Now we have come to the point of implementing what we have written. It is now the time to get ready and preach what we learned from our study. In this chapter, we will talk about the things to prepare before preaching and the things to remember and to while preaching.
Preparing Your Sermon Manuscript

Some pastors don’t prepare sermon manuscripts. All they do is to write the outline of their sermon. However, I would still recommend that you write a sermon manuscript because if you use to write it, you can still use it for many other things such as blogging, documentation of sermons by your Church, and book writing in the future.

These manuscripts can be a good source of knowledge in the future. As for my experience, I used my manuscripts in my blogs, authored ebooks, training disciples, and even writing books. These sermon manuscripts can be useful more than you can imagine.

Being now in the modern world, the use of computer now is almost a necessity. This is why I strongly suggest that you encode your sermon manuscripts and print it if you know how to use the computer, at least for typing purposes. This will enable you to save a hard copy of the hardwork that you just did. Furthermore, the digital format of your manuscript can be used for blogging, making ebooks, and even starting a future book.

How to Prepare For More Topics

Most people struggles on what to write. After making a sermon, many of them do not know what comes next. Where are they going to get the next lesson? This a very common problem especially if a preaching student depends so much on the tools that he has. Furthermore, he will have the same problem if he just copy the work of others.

From my own experience, I began to see more things to discuss when I started not to depend on the works of others and from the tools available. I am not saying that I do not use any more tools because I do use them. But the more you work on your study, more open doors for ideas will be opened.

Using the tools is totally different from depending on it. Using the tools will enhance your knowledge of the passage that you are studying. On the other hand, depending on it is simply copying what were written in the tools that you are using and you do not even mind on meditating on it anymore. People who do this will always find it difficult making their sermon.

Now, how are we going to make more possible topics. It is always better to plan ahead of time. As I said, the more you dig, the more you learn, and more doors for topics will be opened.

There are several different kinds of Bible Study Methods that are equally effective (depending on the use and delivery). In Rick Warren’s book “12 Dynamic Bible Study Methods”, Rick Warren presented 12 nice Bible study methods. Personally, I already have tried all of them and found it very advantageous for my ministerial work.

However, since we are just trying to work on simple things, we will concentrate on simple things. I just want to assure the first timers that doing a simple Inductive Bible Study is an adventure.

Sermon Manuscripts are simply your sermon “blue print”. It is more or less your copy for your sermon outlines and content. For the purpose of our study, we will need to learn how to make a sermon manuscript which is very useful to beginners like you.

Like all other ministries, Sermons has basic elements. Usually, these elements are very necessary so that our sermons can be clearly understood by our hearers. Thus, each element plays a very important role.

Theme
This is the main topic of preaching. In some books that I have read, Topic and Theme has been defined separately. Well to be exact, they are different from each other. Theme is broader while Topic is more defined in scope.

Theme stands for the scope of the whole program of the church. Let’s say the year theme of your church is all about “The Cost of Discipleship”. Under it, we can discuss about; “What are the cost of being a disciple”, “Who are the real disciples?”, “What are the things to do in being a disciple?”, “How to become a disciple?”, “Characteristics of a good disciple”.