Improve Your Preaching By Asking the Right Questions
We’re just a few weeks away from our district’s annual Celebrate Life competition, when Nazarene teens from across Northeastern Indiana descend on a middle school campus in Huntington to compete in a wide variety of talent and athletic categories. Everyone has fun. Those who excel qualify to advance to the regional level at Olivet Nazarene University in May.
Due to @aaronscottallen’s success last year in the Bible Exposition category, I have some teens who have expressed some interest in giving it a try this year. Bible Exposition is essentially a ten minute expository sermon. By rule, it is not topical, but textual. There’s no choosing a topic, coming up with some illustrations and then cherry-picking a handful of prooftexts to make the outline seem Biblical. This is my kind of preaching. Choosing a text, sitting down in the middle of it, and there staying until the small voice of God says “Comfort my people…speak tenderly to Jerusalem.”
To help them get a start on interpreting their passages I’ve compiled a list of questions I typically think through in conversation with a text before I head to the bookshelf or the library looking for answers. These questions help me know what insights I’m looking for from these other commentaries, and they also help me know the areas in which I need to push back against some of the popular interpretations or perhaps dig a little deeper.
Here they are:
