Preaching Revelation – exhausting but invigorating
Posted on 28. Apr, 2009 by admin in Blog
At The Lakes we’ve just finished preaching through the book of Revelation. As a preacher it’s exhausting but invigorating! The challenge of preaching Revelation is that it is such an unfamiliar genre.
Here are the key questions I wrestled with for each passage:
- What is the passage saying?
- What other parts of the Bible are being alluded to?
- What did it mean in its first century context?
- What are the consequences for us today?
Only after finishing those steps did I feel ready to start writing the sermon. And then the challenge was to whittle back all the stuff I had been learning and reflecting on personally to something that was coherent and engaging for the congregation. It’s said that the quality of a sermon is in what’s left on the cutting room floor. I reckon that’s certainly true in Revelation. It would be so easy to make a sermon indigestible.
