Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Preach the Word

Cody Francis

01 Giving the Message

02 Preparing the Message

03 Preparing the Message

04 Building the Message

05 Delivering the Message

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in heaven, we're grateful for the privilege to learn and grow together.

We pray that you will be with us now as we discuss preaching, and we pray that you will grow our understanding and our development in preaching.

So as I've mentioned, as I've been repeating, the key, the biggest thing of preaching is taking the time to study.

And so what we've talked about the last 3 times are the most important in that you have to take the time to study.

And then what we looked at yesterday and the day before, there are different techniques and different things, verses that you can use different techniques with, but it's all a part of digging deeper into the text.

But once you've studied, you do need to be able to figure out how to put a message together.

And so we're going to be looking at building the message today.

We might move on to illustrating the message depending on if we have time.

So when you look at building the message, there's some key components that you need to think about before you even get there.

And by the way, I would say, even if you are a manuscript preacher, even if you write out your sermon word for word, you should always begin with an outline.

Because if you don't begin with an outline, then your manuscript is going to meander most likely.

So very few people can write out a message without having some framework and structure to it.

And so that can be simple, but there should be an outline there.

But even before you get to the outline, there are some things that you need to consider.

And Number 1, what you need to consider is, who are you preaching to?

Before, you may have a message, but who are you preaching to?

Now, who are some different audiences that you might be preaching to?

Teenagers are going to be different than another group, right?

So if you're gonna be talking to leaders, that's going to be a different context of presentation as well.

If you're talking to, when you reach to another language and you have an interpreter, you have to, you have to be very careful.

When I work with an interpreter, I find that people say, oh, you only get half of your sermon.

In my case, that's not the same, because I'm more concise.

And so really, I'm presenting the same message with an interpreter or without.

It's just less ums and things like that in with an interpreter.

Okay, so you're different denominations, different groups of people, uh-huh?

Okay, how much time do you have to speak?

So if you have the 2.15 slot, for example, right after lunch, then you might consider it being a little bit different than another time.

There's all sorts of factors that you need to know when you're considering who you're going to be presenting a message to a congregation.

Now in that congregation, you are not going to have a 1 type of audience.

You're going to have people that are 80 and people that are 5.

And you're going to have, You may have people that are new believers and people that were born in the church.

And so you're gonna have all these different varieties within a congregation frequently.

But there is a cultural expectation in a congregation as well.

My grandfather was, he baptized me in the branch of the Mormon church that we were a part of, and he was a priest there.

And he knew that He had to finish his Sunday sermon by, I don't remember the exact time, I think it was by 11.30, because the people wanted to go and get the morning discounts at McDonald's for lunch.

And so they got unhappy if he did not give them enough time to get there.

And so it is, there's all these different factors, but I would say 1 of the biggest factors is that you're going to be looking at is your, is it going to be multicultural?

Is it going to be what's the general age that you're going to be speaking to?

And what's the biblical literacy that you're going to be speaking to?

And so to me these are kind of the 3 main areas.

You remember I said a few days ago that I would use narrative sermons a lot when I'm talking to where there's a low biblical literacy because a story, it can be engaging no matter what the biblical literacy is.

And so a story from the Bible, you're still teaching the Bible, you're still bringing out truth from the Bible, but it doesn't require as much thought to follow along.

It's easier for those that are less biblically illiterate.

If you are going to be speaking to young people, there's going to need to be probably illustrations adapted to them.

I gave a Bible study 1 time, And I don't even remember, I think he was a brother of somebody we baptized.

I don't remember if we baptized him at that point or not.

And he called me and wanted to study the Bible, so he came over to his house, and we had a Bible study, and he was telling me all about his skateboarding.

And he claimed that he was semi-pro or something like that.

But you know, during that Bible study, the theme that we kept coming back to is what he had told me about skateboarding, I was making associations in the Bible study to skateboarding.

So I gave a Bible study that had lots of illustrations about skateboarding, even though I knew nothing about skateboarding, and it connected well with him.

If you're in another country where the way people get to wherever they're going to go is they walk or they take public transportation, illustrations about driving won't make any sense.

And so you just have to recognize, what is my audience?

And I would say that this is 1 of the most important things you do as you begin a message, is you think about who you're going to be speaking to.

You may have an idea, you may have a concept, God may have really spoken to your heart through a passage of Scripture, but who are you going to be talking to as you are sharing that with them?

And that then is going to inform everything else that you do as you begin to prepare and to build your message.

Now maybe it's always the same, but still ask that question every time.

Every sermon I do, that's a big statement, I should say almost every sermon I do, just to make sure I'm not gonna get inaccurate here, almost every sermon I do I begin with the very first thing I have written down is, what is my goal?

And my goal is going to be different for every single message I give.

So if we were thinking about a goal for this class, which I don't have a, it's not a sermon, so it's just notes there as you see.

It doesn't have this normal, normal parameters that I would use.

My goal though would be to help give a greater understanding of how to put a message together or how to build a message.

Now, if you are preaching 1 of the sermons that we talked about yesterday, trying to remember 1 of those sermons that we talked about.

My goal is going to be I want people to prioritize eternal things over temporal things.

Series

Preach the Word

04 Building the Message

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Preach the Word

01 Giving the Message

1h 1m

Seven Keys to Effective Evangelism and Church Growth

04 Would They Even Know?

1h 4m

Preach the Word

02 Preparing the Message

59m

Reasons to Believe

05 The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

50m

Preach the Word

05 Delivering the Message

59m

Established in the Present Truth

Sound Doctrine

58m

Prophetic Preaching and Persuasive Appeals for Decision

04 Where to Preach Powerful Biblical Appeals

55m

Prophetic Preaching and Persuasive Appeals for Decision

03 When to Preach Persuasive Appeals for Decision

58m

Prophetic Preaching and Persuasive Appeals for Decision

02 The Science of Soul Winning Appeals - How to Say It

52m

End-time Finance

05 Weeping Merchants: The Final Economic Collapse

58m

Principles for Succesful Soul Winning

Interpersonal Relationships - The Art of Hospitality Part 1

42m

Spark Training: Public Evangelism

Spark Training: Public Evangelism- Part 1

57m

Sound Doctrine