That Time Again 10.6.2022

     I begin this draft on the afternoon of October 3, 2022. That means I am working on my sermon calendar for 2023. I started selecting texts and putting together my different series for the year about two weeks ago. At this point I have drafted two whole series from the Old Testament, preparing preliminary but complete outlines for a series from the book of Ruth. The other Old Testament series consists of book sermons from the Wisdom/Devotional literature of the Hebrew Bible.

 

   Today is primarily a “work-work” day. Any big project has plain ol’ work that must be addressed so that the hermeneutical, exegetical, historical, and background reading can commence in earnest. This kind of work is not what I would call fun. It really is work.

    For example, I spent more than two hours this morning just looking for things. I’ve mentioned this before. After 40 years of preaching, I have studied many books, preached many sermons, and organized a lot of sermon calendars. During the yearly process of preparing the next year’s preaching there are times when I need to review and assess what I’ve already done with a book, and to locate where I have filed any documents, articles, PDFs, and other study materials I will need. 

    I’ve been in the full Apple ecosystem since 2012. I began preaching from an iPad and at the same time began using a Macintosh as my regular computer. The transition from PC took several years. When I came to Grayville in 2016, I got a 2012 MacBook Pro and said goodbye (mostly) to the Windows PC world. Till today.

I’m preaching from the epistle to the Philippians next year. I went through the process of dividing the book up by paragraphs for the series and dutifully planned everything in Omni Outliner. Then I went looking for materials I had used in the past. I could not find them on my Mac or any cloud storage services. So out came the HP laptop. It is long in the tooth and slow. I had upgraded it to Windows 10 but that only makes it seem slower next to the M1 Mac Mini I now use as my primary machine. After several minutes of mucking around on the hard drive, I found the folder I needed from 2010 and finally got it moved to a thumb drive. I was going to burn it to a CD, but I don’t have a CD reader on either my desktop or laptop Mac. I didn’t realize how much had changed since 2010. Files tend to be moved through cloud services or on thumb drives. Floppy disks? Are you kidding me? Those days are long, long gone. 

    It really needed to be done. The material I found was just over 75 megabytes of materials consisting of dozens of articles and monographs. I also located the actual sermons so I will be able to make a baseline comparison to what I said then and review the exegesis undergirding each of those messages. It won’t take as long to review the material as it did to find it and access it, but it will be worthwhile. 

    I will be doing tasks like that throughout the month. I have already looked through my reference manager (Zotero) to get an idea of what materials I have for my preaching in 2023. I have looked at Accordance and Logos to determine what resources I have in those two Bible programs. I have made several passes and will make several more because it is not always evident at first glance what materials might be helpful. Book titles are not always as transparent as one would like. A commentary on Mark is straightforward but there are other books that address certain topics, doctrines, trends, or difficulties that have helpful material.  I will try and have the literature sorted and laid out by the end of the month. That allows me some room for each series to determine whether I need to locate and purchase additional materials. 

    The key and this is why I’m addressing the issue now, is to do the “work-work” as efficiently as possible so that I can get on with the more important work of studying and preparing for the preaching task itself. 

    I’ve preached from an iPad since 2012. I’ve not printed paper documents in a long time. (Occasionally if I’m going to be speaking out of town I will make a paper emergency copy in case the Wi-fi does not work or some other technological glitch, otherwise—nope.)  It’s good to have everything we've said and much of what we've studied available on our phones, tablets, and computers. Don’t forget, however, we each must still study the material ourselves. Having what you need is the first step. No Artificial Intelligence can get to the heart of the matter when it comes to studying God’s Word. Automation only gets you so far.  The tools help to make the work a little more efficient, but effectiveness is measured by the quality, dynamics, and clarity of the final sermon(s). That is the real work. The work of exegeting, interpreting, applying, writing, and presenting the Word so that the congregation is inspired, grows, learns, bears fruit, and ultimately applies the Word to their world. 

    Don’t shirk the “work-work.” It is time-consuming and can be frustrating, but it is rewarding. Every wheel that you don’t reinvent and every furrow you don’t re-plow saves time to be invested in laboring in the text, praying for your people, and refining your writing. The work is worth it because of the harvest gathered and the fruit borne.