Sermon Outlines - Which is Best for You?

Using a template for your weekly sermon can save you time and make your sermon preparation time more streamlined and effective. In this episode, we go through four sermon outlines or templates that can help you communicate what the Bible teaches - plus, the templates mentioned are also available to use in the Sermonary app!

The Four Sermon Outlines

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Transcript

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Justin  0:01  
Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Hello church. My name is Justin Trapp.

Wade  0:05  
I am Wade Bearden and we have a very fun topic. On this episode, we're going to be talking about sermon outlines. And when I say sermon outlines, I don't mean, hey, you're talking about this passage and we want to outline it, but actual outlines that you use or templates - structures every single week. So we've got four of them that we're going to be discussing this week on Hello Church.

Justin  0:27  
And I think the real benefit, right for using an outline template would be to give your sermon preparation because we know this right preparing a sermon, writing a sermon is an arduous journey. It's an exhaustive endeavor every single week. And so if you can streamline that process, or even create a process or exist within a structure, a template an outline, it can help you save time as you prepare because a lot of pastors are spending upwards of, you know, 10 hours on average, but we've talked Some pastors are spending 20, 25, even 30 hours in a week on a message. And every little bit helps, right when you're writing this out, so that you have more time for the other areas of ministry and you know, your personal life.

Wade  1:15  
Yeah. And even just looking at the passage, and maybe you're preaching through a chapter, maybe you're preaching through 10 verses, obviously, you're going to read through that, but how do you communicate the truth of that passage, and different templates will allow you to do that in a number of different ways. So that when you preach, you communicate what the Bible teaches, and then you compel people to apply that to their life. So that's the big idea with these templates and with these structures, it's just a different way or a couple different ways to go about talking through the text that you're going through on that particular day.

Justin  1:55  
Yeah, and my challenge to you pastors watching this that you if you don't use it, a template that you commit to one of these or a template, I can tell you from firsthand experience when I committed to using the same format the same structure, every single week, it made me a better communicator, I was able to be more comfortable within my notes because I knew exactly where I was in the message, or at least in that structure. And so even if I lost my place momentarily, I was able to just get that momentum back quickly. Because I was so familiar with that outline.

Wade  2:28  
Yeah. And too, if you work through some of these templates and find your own, you'll create your own custom template from some of these, you'll kind of mix and match. And then also, depending on the Bible text, you might choose one template over the next. So maybe you usually go through three points. But on a particular text or story, you're like, oh, it would be better to use this one because I think this template will help me work through this story, or this passage better. So we're going to give you four of them and we'll just go Go ahead and jump right in. I alluded to it just a second ago. But the first template we want to talk about today is the traditional three point template. And we say three point template. But ideally, you could do two to four points. You don't want to do longer than that. Because if you have more than four points, you probably look, you're looking at a series here, but three points. And also, when we say points, we don't mean three isolated points you're gonna be working through, you still have the big idea of your message. But what are the sub points within that to communicate the whole? So you might say three points, but it really all revolves around the big idea of that passage. And I love this. This is, this is the traditional method for a reason because it's so easy to work through passages with this, you know, sermon structure.

Justin  3:55  
Yeah, I think if we, you know, if you went to seminary, this is probably one of the first things you learned in preaching was this traditional two to four point method. Three points is usually you know, what we learned. And I think this is sort of the one on one of learning how to preach. I think this is great. So if you've never utilized the template, maybe you start here. And then that could help you, as you create and form those sermon preparation habits, this can help you be more efficient in the inside those habits.

Wade  4:23  
Yeah, so let me just briefly walk through this. And what's great too is if you look in the show notes, there's going to be a link. And you can actually download a list of these templates that we're talking about today, in addition to some bonus ones, so you can kind of work through this. But what you have here is you have of course, your introduction. And your introduction is not just something that grabs people's attention, but it grabs their attention and points them to your message. So that's really important. And then you have each point, point, one, two, and three. And then under each of those, you have the explanation section. And this is where you Take a block of your scripture or story in the Bible, and you just explain that scripture or that story, or you tell that story. So you explain it. And you have your, your main point. So if it's God is love, you say, Hey, here's what the Scriptures say about God and how He is a God of love. Then after the explanation, you illustrate that particular message and you say, Hey, you know, I heard a story the other day, and you illustrate it. And then you have the application. Okay, so God is a God of love. What does that mean for us today? And you could take that a couple different ways. If it's an evangelistic message, you could talk about how God loves everyone. If it's a message that's more pastoral, you could remind people of God's love and then you could say, hey, if God is love, and we're supposed to be like him, then we need to love other people as well. So you do that for every single point and then you have the conclusion and some people will switch sit around, I knew one person who would have the point and say, hey, my first point is this. And then they would go straight to an illustration. And then they would say, hey, if you think that story was great, here's what the text says. So you can kind of play around with it. But that's the general structure of the three point traditional method.

Justin  6:18  
And so that's a three point method. The next outline structure that you can use is one that I personally, is my favorite. It's one I've used often is the method popularized by Andy Stanley, and that's Me We God You We, and Andy does a really great job in his messages of really creating tension at the beginning, right, but also really focusing in on one idea of the message not having lots of ideas, not lots of points, but one singular point and everything else goes to reinforce that point and you he starts in the me section and usually the me section is a personal story. Maybe it's let's say you're talking about forgiveness. It's a personal story about where someone wronged you or turned on you or hurt you. And you had to you had to forgive them and you had to come back to forgiving them again and again. And then as you move from that person or that person, you know, that personal attention that personal story into like, what what, how does this impact us as Christians, when we are faced with people that have wronged us? How should we respond? And so you go from me to we. And then the God section, what is the what does God's word say about this particular topic or thing that we're talking about? And that's when he'll go and he'll park it in the passage for a long time.

Wade  7:45  
Yeah. And I love the the tension that Andy Stanley creates the message and and sometimes this is referred to as the message map, this template, Andy Stanley's message map, but he'll often do with me he'll say, Hey, here's how I struggle with this, and then it. Here's how we, have you ever struggled with this, maybe you have someone that it's just so hard to forgive them because they did something to you. And then, like you mentioned, he'll go to the God section. And he'll talk about the passage and say, here, here's what the Bible says. And then he goes back to you. So he, he applies it to you, and then what you're like, what are you supposed to do with it, what he's supposed to do with it. And then he goes to what people miss a lot of times that message in We so there's always this community component to God's word into the body of Christ. And he'll usually say something like, imagine if we all applied this, what would it look like? What would it look like in our church? And in our world, if we did this as a whole? And I really, I really appreciate that because it adds that community aspect of accountability. Yeah. And it's all singular. It's kind of like what you mentioned, that he is he's constantly trying to refer people back His main idea and he usually has like a sticky statement, that phrase that is easy to remember. And so when you go home, you're like, I remember it. And sometimes it's catchy. Sometimes it's just really straightforward. But you walk away with that sticky statement, you say, I know what the message was about and what that passage was about. It was about this. And it's very, very clear.

Justin  9:20  
I love this method again. So before we created Sermonary, which if you don't know what Sermonary is, it's a cloud based sermon builder. And you can construct your sermon in a real drag and drop. It's just very easy and simple to construct a sermon but before Sermonary, I used to use note cards and I used to write on a note card, I lay him down in the living room floor. And I'll just write down the passages that I'm using or passages that I'm using and the ideas and the illustrations that I'm gonna go Okay, this, this is a story about forgiveness. This goes in the Me section and, and so I lay out my sermon on the floor, right using index cards, and then I would just look at it I would create my notes from that now with Sermonary, you're able to do that in a digital way. And it's a lot faster and more agile than trying to write a sermon in Word. So yeah, a little shameless plug for seminary.

Wade  10:11  
Yeah. Well, and, and to, you know, you can sign up for a free trial. And all of these templates are in sermons. So if you write a new message, you can choose this and they'll all be blank, there'll be blocks and so you can just fill in the blocks and something like the Andy Stanley's message map, his his template, the blocks actually describe what each section is, so you can Okay, you know, share a story about myself, how do I struggle with this so that I think it's very helpful. The third template that we have is the verse by verse commentary. And this one's pretty straightforward, but you have certain people, they just love kind of working through the verses that they're just detailing. I sometimes use this depending on the text, but basically You break up the passage, and two different sections. And you'll just work through, you know, a paragraph or a couple verses, and just detail everything about that. And then you do an illustration to kind of help illustrate that. And then after that, usually you can put a you can put a, a application point, or some people will choose and just do the application at the very end of the message. So you're saying, here's what the text says illustrate the text. Here's what the text says illustrate the text. Here's what the text says illustrate this text, okay, we just learned about that. Now, here's what you need to do. So a lot of different ways that you can do that. And I think this is really helpful, especially for something that's very dense, like maybe something from Paul's epistles, where you just got to really dig into that.

Justin  10:11  
Yeah, I love this structure in this template

Wade  12:03  
There's a lot of ways you can do inductive and deductive basically, at the start of your message, you can come out and say, here's the point that I want you to, I want you to take home today. here's, here's what my message is all about. Or you can you can say, Man, this is a really good question. Let's figure this out. Either way, you can kind of create tension, depending on how you do it. But be thinking about that. Do you want to at the beginning of your message, say, here's my big idea, boom? Or and this goes with any template? Do you want to raise some questions? Hey, man, let's, let's kind of figure out what we're supposed to what we're supposed to do. And you slowly reveal your answer over the course of your message. So it's kind of fun. You can kind of you can play around with the way that you structure your sermon. Yeah.

Justin  12:48  
Our next template or structure is the defenders outline. And I love this this structure because it's sort of an apologetics type of structure.

Wade  12:56  
Yeah. So this is one and that I was I was thinking About whenever I was working through a couple of messages that were more apologetic in nature, so I created this template, and it's nothing groundbreaking, but if you are, if you're preaching a message on a hot topic, or maybe you're preaching a message about, Hey, can we trust the New Testament? Or did Jesus really rise from the dead? Or should we follow this moral law that's found in the Bible? You could use this, this template, and I think it could be helpful. And the way that it works is, is that you have your introduction. Just like we talked about, really push the tension here. It's like, Hey, this is this is like really tough. How do we how do we go about thinking about this? And then you state the biblical principle. You make it very clear here. Here's what the Bible says, Here's where it says that and then this is this is an important part that we often miss. You can sitter the objections, so You basically say, okay, there are some there are some people who of course, disagree with this, Timothy Keller is great at this. He's really great at this at here, here's some, here's some people who disagree, and here's why they disagree. And you work through it. And then the next part is you offer defense. So instead of somebody walking away and saying, Okay, I know what the church believes, they walk away, say, I know what the church believes, and I know why they believe it. And so you offer defense and say, Hey, we talked about this objection. Here's why I don't think this objection is a roadblock to our principal. And you work through those you offer that defense. And then you have to every single time provide an application, and I i love it, too, because I've been in some churches where you know, Easter Sunday, it's like, Oh, Jesus rose from the dead. It's really great. I appreciate when, hey, Jesus rose from the dead. Here's how that changes things. So always make sure to provide application whenever you're preaching no matter what template you're using.

Justin  14:57  
Yeah, I think that's really important. So that, you know, we're not Just giving people information, right, but that we're giving them actionable steps to take in their own lives or to consider or to meditate on throughout the week. And then they're not just leaving going. Oh, that that was cool. Yeah, but what can I do with that?

Wade  15:15  
Yeah, what can I do? What can I take away? Okay, yeah, so I trust the New Testament, well, the application is you need you need to read it. And, and that's, that's very important. So those are our four, we have some bonus ones that we included in our PDF as well as on Sermonary. And one of those that I'm really excited about is the children's leader. And what I did was I talked to a number of children's pastors about their message and their service and we've created this template and here's how this one's unique. The Children's leader isn't necessarily just a sermon, or a lesson template, it's a service template that takes your big idea and brings it throughout the whole service. So let me give you kind of a just a quick breakdown. You've got the introduction. Then you have the word of the day that comes from the text where you explain it. You tell your Bible story. You have illustrations, applications, you have small groups, and then you have a game that reviews everything. So you can take this and you can have a whole order of service. And then the children are learning about that principle, that big idea that story throughout every single section, even down to the game. I've also created one called the youth pastor template, and once again, talking to youth pastors, seeing what they what they needed. And as a youth pastor myself, what did I need, and we have the see, so it's kind of fun, capture their attention, connect, connect to the students, consider what God's word says collide, how does this principle meet their world? And then call What do I want the students to do? And I want to be very clear, what do I want them to do at the end of this message. So those are some some bonus ones that you can find in the PDF and on Sermonary.

Justin  16:58  
And again, if you don't use Use a an outline or a structure for your sermon preparation for your preaching, we encourage you to commit to do it for a month, just just do it for one month, commit to one template or one structure. And do it for a month and see how that impacts not only your sermon preparation, but your memorization of the content that you've prepared when you're preaching your comfort, level, your confidence level when you're presenting the message. And I'd love to hear from you how did it go? Do you currently use one of these templates? Or do you use another template and put it in the comments below? If you're watching on YouTube, or if you see us post the link on Twitter or Facebook, we'd love to hear what what template or structure you're using for your messages.

Wade  17:40  
Yeah. And also on Sermonary, we actually receive permission to use a template that we we didn't actually include here and it's Timothy Keller's template and it's really great. He talks about it in his book preaching. So that's not actually on the site, but we can share with you

Justin  17:56  
we can put that in the show notes.

Wade  17:57  
Yeah. So if you if you click that link Then what it'll do is it'll take you to Sermonary and you can include it in your library, and you can use it every single week. So that's really great. And then if you do have your personal template, we'd love to see that. So you can post it, if you if you have one too, and you have Sermonary, you can create it in Sermonary and share it with people. So they can add it to their library, and they can use your template. So that's something you can do as well. Let us know what you do every week. Perhaps you take one of ours, or one that we've talked about today, or maybe you take one and you tweak it and you just kind of make it different for your congregation. We'd love to hear about that. We'd love to see that.

Justin  18:36  
Next episode, we're gonna be talking about preaching on controversial topics. What to do, what not to do. Yeah, lessons learned. It's gonna be fun and interesting episode. Yeah, I'm excited for it.

Wade  18:50  
Yeah, it's gonna be fun because we've got some controversial things that are happening in our world. Just a few

Justin  18:56  
I mean, just everything's controversial.

Wade  18:59  
So Tune in. If you've enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend. Maybe you have a student that you're mentoring and maybe a college student or someone who's fresh at your church they want to preach, I share with them this episode so that they can grow and really kind of dig into what it means the art and science of preaching. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel or if you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher Make sure to leave us a review as well. Every little bit helps and we appreciate you listening every week to Hello church.