Sermon Preparation Should Be Like Digging a Well

Sermon study and preparation is like digging a well.  A preacher should dig (study/pray/prep) until they hit a spring.  

How do you know when you’ve struck water?  

How do you know when you've struck water? When the Holy Spirit opens your eyes to an inspired truth/revelation/idea/focus/purpose of the message… a Spirit-revealed idea, a single laser-focused truth that has LIFE in it.  It’s a revelation that forces you out of your seat and causes you to march around shouting Glory! and Thank you, Jesus! 

When you can sit back down the sermon prep process fundamentally changes.  You go from digging and searching to capturing and containing.  You can hardly type/write fast enough.  Then draw, draw, draw the water and develop the message around that…and leave the dirt and rocks behind.   Be prepared and confident enough to throw out and remove most if not all of the dirt you’ve dug to get there.  This is where you focus all your excavation now.  It is where you begin to build a scaffold to draw the water out so your audience can also drink from the water. 

But what do you do when you’ve done a lot of digging and still not struck a spring?

There may be many reasons we dig and don’t strike water.  Distractions, time constraints, spiritual opposition, poor study and preparation habits, and a dozen other reasons.  But I have found in my own sermon prep journey the number one reason was a lack of prayer in the sermon development process.  You must always ask yourself, “How much prayer have I devoted to this sermon?”  Prayer must be integrated through the entire process, not just a “Lord help me, I’m stuck!” in times of desperation. Regardless of the time you have to prepare, 2 hours, 6 hours, 8 hours or more, you must include time for prayer in your sermon preparation. 

How much time should be devoted to prayer in sermon preparation? 

The quick answer, “As much as you can.” and “More than you are.” But for specifics, you will have to ask the Holy Spirit. It may be more for some than others.  But here is my conviction and goal: my conviction is a ratio of 1 to 4, and my goal is 2 to 4.  In other words, 25% of prep time is devoted to prayer with a goal of 50% regardless of the total time I have committed. If you think that is a lot, and I often feel the pressure to get studying, let me encourage you, the time you devote to prayer will multiply your effectiveness in study. Sometimes in prayer, he shows me where the water is before I’ve begun digging!  But that tends to be the exception rather than the rule.  Prayer and spending time in the presence of God align my thoughts and spirit with his.  It often saves me from a lot of time-waisted digging. 

Including prayer in my sermon preparation time also streamlines and shortens my sermons. I am far less tempted to include a lot of study information that does not support the main idea of the message.  We need far less three-point, five-point or more-point sermons and more one-point sermons that shoot out of us like a cannon.  That fountain-anointed one-point message may only last twenty minutes but it will have more impact than a forty-five-minute or longer five-point message. Let’s be transparent and brutally honest here, will your audience even remember one of the three or two of the five points twenty-four hours later? We often enter the pulpit with sawed-off shotguns with buckshot when laser-scoped high-powered rifles are needed. Keeping with the water well analogy, we often enter the pulpit with a half-empty squirt gun when a fire hose attached to a fire hydrant is needed.      

Here is a truth that may seem counterintuitive: the less time you have to prepare a sermon the more prep time you should devote to prayer.  This discipline and practice will greatly increase your dependence on God rather than relying on your study skills.   

Even the Rocks will cry out.

There are many water-less and power-less messages from the pulpit because 90% of the message was digging the well rather than drawing from it. The sermon delivered undigestible dirt rather than life-giving water.  May the Lord rebuke us if we ever step behind a pulpit without first having struck water in our preparation.  

Thank God by his mercy and grace he can make even the rocks to magnify his name, but give me a teaspoon of Life-giving water from the fountain of the Spirit over a wheelbarrow of rubble!