How I Pick a Sermon Text

The selection process for choosing a Sunday sermon is to me an interesting one. As an independent church, I have the luxury and responsibility of choosing the text each week and deciding which emphasis from the text to put the focus upon. In the Catholic Church this process is partly decided by the liturgical calendar in which three texts to be read are decided in advance (OT, NT, Gospel); the priests know which texts they will be working with and choose one of them (or parts of two or all three) to make the message from. After spending the last two years working out my technique, I’ve found it useful to have multiple simultaneous series to choose from. Right now we’re working through Ephesians (almost done), Luke, and the account of the life of David.
Having that framework allows me to have continuity in the themes we learn about and also keeps the messages from being too scattered. I know that many preachers choose to preach on a specific topic or themes in a series of sermons that draw upon a variety of scriptures for their basis, but that technique has never really appealed to me. If an occasion seems to warrant a message on a particular topic I would certainly find a text that works with that theme, but I prefer to let the text that we’ve come to tell me what to preach to the church rather than try to find a text that goes with what I already want to preach. From time to time I find myself looking at the choices in each book we’re working through and I don’t seem to see something that will speak to our hearts this week. In that case, I often leaf through the Psalms or Proverbs, or perhaps look for a O.T. story that has a message we can discover in one sermon (like the one on Ruth). In the end, I’m simply hoping to try to bring the text of our beloved Bible to life, to help explain what it meant both then and now and to help us find out what God’s Word has for our lives today.