It is about 3:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon. You are almost finished with your sermon and feeling pretty good about it. The main points have come effortlessly. The structure of the sermon has seemed to fall into place. The unique illustration you filed away has leaped up and said, "I would feel real cozy in between those paragraphs." You even call your spouse to say that you think this sermon is going to be the best you have ever prepared. Life is good.

Then 4:00 p.m. rolls around and all you have left to write is your final movement and conclusion. But you look down on the back of that receipt where you first wrote down the ideas for this sermon, and the final movement and conclusion do not look as appealing as they originally did. They don't seem to flow with the rest of the sermon. The conclusion does not have the same punch as it did on Tuesday when you relished in it while eating your lunch. Suddenly, you realize that the wind has gone from your sail, and you are farther away from your destination than you thought. You read over what you have already prepared in the hopes that as you read you will gain enough momentum to be carried over into a new idea, but nothing happens. There seems to be no way over this mountain, even though you are praying that the path will be revealed. The cursor on your computer screen keeps blinking at you, as if it were saying, "Is that all you have?"

We have all been there. For lack of a better phrase, it is called "preacher's block." It can happen at the beginning of sermon preparation with a feeling of not knowing where to start. It can happen in the middle of writing a sermon when, for instance, the first point does not flow well into the second. And it can happen at the end of sermon preparation when you have no clue how to conclude the sermon effectively. It is not a pleasant feeling. In fact, it can be downright maddening. You feel like you are stuck in a rut with no hope of getting out.

What is the remedy for preacher's block? Over the years, I have read a lot of good material and listened to wise counsel relating to this subject. After digesting all this information, I have come up with a prescription for preacher's block that has helped me. I hope it is helpful to you. Please know that this prescription is not a cure, but it can provide a way to bust through the "block" and move forward.

Take a Break and Allow Your Thoughts to Incubate

When we hit a roadblock while preparing our sermons what we tend to forget is how we usually come up with great ideas. More often than not our ideas for sermon material come when we are not thinking hard to find them. The ideas hit us while we are talking to a friend or taking a walk. And why is this? Our subconscious mind has incubated our thoughts by allowing them to grow through associating with other thoughts.

When we least expect it, our subconsciousness knocks on the door of our consciousness and says, "Look! Your thought found a friend." And so, an idea is born. But this process can only occur when we allow our thoughts to enter the subconsciousness. We must rest and put our minds to other things in order for this to happen. The great preacher Paul Scherer put it this way: "Spells of hard thinking with the mind under full steam, followed by brief periods of incubation, even of idleness, when the conscious mind is relatively unoccupied, is, I dare say, as near a formula for fertility as a [preacher] can come."1