How to Prepare an Expository Sermon

Expository preaching, briefly — and how it differs from topical

An expository sermon takes a unit of Scripture and preaches what that unit says, in something like the order it says it, toward the purpose the author had in saying it. The passage supplies the points. The passage supplies the emphasis. If the text spends four verses on one thing and half a verse on another, the sermon should feel that proportion.

A topical sermon starts from the other end: a subject — anxiety, giving, marriage — and gathers texts that speak to it. Topical preaching is not dishonest by nature, and every faithful preacher does it sometimes. The difference is who chooses the subject. In topical preaching you do. In expository preaching the text does, week after week, including the weeks it chooses a subject you would have avoided. That is most of the argument for it: over a few years, a congregation fed expositionally hears things you would never have thought to say.

Two practical notes people ask about first.

• Preach units of thought, not verse counts. A paragraph, a parable, a psalm, an argument in Paul that runs eleven verses and cannot be split at eight. Find where the thought begins and ends, and preach that.
• Length is a local question. Thirty to forty minutes is common for expository preaching, because carrying a congregation through a text takes time. But a tight twenty-five beats a shapeless forty-five, and your people's actual attention is a fact about your church, not a failure of theirs.

On choosing a book: alternate long and short, Old Testament and New. Follow a fourteen-week run through a Gospel with five weeks in Ruth. Preach a book you have questions about rather than one you have answers about — your congregation can tell the difference.

The six stages of expository sermon preparation

Nearly every reliable method reduces to the same six movements. The names vary. The order does not, and the order is the whole discipline — most bad sermons are not caused by bad study but by doing these out of sequence, usually by deciding what you want to say in stage one and spending stages two through five defending it.

1. The passage. Choose the text and fix its boundaries. Read it many times, in more than one translation, out loud at least once. Keep it in front of you for the rest of the week — literally in front of you, printed, marked up.
2. Observation. What does the text actually say? Repeated words, contrasts, commands, promises, questions, shifts in tense or speaker, who acts and who is acted upon. No interpreting yet. This is the stage most preachers cut short, and it is the stage that produces original sermons — not clever ones, just yours.
3. Interpretation. What did it mean to the people who first heard it? Author's intent, historical setting, place in the argument of the book, echoes of earlier Scripture. Commentaries belong here and not before.
4. Doctrine. What enduring truth does this passage teach? State it in your own words, in one sentence, in the present tense. If you cannot say it without quoting a commentary, you do not have it yet.
5. Application. What does that truth ask of this congregation, this week? Not people in general. The family in the third row. The men who have not been back since the layoffs. Only you know this.
6. Composition. Now build the sermon: outline, then manuscript, then reduction to what you will carry into the pulpit.

Stages two through five are study. Only stage six is writing. If you find yourself writing sentences on Monday, you are composing a sermon around an idea you have not earned yet.

A weekly sermon prep schedule with hours attached

Ask ten preachers how long a sermon takes and you will get ten honest answers — some are giving four hours, some are giving twenty, and both are telling the truth about their week. The number matters less than the order you spend it in. Here is one way — roughly twelve and a half hours, spread so that no single day carries the sermon.

Monday — the passage and observation (2 hours)

Read the passage ten or twelve times. Copy it out by hand; you will see things you cannot see reading. List observations without evaluating them — thirty or forty of them, most of which you will never use. Write down every question the text raises, including the ones that embarrass you. Close the books. Do not open a commentary today.

Tuesday — interpretation (3 hours)

Now work the questions. Context, structure, key words, cross-references, the place of this unit in the book. Then two or three good commentaries — a technical one, a pastoral one, and an old one. Read to be corrected, not to be supplied. Take notes in your own words; anything you copy verbatim will end up in the sermon verbatim.

Wednesday — doctrine, big idea, and outline (2 hours)

Write the big idea sentence. Rewrite it eight times. Then build the outline from the text's own movements, and check every point against the idea. Wednesday is short and it is the hinge of the week.

Thursday — composition (3 hours)

Write the body first, introduction second, conclusion last. Write fast and badly. You are not writing the sermon; you are finding out what the sermon has in it.

Friday — revision (1.5 hours)

Cut. Nearly everything you cut on Friday is something you wanted to prove you had studied. Sharpen the transitions, fix the landing, read the whole thing aloud with a timer running.

Saturday — internalizing (1 hour)

Reduce the manuscript to the notes you will actually carry. Say it through once, standing. Sleep.

Sunday — thirty quiet minutes

With the passage, not the notes. Ask for the thing you cannot prepare.

The four-hour version, for bivocational preachers

If you have a job and a family and four honest hours, do not do a shortened version of everything. Do the same path, weighted differently, in four sittings.

• Sitting one (75 min): passage and observation. Do not compress this one. It is the sitting that keeps the sermon yours.
• Sitting two (60 min): interpretation — one good commentary, read against your own questions only.
• Sitting three (45 min): big idea and outline. Nothing else.
• Sitting four (60 min): compose. Manuscript the introduction, the transitions, the idea, and the last ninety seconds. Cue the rest.

Four hours of that produces a real expository sermon. Twice as many hours in the wrong order will not.

Worked example, part one: from cold read to the big idea

Take Mark 4:35–41 — the storm on the lake. Watch the sequence run.

The passage

The unit begins at verse 35 ("On the same day, when evening had come") and ends at verse 41 with the disciples' question. Do not extend into chapter 5; the question at the end of verse 41 is where Mark wants you standing.

Observation — what the text says

• The crossing is Jesus' idea. "Let us cross over to the other side." They are in the storm because they obeyed.
• The word great appears three times: a great windstorm, a great calm, and — literally — they feared a great fear.
• Jesus is asleep. Mark bothers to tell us there was a pillow.
• Three questions carry the passage. Theirs: "Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?" His: "Why are you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith?" Theirs again: "Who can this be, that even the wind and the sea obey Him!"
• He rebukes the wind and speaks to the sea the way He speaks to demons earlier in Mark.
• The fear increases after the danger ends. That is the strangest thing in the passage, and it is the door in.

Notice that none of that required a commentary. It required reading slowly.

Interpretation — what it meant

Mark is building a case about identity; the question "Who can this be?" is the engine of his Gospel. Behind the scene stands Psalm 107, where those who go down to the sea in ships cry out to the LORD in their trouble: "He calms the storm, so that its waves are still" (Psalm 107:29, NKJV). A first-century Jewish hearer knows who stills seas. The disciples' closing question is not confusion — it is the beginning of an answer they are not ready to say out loud. Their first question assumed Jesus' indifference; His question exposes that the real deficit was faith, not care.

Doctrine — the truth, in your words

Something like: Christ's apparent silence in our danger is not evidence that He is unconcerned; it is the occasion on which He shows us who He is.

The big idea — compressing it

Now force it to one sentence. Most preachers need several passes, and the failed passes are instructive.

• "Jesus and the disciples cross the sea, a storm comes, they panic, He calms it, and they are amazed." — That is a summary, not an idea. Summaries have no verb that does anything to the hearer.
• "Jesus has power over nature." — True, and it is a topic, not this text's idea. It drops the sleeping, the accusation, the rebuke of the disciples, and the growing fear. If your idea survives when you delete half the passage, it is not the passage's idea.
• "The storm did not endanger the disciples; it exposed how little they knew the One in the boat with them." — Now it accounts for the strange ending.

A useful test: state your idea as a question the passage answers, plus the answer. Question: what does the storm actually do to the disciples? Answer: it exposes how small their Christ is — and He answers that, not just the weather.

Worked example, part two: outline to manuscript

The outline

Build the points out of the text's own movements. This narrative has four, so the sermon has four — the number of points is a fact about the passage, not a convention. Three is common because paragraphs often have three moves, not because three is holy.

1. The storm found them exactly where obedience put them (vv. 35–37). He said cross over. They crossed. The wind came anyway.
2. Their question revealed what they actually feared (v. 38). Not "save us" — "do You not care." Under the panic is an accusation.
3. His word silenced the sea, and then it searched them (vv. 39–40). He deals with the wind in a sentence and with their hearts in a question.
4. The calm left them with a larger question than the storm did (v. 41). Safety was never the point. Identity was.

Then check each point against the big idea and cut what does not serve it. A fifth point on first-century boat construction — however interesting Tuesday made it — does not serve it.

Naming the application

This is the stage no book and no software can do for you, because it depends on knowing a specific room. If your congregation has spent eighteen months in something hard — a closing plant, a church split, a season of funerals — the application is not "trust God in storms." It is nearer to: you have been praying the disciples' prayer, and you have been praying it as an accusation, and Christ is not offended by it — but He intends to answer a different question than the one you asked. Say who. Say when. Say what it costs.

The numbers: outline to manuscript

Most preachers deliver somewhere between 110 and 130 words a minute. So a 35-minute sermon runs roughly 3,800 to 4,500 words; 25 minutes runs about 2,800 to 3,200. Write to that, and time yourself reading aloud rather than trusting the word count — you slow down where it matters.

You do not need to manuscript everything, but manuscript these:

• The first sixty to ninety seconds, verbatim. Nerves cost you your opening more than anything else.
• The big idea sentence, word for word, and say it word for word each time it returns.
• Every transition. Sermons come apart between points, not inside them.
• Every Scripture quotation, written out. Never paraphrase from memory in the pulpit.
• The last ninety seconds. Landings that get improvised get long.

Everything else can be a cue — a phrase, an illustration's first line, a verse reference. Then reduce the manuscript to notes on Saturday: one page per point, key sentences in full, everything else in fragments large enough to read at arm's length.

Two manuscript paragraphs

There is a kind of fear that only shows up after you have done everything right. They were on that lake because He told them to get on that lake. This was not presumption and it was not a detour — it was obedience, and obedience sailed them straight into a storm that filled the boat. Some of you know that water. You did the faithful thing. You told the truth, you kept the vow, you stayed. And the wind came anyway, and it has not stopped, and somewhere in the last few months a question has been forming in you that you have not said out loud.

They asked, "Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?" — and by the time the water went flat they were not asking whether He cared. They were asking who He was. That is what this passage does. It will not promise you calm water. It promises you something better and harder: that the One asleep in your boat is larger than the thing you are afraid of, and that He is willing to let the storm go on long enough for you to find that out. Do not waste the storm asking whether He cares. He has answered that. Ask the question the calm left them with — who can this be? — and then go find out.

When the text resists you

Some weeks the passage opens by Tuesday. Some weeks it does not open at all. That is not usually a spiritual failure; it is usually a diagnosable one.

The passage has no obvious structure

Common in narrative and in the Psalms. Stop looking for outline points and look for movement instead — where does something change? Change of speaker, change of place, change of emotion, change of verb tense. Mark the changes and you have your points.

You are preaching the wrong genre with the wrong tools

Propositional outlining works on Paul and fails on Job. A narrative wants tension, delay, and reversal. A psalm wants to be felt in the order it moves. Proverbs resist being systematized. If the text feels flat under your method, suspect the method.

The big idea will not compress

Almost always one of two things: your unit is too large — you have taken two paragraphs and there really are two ideas — or you are trying to protect a point you like that the text does not actually make. Cut the unit in half and try again, or ask which clause of your sentence you are unwilling to delete, and why.

You disagree with the passage, or it frightens you

Preach it anyway, and say so — briefly, without theater. "I will tell you plainly that this text has been hard for me this week." A congregation trusts a preacher who has wrestled more than one who has never needed to. What you must not do is soften it into something you find comfortable and then preach that.

You have preached this text before

Do not reread your old sermon until Thursday. Work the passage cold, all the way to the big idea, then compare. You will find you are a different preacher preaching to a different church, and the overlap is usually smaller than you feared.

It is Saturday and you have nothing

Triage, in this order. One hour: read the passage twenty times and write ten observations. Thirty minutes: one commentary, on your questions only. Twenty minutes: one sentence — the big idea — no matter how plain. Thirty minutes: three or four movements from the text. Ninety minutes: manuscript the introduction, the idea, the transitions, the landing; cue the rest. Then stop and go to bed. A plain sermon on the real idea of the text will feed people. A brilliant one on nothing will not.

Common mistakes in expository sermon preparation

These five account for most weak expository preaching, and none of them come from laziness. They come from working hard in the wrong direction.

• The commentary dump. Running verse by verse through everything you learned, with no controlling idea. It feels responsible — you are only saying true things about the text — but the congregation cannot carry home a running commentary. Ask of every paragraph you write: what is this doing for the idea? If the answer is "it is interesting," cut it.
• Application bolted on at the end. Thirty minutes of exposition and then four minutes of "so what does this mean for us?" Application belongs in the joints — inside each movement, as the text raises it — and it belongs to the specific people in your specific room.
• Points that do not serve the idea. Alliteration is the usual culprit. A point that exists because it started with the right letter is a point the text did not ask for.
• Borrowing a commentary's outline. Commentaries outline for readers, not hearers, and their divisions are analytical rather than rhetorical. Let a commentary correct your outline; do not let it supply it.
• Deciding the sermon on Monday. The fastest way to preach the same sermon fifty-two times a year is to know what you want to say before the text has spoken. Observation exists precisely to make you slow down and be surprised.

One more, quietly: preaching someone else's sermon. Learning from other preachers is right and old — read them, borrow structures, credit illustrations. But a sermon lifted whole has skipped the part of the week where God worked on the preacher, and your people are the ones who lose that.

Tools: commentaries, languages, and where software fits

Commentaries

Three is plenty for most weeks: one technical, one pastoral, one written more than a century ago. Read them after your own observation, and read them to be corrected rather than supplied. When two good commentaries disagree, that disagreement usually marks the interpretive question your sermon needs to answer.

Greek and Hebrew

No, you do not need them to preach expositorily, and plenty of faithful expositors have preached forty years without them. What you need is the discipline the languages teach: reading slowly, noticing repetition, refusing to assume you know what a word means because you know what the English word means. Good lexical tools and a couple of careful commentaries will keep you honest. If you do have the languages, use them in the study and leave them there — a congregation needs your conclusions, not your parsing.

Software

Software cannot do any of this for you, and you should be suspicious of anything that claims it can. What it can reasonably do is hold the sequence — keep the passage in front of you, and refuse to let you jump from observation to composition. That is what KERYGMA PRO is built to do: it walks you through the same six stages this guide describes, asking at each one, and then composing a full draft out of what you wrote — your observations, your interpretation, your doctrine, your application for your people. It never writes the sermon for you, and it will not hand you someone else's outline. Your work stays private to your own account. It runs in a browser on Windows, a Mac, a Chromebook, or an iPad, and there is a Windows desktop app if you would rather have one.

If you are unconvinced that AI belongs anywhere near a study, that is a reasonable concern and it deserves a plain answer rather than a slogan. The danger is real: anything that hands a preacher finished thoughts has quietly removed the week in which the text does its work on the preacher. So the order is the point — the app asks; you answer. It does not supply your exegesis, your convictions, or your knowledge of the people you will stand in front of on Sunday. It has never met them; you have. What it holds is the sequence, and then your own words back to you in a shape you can preach. The Founding Beta is free while there are spots, and three guided sermons come with it.

The part no method covers

You can run this sequence perfectly and still stand up empty. Preparation is not a substitute for the week you spent with the text and with God, and the best hour in your schedule is often the quiet half hour on Sunday morning with the passage and nothing else. Do the work carefully. Then preach the sermon only you can preach.