Notes:
- John MacArthur knows the context of a certain Book in the Bible because he knows what's before and what's coming after.
- Building Sermons by JM (in order):
- Read enough so that it's in your head
- Repeated reading
- Meditating on the text
- Go back to the original tools - Lexicons, Greek Dictionary, etc....
- What does this actual say? You want to make sure you get it right. To get a verse wrong and misinterpret would be a bad slip up
- Read commentaries (this gives the benefit of downloading past illumination)
- "I want to be in the flow of the Spirit of men who have worked in the past."
- Fresh ways to understand the text
- Start thinking about the theology of it
- Outline + Structure
- JM starts with: Where do I want to end?
- Write out a rough draft
- As we said in film in the past and now, "Shoot more than you need, use less than you have." —> The same applies to building a sermon
- "I use my notes as landing lights." (JM says 10-20% of what he has written down)
- No introduction or conclusion statement until the sermon is finished
- Hold back that aha-moment until the end —> as a true storyteller would!!
- Problem <> Solution
- Set the hook by recoginzing the relevancy of the times - speak to people where they live and where they are; reel them into that
- Bring the audience to that ancient time, not vice versa ("tying a rope to the people and bringing them back to a past revelation" that addresses their issues)
- Sermon: "ending is different than stopping."
- When preaching: "Look at your audience without looking at individuals."
- "They need to hear me and read the Scripture."
- 3 part-conversion: congregation (them), preacher, and Bible
- "It's not that 'I heard John speak', but rather they walked away with something."
- "You want them to go where you went during the week with your sermon prep."
- "You're teaching them how to study the Bible."