Preaching Notes: Joshua Harris

It's been a while since I posted in the Preaching Notes Series that I started in the summer. Since we started sharing notes from different pastors, many of you have turned the tables on me and asked to see my notes. So that's what we're featuring here. And I hope everyone recognizes the great humility involved with posting a caricature of myself that makes me look like a monkey-boy with a massive jaw. I think artist Drew Blom is getting back at me for low wages I paid him for his work. (I didn't pay him. Thanks for volunteering, Drew!)

About My Notes
I basically preach from a manuscript, though I do my best to avoid staring at my notes. I print my notes in 18-point type so they're easy to read. And I put my notes in a three-ring binder so I can easily flip pages. (In my humble opinion, it's distracting when guys have loose pages and shuffle them front to back as they preach.)

I use a manuscript because I've found that making myself write out every word forces me to think more clearly. It also enables me to get useful feedback on my sermon from other men on our pastoral team before I preach. I do get feedback after I preach, but I much prefer it beforehand!

Because my preaching notes aren't that interesting to look at, I'm including more than just the manuscript I carry into the pulpit. I thought it might be interesting to see the "evolution" of a sermon through my preparation notes.

I prepare my sermon in several stages. While I'm reading the passage, working on the outline and consulting with commentaries I write everything by hand. For some reason my brain thinks differently when I have a pen in my hand. So what you'll see in the first PDF are my general outline notes, and then a more detailed handwritten notes for the whole message.

The final stage of preparation is to take these handwritten and type up the manuscript. This can be a time intensive stage because my original notes are often just bullet-points and need to be filled out. The second PDF is the final manuscript that I print out and carry into the pulpit. When I have time I try to go over them with a pen to underline and make notations, but in this case I didn't have time to do that.

Hopefully all this will be useful or at least interesting to someone. No doubt I'll show up in some homiletics class as an illustration of "how not to prepare a sermon." Oh, well. As CJ likes to say, "Saved to serve." Massive Jaw Monkey Boy at at your service.

The sermon I'm sharing from is Prayer for Spiritual Strength on Ephesians 3:14-21.