The Form of the Sermon. part 2

We have come to the second half of chapter 4 in our reading of Martyn Lloyd-Jones book Preaching and Preachers concerning the form of the sermon. This is an excellent section on preparing an outline. While there is more to preaching than form, and it can be a danger to become hardened  against truth if it doesn't fall into even the preferred form, the fact is "when truth is presented in this particular way it is more easily assimilated by the people, it is easier for them to take it in, to remember it, to understand it, and to benefit from it." The form Lloyd-Jones is found by the following steps:

1. Exposition of the text
2. Finding the doctrine in the text
3. Application of the text to the hearers.

When you read a passage, you are not doing and information dump. You are not saying all the true things you can think the passage is saying. That is not a sermon. A sermon should have a theme. When you take a passage of Scripture, and expound it and then preach it, that sermon should have a point. You may say "my sermons usually have three points". Here is the key. Here is the difficulty and where most go off the rails. The "points" in a message should all be developing the main point of the message.

The conclusion of a sermon is not tacking the gospel on at the end. Rather the whole sermon should be working towards the conclusion. Read a passage of Scripture and find the meaning of the text. Next you examine it for the doctrine it is teaching us. Expound the text, get the meaning you are going to preach, have one doctrine that comes from the text, and seek to apply it. That is how you get your proposition.

Think of the proposition as being able to tell someone what your sermon was about in a text message. If it takes you 7 text messages to explain what your sermon was about, you probably didn't have a clear proposition. Work on that, think about the one thing you sermon is about. This is why some topical sermons are hard to follow. For example, they take a topic on marriage. Then there are three points about marriage from three different passages of Scripture. Each point is true and each of the points are all about marriage, but they are not related to each other in a logical flow of thought. Point one doesn't logically flow to point two and points one and two do not build to get us to point number three.

Here is an example of what NOT to do. I happened to be looking through some of my old notes recently and saw a sermon I entitled "We Must Preach Jesus" from Acts 4:14-23. The proposition was that the people of God can do nothing else but preach Jesus because we have no other message. My points were:

1. Foolish Judgment 
2. Fiery Zeal
3. Fundamental Report

I had three points, and they were even alliterated! But I dropped the ball because my third point, though true, didn't fit with proposition of my message. I had opposition to the gospel followed by a zeal for the gospel preaching, leading to the example of the apostle serving through the local church. I hold to the truth of what I said, but it didn't fit together. My sermon would have benefited from the Sesame Street game, "One of these things is not like the other." The message would have been better served to only have the first two points and then a completely separate message for the report.

In summary, your message needs to have one main proposition and that one point needs to be derived from the passage you are preaching. The proposition is what you want people to do or believe based upon the exposition of God's Word. Each of your points need to advance your proposition. If you point doesn't advance the proposition, then you need to reconsider the proposition or reconsider your point. We might think of the sermon as a table, the proposition as the table top and each of your points being the legs.

Just an aside. I have found the easiest way to do this is when I go from point one to point two, write a one sentence summary of point one, restate my proposition, and then a one sentence summary of how that leads us to point two. Writing those three sentences can be difficult, but it will be a world of help to at least clarify your thought. There are tons of ways to do this. In Romans 9, Paul teaches a line of thought and then anticipates an objection to his first point, asks the question, and that leads him to his next thought. By preaching the whole chapter, you could use Paul's questions as your transition statements and the next line of thought as your points.