Scherer believed in beginning sermon preparation on Monday morning. By Tuesday at the latest the theme should be ready, summed up in two or three pointed sentences designed to arrest attention and arouse interest. As a Lutheran he knew the value of the Christian Year, and he did most of his morning preaching on the pericopes, those selections of Epistle and Gospel worked out for all the Sundays of the church year. He would leaf through the sermons he had written for the last six months to see what he had preached about, and would become aware of needs that he had not tried to meet or of truths which called for treatment. He advised that the emphasis of one's preaching should vary from week to week -- expository, doctrinal, pastoral, ethical and evangelistic.
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Scherer was in favor of allowing the structure of a sermon to show. The divisions should be two or three, rarely more. Once they have been established, their relationships and sequences clearly indicated, and the points arranged in the most telling order, the introduction and conclusion should be written. A thorough exegetical study of the text needs to be made, since there is little value in preaching on a text that is not there. He advises the preacher to go over each point, setting down any thought that comes to him, and assigning it its proper place in the scheme. There should be a reasonable balance between the various parts of the sermon, in length and content. Once the material has been organized, it should be allowed to stand for a while. Scherer began writing the sermon on Thursday morning.
Scherer was insistent on the discipline of writing. "I would not give a brass farthing, as a rule, for a preacher who does not write at least one sermon a week for the first 10 or 15 years of his ministry. It is a discipline that no man can afford to forgo. To write only the first half and leave the second to God, as one young preacher said was his habit, merely exposes you to the compliment that was paid him: 'Sir, I congratulate you indeed. Your half is unfailingly better than God's.'"
It is essential that the preacher should always keep before his mind's eye the people to whom he will speak, and say to them what is in his heart. Scherer's advice on the preacher's style may be summed up as: Say what you have to say truthfully, simply, pictorially and with clarity. He did not approve of reading the sermon in the pulpit, because this was too impersonal. After two or three hours with his manuscript on Saturday afternoon, with a hasty review on Sunday morning, he found that he could preach letter-perfect what he had written.
He believed in the creative nature of the sermon. It acts, creates, transforms. It must involve whole persons -- their intellect, emotion and will -- and provide them a confrontation with God. In preparing the sermon, the preacher needs to beware lest he get in the way of God's Word to His people. He must brood over the text, and not come to it with his own ideas only to determine that the text is expressing them. He must see what it is saying, what questions it is asking, and listen for the answers.
