some of the Words Are Theirs: The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon, by helping us ask these five questions:

1. Have I made sweeping generalizations?
2. Have I overargued my point?
3. Have I taken into account my own biases?
4. Have I considered other viable points of view?
5. Have I sufficiently justified my claims?

Links:

Some of the Words Are Theirs: The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon