Study the Passage: The vital step in preparing powerful sermons...Continued from page 3

Once you have the larger flow of thought and have flagged specific things you don’t fully understand, you’re ready to begin an in-depth study of your passage, hopefully starting with the languages in which the original authors wrote.

Our abilities in the original languages differ; but to the extent that you are able, work your way through the passage in Greek or Hebrew, noting vocabulary, word order, structural connectors, and organizational designs (e.g., chiasmus, inclusio, parallelism). Use whatever computer programs or language aids might help you.

Moving slowly through the material in Hebrew or Greek pays off in many ways. First, by going slowly and saturating yourself in the text, you build the fire or passion you will eventually want when you preach. You begin to feel the power of the Word. It starts to seep into your soul.1

Second, looking up the original vocabulary in the lexicons gives you nuances of meaning that cannot be brought out in the single word or phrase of the English translation.

Third, the original languages contain aids to interpretation that may not be apparent in the English, such as word order to indicate emphasis, or syntactical observations to reveal the organization of thought (e.g., if participles are subordinate to an imperative in the Greek, they indicate the time, manner, means, cause, condition, concession, purpose, or result that attaches to the command being given).

Fourth, the original languages sometimes reveal an ambiguity that the English translators have interpretively resolved (e.g., whether the genitive is objective or subjective). While their resolution might be helpful and accurate, it might also reflect a doctrinal bias or at least an interpretative viewpoint that should be held tentatively until further study is done.

Finally, having the original languages in mind will prepare you to read the commentaries more intelligently and profitably. Your familiarity with the original words or phrases will enable you to immediately understand the points the commentators are making and prepare you for how they play off each other in their various viewpoints.

The three stages so far?reading the surrounding context, flagging what you don’t understand, and going through it in the original languages?might take one to two hours, depending on the length of your chosen passage. The next stage will probably add four to six hours to this.

CONSULT GOOD COMMENTARIES

Good commentaries generally are found among those produced in the last few decades. Older works, perhaps in the public domain and therefore inexpensively available, have limited value. Though perhaps written by godly men or women, many are merely random devotional observations without a grasp of the author’s true meaning or flow of thought. Others, though written by competent scholars, are dated and lack the benefit of recent cultural, archeological, and grammatical studies.