How do I Prepare an Expositional Sermon?
Planning and Preparation
Cooking the Food - Exegetical Simmering
- Exegesis is simply drawing meaning out of a text. The three steps are observe, interpret, and apply. These steps will often overlap. But try to do one at a time.
- Observing the text is simply asking "What does the text say?" So here you're looking for repeated words or ideas, conjunctions, subject and object of actions, comparisons, contrasts, transitions, literary structure, verb tenses.
- In observing the text, it helps to type the passage out, print it, and then mark up the printout using different colors to highlight the different lexical, grammatical, and syntactical features of the text.
- Interpreting the text is simply asking "What does the text mean?" So here you're synthesizing your observations, discovering principles, drawing conclusions, and seeking to discover what claim the text lays on your life.
- Applying the text is simply asking "What does the text mean for me?" So here you're looking for concrete ways to obey the claim of the text on your life, or to put the principle into practice.
