Moving from Concept to Sermon: The Art of Preaching Old Testament Narrative
By Steven D. Mathewson
Jon Krakauer cleared the ice from his oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and straddled the summit of Mount Everest. It was 1:17 P.M. on May 10, 1996. Krakauer, an accomplished climber and journalist, had not slept in fifty-seven hours. He had not eaten much more than a bowl of ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&Ms in three days. Still, he had reached the top of the earth's tallest peak — 29,028 feet. In his oxygen-deprived stupor, he had no way of knowing that storm clouds forming below would turn into a vicious blizzard that would claim the lives of five fellow climbers. Yet he knew his adventure was hardly finished. In his book Into Thin Air, Krakauer describes what he felt:
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Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against long odds, after all, I had just attained a goal I'd coveted since childhood. But the summit was really only the halfway point. Any impulse I might have felt toward self-congratulation was extinguished by the overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead.1
David Breashears, the first American to scale Everest twice, concurs and offers this counsel to climbers: "Getting to the summit is the easy part; it's getting back down that's hard."2
In this respect, the adventure of preaching Old Testament narratives resembles an Everest expedition. Arriving at the exegetical summit with the author's intended meaning is the easy part. It's getting back down to deliver the goods to the congregation that's hard. When the journey from text to concept is completed, preachers may feel a rush. There's a thrill and a sense of satisfaction that accompanies understanding what the author means. But this summit is only the halfway point. A demanding journey lies ahead as the preacher moves from concept to sermon.
The difficulty of the descent from concept to sermon calls for increased fervency in prayer. Preachers should continue to saturate their labors with prayer. The summit or halfway point in the process is a good time to pause and worship God for who he is and what he has done. A careful study of the story will have yielded new or fresh insights about God's person and work that should move a preacher to praise. Then, throughout the descent, preachers will need to pray through issues such as how the story applies to a believer's life and what communication strategies will work best when preaching the story to a particular congregation. The descent from concept to sermon is no time for a preacher's prayer life to wane.
The ensuing chapters will explore the stages of sermon development as the expositor descends from concept to sermon. The next three stages may be the most difficult in the entire process because they involve a high level of thinking. In some ways, I find them harder than studying the narrative text in Hebrew. Once you know what you're doing in Hebrew, the work is fairly objective. However, these stages require synthesis — putting back together what you've taken apart in analysis — and a more abstract type of thinking. As difficult as these stages may appear, they will make the difference between a mediocre sermon and a superb one.