Preaching from the whole Bible

Does it matter to you if you preach from the whole of Scripture?  Should it matter?  If you preach in a tradition that emphasizes the lectionary in worship, the congregation should at least hear most of the Bible read to them every three years in worship.  Even so, there is no guarantee you preach from each portion of the scriptures.  If you are from a more free church tradition then there is a good chance that portions of scripture go completely untouched in corporate worship over the course of a congregation's life.

I've been preaching at Southland now for five years, so I decided to do an inventory of the sermons I've preached here.  I preach from the New Testament 73% of the time, from the Old Testament 27% of the time.  Over a forth of my sermons are from the gospels, Luke being my apparent favorite.  I've preached from the third gospel twice as often as any of the others.  I've spent over three months of those five years in the book of Acts.  The rest of my NT sermons are fairly evenly split between the Pauline epistles and the rest of the NT cannon.  In the OT I've spent a lot of time in Psalms.  This inventory revealed that there are 20 OT and 5 NT books I've never preached a sermon on here at Southland.  11 of those I've covered in Wednesday evening Bible Study, but that is a much smaller crowd.

I will certainly take these numbers into consideration as I plan my sermons in the future.  Do any of you keep statistics like this?  What about keeping topical statistics (Like how many sermons on forgiveness, discipleship, loneliness, etc.)?  I could see where that might be helpful.  I'd love to have your input on your record keeping and how that record planning influences your planning.

Question of the week: What are some tricks you have to find some extra time?

As is evidenced by the lack of posts last week, life caught up with me. School work combined with some extra tasks at work meant little time for the blog. That's alright, I doubt the world suffered very much for that. One thing that can suffer when extra work piles on is sermon preparation. Time spent in the study is time almost no one sees and it is tempting at times for the preacher to cut corners there by not doing enough exegetical work or not sitting with the text long enough to find a fresh word from God. What we usually end up with on those weeks is something that isn't very thought out or something rehashed that we've done before. In other words, not our best.

While we can't always predict when extra work will pile on - like when a funeral occurs. However, we do sometimes know when busy weeks are headed our way. Family vacations, conferences, etc. - these things show up on our calendar months ahead of time, usually. We can, plan our sermons in such a way as to take such heavy weeks into consideration.

One thing I will often do, if I know I have a week coming up that will prevent a lot of study time is plan to preach from a text for two or more weeks in row. I'm a one idea per sermon kind of preacher, but most texts, especially in the epistles have more than one idea in them. As a result, if I'm willing to do some very heavy lifting exegetically that first week on the whole passage, then I will be able to greatly reduce the amount of exegetical work I'll need to do over the next couple of weeks. I spend about 2/5 of my sermon preparation on exegetical work (2/5 on writing, 1/5 on delivery), so getting this part of my preparation finished ahead of time reduces the amount of time I'm spending on a sermon by 40%. That can be very helpful on a week that I know is going to be busy.

An example might be a sermon series that I did out of Hebrews 13. By exegeting the whole chapter in the first week of sermon preparation, I was able to minimize that portion of sermon work for the following three weeks - one of which I was at a conference limiting my ability to prepare.

Hebrews 13:1-2 Keep on Loving . . . the StrangerHebrews 13:1, 3 Keep on Loving . . . the PersecutedHebrews 13:1, 4 Keep on Loving . . . your SpouseHebrews 13:1, 7-8 Keep on Loving . . . Those who Taught you the Faith

To do this requires some advanced planning, but it can really help with the work load on weeks we know will be busy ones.

What are some things you do to help balance the responsibility of faithful preparation with all the other duties that a pastor faces?