Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages

by Haddon W. Robinson

The mess someone is in. Develop a problem in personal terms. How does a particular individual experience it? How does he or she actually talk about what he or she is going through? All theological questions show up in life somehow, somewhere, or they aren’t worth the bother. Start your sermon in someone’s life. But look! This personal mess is really part of something larger. The individual’s situation is really a single case of something much wider. Provide examples of where the problem shows up in different ways in people’s experience. What are the consequences this larger problem creates in ourselves or in people we know? What questions does that raise? Not only that, but the mess didn’t start with us. We are talking about something fundamental to human experience. Talk about the problem as it occurred to people throughout history and particularly to someone in the Bible. That raises a deeper question: how did anyone get into this mess? Was it deliberate? Do people stumble into it? Folks don’t go down without a struggle. What solutions have they tried to clean up the mess they were in? How did people in the Bible respond? Did the solutions work or simply make matters worse? Finally, there must be good news. There is a way out of the mess! Expose the biblical principle at work in your passage. How did it work in men or women in the Bible? Then relate the principle to the individual you introduced in your introduction. Apply it to others wrestling with the same kind of pro...

Flow of an inductive sermon