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Friday, September 28, 2012

Should a pastor prepare his own sermons or buy them on-line?  What is the common practice?

Sincerely,
Pulpit Prep

Dear Pulpit Prep,

We get our sermons at IKEA; you have to assemble them yourself… but they cost less.  In fact, we got a great deal on a book of sermons at Amazon – click here to buy your own copy of the Bible!

All joking aside, we can’t tell you what the “common practice” is; we can only tell you what should be done.  Preachers and pastors (read “Elders” to find out what a pastor is; a preacher is simply someone who preaches) should be searching the Scriptures daily to see God’s Will (Acts 17:11).  They should be studying to show themselves approved, rightly handling God’s Word (2 Tim 2:15).  Anyone who preaches needs to hold firmly to the sound words of the Bible (2 Tim 1:13).  A preacher needs to be immersed in the Word of God in order to be fully equipped for the work at hand (2 Tim 3:16-17).

None of this specifically excludes buying your sermons on-line… but if you are doing all that work anyway, you might as well just write it yourself.  This way you don’t need to go back and double-check and fix a store-bought sermon to make it Biblically accurate.  We here at AYP have a hard time seeing the preachers of the first century being really happy about a preacher paying for a sermon that he should have studied for and wrote himself.  Seriously, it smacks of laziness (Pr 21:25).

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