One of the primary skills that is lacking in leadership is the ability to take a passage and to craft an expositional sermon. Don’t get me wrong—leaders and pastors craft sermons every day, but may not know how to discern the main idea of a passage, the felt need and the outline.
Many pastors suffer from not knowing what to preach on Sunday. They say things like, “I feel like I’m always saying the same stuff.” If you are able to master the process I’m about to lay out, then you don’t have to worry about original content. It makes sense, too—don’t you think that God said more than just the same applications that are being repeated? Of course he did! As you work through this process, the Bible will come to life with heart-hitting sermons.
We will break down our method into three parts: Topic, Question and Answer. Simple enough, right?
Let’s take a verse like Romans 5:8.
But God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
First we begin by trying to identify in one or two words the primary topic that is being addressed in this verse. I say primary because there are many topics that could be addressed, but there is only one primary or main topic. Try to identify this topic in one or two words.
In this case, I think the topic is Love.
Next we want to craft our question and answer using only the passage. First let’s begin with our question. What question is this verse answering? Another way to think of this could be, “What question would someone need to ask me that I would open up Romans 5 and tell them this is the answer?”
You might think this is subjective, but it’s actually not. In order for it to be objective, all of the passage needs to be answered in the text.
So if I were to say the question should be: “What does God demonstrate?” This is probably not the correct question. The answer to that question is “Love.” However, the rest of the verse isn’t being addressed by this question. We are looking for a question and answer that fully use the verse.
I would suggest the following: “How does God demonstrate his love for us?”
The answer to this question would be: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
You might think this is fairly elementary, and maybe it is. But as the passages get longer this becomes more of a challenge.
So we now have the following:
Topic: Love
Question: How does God demonstrate his love for us?
Answer: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Now let’s put the question and answer together to get the Main Idea. In this case, the main idea happens to be pretty much the verse:
God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Now let me show you what this process will help us to do. This is the magical part!
Our question will inform our felt need. My pastor describes the felt need as the itch that needs to be scratched. We need to surface the felt need at the beginning of a sermon and essentially help them to know what is the “itch" they have that we will “scratch” with our sermon.
Let’s take a look at our question: How does God demonstrate his love for us?
Why would a question like this one be asked? More than likely because someone is wanting to know the extent of the love of God or perhaps the greatness of the love of God. If someone needed to understand it back in Bible times, no doubt people need to know it today. So from the question of the passage we have discerned the felt need of the passage.
Our felt need was found in the passage, and by the same token, our outline is found in the passage.
Let’s take a look at our answer: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
There are two segments in our answer and in this case those two segments will make up the two points of our sermon.
In my first point I will talk about the depth of our sin and how offensive it is to a holy God. The Bible says we were enemies at that time. So I would talk about how the most counterintuitive thing for God to do, but the most loving, would be to move towards his enemies to reconcile.
My second point would be related to Christ dying for us. While the first action of God moving towards his people while we were his enemies is truly loving, to give his Son as an atoning sacrifice is beyond human comprehension. This is love displayed at a celestial level.
Obviously, all of these points will need to be developed as you prayerfully study God’s word and work out your outline and sermon. (To be clear, I am not suggesting that your first point Sunday morning should say: "While we were still sinners." Hopefully you get the point.) That said, this is a great way to begin your sermon outline, work out the main idea, and develop the felt need of the passage.
It is one of the greatest blessings when you come come to a passage without any idea of what your message will look like, or what the main points will be, and then as you study and follow these steps slowly, the Lord begins to bring about a powerful, impactful and compelling message that reaches your heart and the hearts of your people.