"Text-Driven Preaching"

Much that passes for preaching today is at best humanistic drivel and at worst nonsense. The reason for this is that the bible is often essentially ignored while the "preaching" takes place.

If we want God's truths to permeate preaching, then we need the preaching to be driven by the biblical text. Text-Driven Preaching is a book that deals directly with this issue. The book contains eleven chapters that are separated into three main sections. These sections deal with the preacher, the preparation, and the preaching.

I bought this book for the second section (I've read enough books on the other two topics). The reason for this is that I have not found books that deal well with sermon preparation from the biblical text. This section would be beneficial for anyone to read because the principles from it apply to all sorts of biblical teaching, not preaching alone.

In particular, I wanted to read Dave Black's chapter entitled, "Exegesis and the Text-Driven Sermon." Simply put, this chapter was worth the price of the book. Black focuses on issues of historical analysis, literary analysis, textual analysis, lexical analysis, syntatical analysis, structural analysis, rhetorical analysis, tradition analysis, theological analysis, and homiletical analysis. That may sound a bit dull in this blog post, but it isn't. Rather, it's fascinating.

Black continues by walking through the above steps while focusing on Hebrews 12:1-2, finishing with a sermon title, theme, and outline.

I'll admit that I only read a few chapters of the book. They all dealt with sermon preparation.

If you are interested in how to begin with a biblical text and move to a teaching/preaching outline, then Black's chapter will be a big help to you. If you don't want to spend the money just to read one or a couple of chapters, then at least try to find it in your local library.

Order it here.