How to write a sermon: preparation, structure and delivery

To write a sermon, start with a passage, not a topic. Study it until you can say in one sentence what it meant to its first hearers, then say that truth again in one sentence for your congregation: the big idea. Build an outline in which every point, story and application serves that sentence. Write for listeners at about 130 to 150 words a minute, so a 20-minute sermon is roughly 2,600 to 3,000 words, and preach it out loud at least once before Sunday.

The method below follows one sermon from first reading to pulpit copy: 20 minutes on Mark 4:35–41, the storm on the lake. It suits any tradition that preaches from Scripture, and it works for a pastor's weekly sermon, a lay preacher's first time in the pulpit or a homiletics class. Where your church has its own form, such as a short homily on the day's readings, follow it. The study and the outlining are the same.

Start with the text, not the topic

A sermon that starts from a topic tends to go looking for a verse that agrees with what the preacher already meant to say. Starting from a passage reverses the order. The text sets the subject, and your job is to understand it well enough to say it again, in your own words, to people who live in a different century. Even topical sermons are stronger when each point rests on a passage read in its context rather than a verse lifted out of it.

Most sermons are one of a few types, sorted by where you start.

Choose a preaching unit

Pick a passage that holds one complete thought: a single story in the Gospels, a paragraph of an epistle, a whole psalm. Too short and you will fill the time with cross-references. Too long and you will skim. If your church follows the Revised Common Lectionary, the choice is partly made for you. It runs on a three-year cycle with four readings each Sunday (Old Testament, Psalm, Epistle and Gospel), and Year B centers on Mark. The running example is the Gospel reading for a Sunday in late June of Year B.

Study the passage before you outline it

Exegesis means drawing the meaning out of a text rather than reading your own into it. Give it more time than any other stage, and do it before you open a commentary: once you have read someone else's outline, it is hard to see anything else. Keep a document open and write down everything you notice, including the questions you can't answer yet.

• Read it many times, in more than one translation. Read it aloud at least once. Where translations differ, the original is usually difficult or rich. A literal translation and a readable one make a good pair.
• Read the neighborhood. Read the chapter before and the chapter after, and ask why the passage sits where it does.
• Name the genre. A psalm is poetry. A proverb is a general rule, not a promise. A letter answers a situation, and a story makes its point through events. Each is read differently.
• Mark what repeats and what contrasts. Writers point with repetition. Circle repeated words, questions, commands and turns such as "but," "therefore" and "immediately."
• Ask what it meant then. Who wrote it, to whom, and what would the first hearers have understood that you don't? A Bible dictionary or a good study Bible answers most of this.
• Check the original where the translation hides something. An interlinear and a lexicon show when two English words are one Greek or Hebrew word, or the reverse.
• Read commentaries last. Two or three, ideally from different traditions. Treat them as conversation partners who check your notes, not as the source of your sermon.

Find the one big idea

The big idea is the sermon in one sentence. Haddon Robinson, who taught preaching at Dallas Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell, argued in Biblical Preaching (1980) that a sermon should carry one major idea, made of a subject (what you are talking about) and a complement (what you are saying about it). Points, stories and applications develop that idea. They are not extra ideas.

Get there in two moves. First write the exegetical idea: what the passage said to its first hearers, in the past tense. Then write the big idea: the same truth said to your congregation, in the present tense. The second sentence must still be the passage's idea, not a different one that happens to be nearby.

Bryan Chapell's Christ-Centered Preaching adds a useful question at this point: what human need does the passage address that its first hearers and your congregation share? He calls it the fallen condition focus. Naming that need tells you why these people need this passage this week, and keeps the sermon from becoming a lecture on the text.

Before you outline, test the big idea:

• You can say it in one breath, without notes.
• A careful reader of this passage alone would land somewhere close.
• It says something about God, not only about us.
• A teenager could repeat it on the drive home.

Choose a structure that fits the passage

The structure is the order in which listeners meet the big idea. Some sermons state it first and then explain, prove and apply it. Others hold it back and let the congregation arrive at it. Let the genre decide: an argument in Romans wants points, and a story in Mark can be preached as a story.

Often the outline is already in the text. Mark 4:35–41 turns on three questions, so the sample outline uses them as its three points. It states the big idea early, like a deductive sermon, but the points follow the story in order. Mark also sets a great storm against a great calm, a juxtaposition the second point leans on.

Each point has the same four parts: a claim you can say without notes, the verses it comes from, an illustration and an application. The sermon outline template has a slot for each, plus the big idea, the shared need and a time budget.

Write the sermon for the ear

Some preachers take a full manuscript into the pulpit and others a single page of notes. Write the full text for your first sermons either way. It is how you find the right sentences, and it is the only reliable way to know the length. Plan at 130 to 150 words a minute, a little under conversational pace, because preaching has pauses in it.

The craft of writing a speech applies, with a few habits particular to preaching:

• Say the big idea at least three times: in the introduction, at a turn in the middle and in the close. On paper it looks repetitive. In the room it is how people take it home.
• Take people to the text. "Look at verse 38 with me." Give the reference before you read, so anyone holding a Bible can find the place.
• Write transitions in full. "They asked whether he cared. Now he asks them something." Listeners can't see your headings.
• Let illustrations show the idea. A story makes a truth visible where an explanation only states it, which is show, don't tell applied to the pulpit. One story told well beats three summarized. More on finding and testing them in sermon illustrations.
• Make application specific. "Trust God more" changes nothing on Monday. Name the places people will be: the night shift, the hospital waiting room, the message they haven't answered.
• Check and credit. Trace any story you found online before you tell it as true. If you can't, tell it as a parable or drop it. Credit borrowed outlines and lines. "As one pastor put it" is enough from the pulpit, but your notes should say who.

The opening of the sample sermon starts in medias res, inside a moment the congregation knows, and reaches the text within a minute:

A week of sermon preparation

The big idea rarely arrives in one sitting. Spreading the work over a week gives the passage time to work on you before you work on the manuscript.

1. Read and live with the text

   Early in the week, read the passage daily, aloud, in two translations. Write questions, not answers. Many preachers pray through the passage at this stage too.

2. Study it

   Work through context, genre, repetition and word checks, then read the commentaries. Finish with the exegetical idea in one sentence.

3. Write the big idea and the outline

   Name the shared need, write the big idea and the purpose, choose a structure and give each part a share of the time.

4. Draft the manuscript

   Write the body straight through, quickly, in a speaking voice. Write the introduction and the conclusion last, once you know what they open and close.

5. Cut and sharpen

   Read it aloud with a timer. If it runs long, cut a whole illustration or sub-point rather than trimming words everywhere, and check every point against the big idea.

6. Preach it once to an empty room

   Stand up and preach the whole thing. Mark every stumble and fix those sentences. Make a pulpit copy with large type, wide margins, page numbers and no sentence split across a page break, and learn the first and last lines by heart. More in how to memorize a speech.

Common sermon-writing mistakes

• Starting with the story. A great illustration looking for a text usually finds one out of context.
• Preaching your study notes. The congregation needs the result of your exegesis, not the full tour. Keep the one or two discoveries that serve the big idea and save the rest for a Bible study.
• Three sermons in one. If each point could be its own sermon, preach one and keep the others for a series.
• Application that only says "be more." More faithful, more prayerful, more generous. Say what it looks like on Tuesday.
• Ending three times. Once you say "in closing," close.
• Writing it on Saturday night. You can produce words that way, but rarely the big idea.

Writing sermons in Strokes

Strokes is a desktop editor that keeps documents as files on your own computer. A project per sermon series works well: a folder holding the study notes, outline and manuscript for each week, so the next time Mark 4 comes around in the lectionary, your notes are where you left them. Version history saves as you write, so the point you cut on Friday is one click away if Saturday's run comes in short.

Use the AI Assistant as a first listener, not a ghostwriter. Add the manuscript to a chat and ask which sentences are too long to say in one breath, where a listener might lose track of the point you're on, or whether each point serves the big idea. Select a paragraph and press ⌘K to make it easier to say aloud, then read the result aloud yourself. Keep the exegesis your own, and check any verse reference or word meaning the Assistant offers against the text: language models can state wrong things confidently. When the manuscript is final, page view with page numbers and a PDF export give you a pulpit copy to print.