Shepherding the church. Your preaching is the most effective way you can impact your congregation. Sunday morning is when you can touch the most people at one time. You must be a good steward of your opportunity. This happens not just by how you preach and study, but also by how you plan. You can easily start following the parade, if you wait until the end of the week to choose your text for Sunday. Your preaching will become too reactionary. By planning your preaching in advance, you can strategically lead your church forward in thinking and living biblically.
Maintain doctrinal balance. In his farewell address to the Ephesian elders, Paul declared, “Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:26-27, ESV). This is how I want to end my ministry. So should you. However, this cannot happen if you are only riding your theological “hobby horses” from week to week.
Your congregation needs a consistent diet of God’s word, to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ (2 Pet. 3:18). It also needs a balanced diet. Your people need to hear Law and Gospel. They need to be taught Christian doctrine and Christian living. They need to be exposed to the various forms of literature in the Old and New Testaments. Planning your preaching helps you to guard against “vain repetition” in your preaching. It helps you to establish a strategy for declaring the whole counsel of God.
Planning corporate worship. The pastor is the worship leader of the church, whether he knows music or not. Hearing the word of God is the highest form of worship. It also feeds the other elements of worship. Our worship will go higher only as we deepen our understanding of God’s word. Everything that happens in worship—in the body-life of the church, for that matter—should be viewed as an extension of the teaching ministry of the church. Planning your preaching gives a pastor a practical tool by which to oversee corporate worship and to plan more meaningful times together in worship.
When the preaching has been planned ahead, you can assign appropriate scripture readings that support the message. Music can be selected that highlights the theme of the message. Special, creative elements—readings, videos, testimonies, bulletin inserts or follow-up commitments—can be planned for the worship services. You can decide that everything in the service one Sunday will be on prayer. Or you can cross themes, preaching on the grace of God and singing about the holiness of God. Generally, your people should know what to regularly expect from the worship service. But every now and then you should knock their socks off with something special. Developing a sermon plan can be a great catalyst to accomplish this.
Making best use of your time. One of my associate pastors acts as a research assistant for me. He does not do my study for me. But he helps me to access what I need for study. He has my preaching calendar and access to my library. Each week, he pulls the major research material and commentaries that I will need and prints them out for me. I like hard copies I can mark up and file for future reference. At this point, he stays several weeks ahead of my preaching. So when I finish preaching one sermon, I am able to pick up the next file and take it with me. Having this file always with me gives me an opportunity to take advantage of “stolen moments” to read, research and reflect on the text for my next sermon. This would not be possible if I did not plan my preaching.
