I was chatting recently with another pastor about my freakish approach to sermon writing. I do accept I am the weirdo here. I am currently writing manuscripts that will not be delivered until sometime in February. So, whilst this coming Sunday we will be preaching from Titus (though I won’t be the one preaching it), I am currently preparing sermon in 1 Corinthians which we won’t begin until several weeks into the New Year.

Before I go any further, I hasten to add my approach is not the biblically mandated one. Nobody has to do what I do. I just find it is helpful and works for me. Nevertheless, I do think there are some distinct advantges to writing your sermons as far in advance as I do. So, in no particular order, here are some of them.

Clarity

Maybe everything you write down, first time you write it, is inked with searing clarity. But I suspect more of us are like me. That is, I know exactly what I mean when I first write something down, all the logic and reasoning and argument and explanation make absolute sense to me. Only, when I read it back later, I suddenly find what was utterly clear in my mind as I wrote it no longer seems to make so much sense, isn’t nearly so clear and needs some hard editing.

The benefit of writing your sermon very far in advance is that when you come back to edit it, it is almost inevitable that the arguments and thought processes that became whatever you wrote has gone. And this is good because it means you hear those things freshly and can more helpfully assess, does this actually make as much sense as I first thought it did? If you’re anything like me, you’ll discover the answer to more of it than is comfortable is ‘not really’. Only, if you’ve written the whole thing in the days running up to the Sunday it is going to be delivered, you simply won’t have the distance between you and it to properly know.

How they hear it

Sermons are ultimately written to be heard so we must think about the people who will hear it as we write them. One of the benefits of preparing months ahead and returning to your manuscript much later – particularly if you have effectively forgotten most of it – is that your first reading of the sermon notes is largely how your people will also hear it. If things no longer make a great deal of sense to you, what chance has the person reading the passage and listening to you explain it for the first time got? If you, who spent hours writing the sermon came back to it and can’t fully make head nor tail of what you’re saying, what chance has the bloke listening for half an hour one time got? If we set the sermon aside and return to it later, not only will we often find we’re not nearly as clear as we think, we’ll get a sense of how our people will hear us too and we will cut out much of the guff.

Time

Most pastors do not always have the ability to manage the issues that come their way. By which I mean, people don’t tend to work their crises around our schedules. What is the pastor who is planning to do his sermon on Friday or Saturday to do if and when a pastoral issue crops up unexpectedly and eats up all the time he set aside to prepare? What do you do if some other emergency overtakes? Sunday always comes. Sunday is no respector of our schedule either. A sermon inevitably must be preached and your people want feeding.

If you happen to have prepared your manuscript ahead of time, such scenarios rob you only of your editing time at best. Your sermon might not be quite as polished, neat or clear as it otherwise would have been had you found the hour or two needed to edit it. But it will still essentially explain the passage and apply it to your people. Sunday will nevertheless come and you will have something credible to deliver, even if you didn’t manage to do any sermon preparation all week because of extraneous demands on your time.

Understanding

One benefit of prepping further ahead is that you tend to get more clarity on the themes and format of the book you are preaching. Sometimes, the earlier bits of a book only really become clear as we get to latter parts of the book. We sort of understand a bit better what the writer was doing at the start as we go further into what they have written.

If you prepare far in advance, I have three months worth of sermon prep ahead. Which means, the sermon I will preach on any given Sunday was written three months ago and the sermon I am preparing that week will come three months later. But that means, when I come to my edit of the sermon for Sunday, I am three months ahead in my preparation of the book overall, which means I can more easily see the argument being made later and perhaps how things earlier on function. I am convinced preparing sermons much further ahead helps us understand the earlier passages more helpfully and we can re-write those bits of our sermon as we come to deliver such as later bits have made them clearer in our mind.

So, there are four benefits I find to preparing my sermons very far in advance. If my approach doesn’t work for you, I don’t need you to write in telling me how you couldn’t possibly do that even if you want to. For one, I don’t believe you – we could all do it if we really wanted to do so – there are lots of ways and means. But more importantly, if you just don’t want to work this way, or you’re convinced there are other, better, more valuable benefits to preparing right up to Saturday night (or whenever you do it), this is not the stuff of biblical mandate. Do whatever works for you. Do whatever works to make your sermons as good as you are able to make them.

What I will say, however, is don’t let your incredulity at the thought of prepping this far ahead stop you from doing it if it would actually help make your sermons better. Your people are too important and God’s Word too valuable to let laziness or comfort stymy us. This approach might genuinely not do anything to make your sermons better, or may even make them worse. If that’s you, don’t do it, of course! But if this approach would, or could, serve to help improve your sermons, I think comfort with a preexisting approach and unwillingness to go to the hassle to get to a point of setting ourselves up to serve up the best sermons we are able dishonours the Lord and makes mugs of the people he has given us to serve. If that’s you, don’t do that.

Let’s just also be clear that many of those who insist they couldn’t work any other way, or that they need the anxiety of the deadline looming, seem oblivious to the fact that quite a lot of us can tell you left your sermon to the last minute.