For even the most diligent and disciplined preacher, those weeks come in which time for sermon preparation is short. What should we do?

How we use the time we have for sermon preparation is the single-most important human factor in the effectiveness of the sermon. Obviously, if he so chooses, God can take anything we offer and empower it to produce Pentecost! But more often than not it is the quality of our preparation, regardless of how stressed we may be, which makes the difference between poverty and potency in the pulpit. I would offer the following suggestions for sermon preparation to time-squeezed pastors.

Work during peak hours.

For those who feel they're most efficient early in the day, I suggest giving three to four hours each morning to sermon preparation. But if you're like a pastor friend of mine who comes alive at eleven at night, then study as much as you can after the rest of your family has gone to bed.

My guess is that the average pastor—who must lead meetings, do hospital visitation, provide some pastoral care, and be available for staff and other types of counseling—has at most 12 to 15 hours each week for sermon preparation. Those hours must be stewarded wisely, which means working during the time of day (or night) when you can give your best to the preparation process.

Get ahead.

This may sound unrealistic to the time-squeezed, but if you can find a way to get a day or two ahead, you'll be pleasantly surprised to discover how much this can improve the quality of your preaching. A number of years ago, social psychologists studied people of a creative bent—artists, musicians, writers, and poets—to discover the secret of their success. They discovered that the vast majority of those they studied seemed to work intuitively in a ten-day creative cycle. For preachers to become homiletically creative, this means starting some of the work for the following week's sermon on Thursday of the current week.

Obviously, this takes discipline, but when it's done the rewards roll forth: more time to think about the particular passage or theme, more opportunities to collect current illustrations, and more time given to relevant application. I've discovered that if I'm a bit ahead in the process, it actually goes faster once I start because I've given myself more time to meditate on the message and how it might come together.

Draw from previous sermons.

When I was in seminary, one of my professors preached a sterling sermon in chapel that had a profound impact on a number of the students, myself included. Afterwards, one of the students asked him, "How long did it take you to prepare that message?" His answer has never left me: "Three hours and thirty years." As an experienced pastor and a person who had lived some life, he had a great depository of material to draw from. This saved him innumerable hours in the sermon-writing process.

If you find yourself in a situation where you only have five hours to put together a sermon, don't be afraid to pull some things out of the file and re-work them. If it's true that some of your sermons should go into the shredder, it's also true that some of them can and should be used again.

If you are redoing an old sermon, devote the majority of the available time to making the illustrations current and sharpening the applications. Since the original sermon was solid, you need not tamper with the basic content. Moreover, while I encourage preaching without notes, I would never hesitate, under the constraints of time, to take some notes with me into the pulpit.

Borrow ethically.

The operative word here is "ethical." We must be both honest and careful about what we use and how much we use from others, especially when we're time-strapped. One way to do so ethically is to "footnote" the other preacher in your sermon. For example, I recently preached a sermon on envy in which I borrowed some material from a book by a very prominent preacher who happens to be a personal favorite of mine. I had no reservations about giving him public credit for his insights on the topic, and doing so made the sermon stronger and helped me stay ethical.

Another way to avoid pulpit plagiarism is to take the ideas and illustrations of other preachers and use them as a catalyst for finding those in our own experience. For example, a preacher once used a humorous personal experience to communicate clearly our tendency to deceive ourselves into thinking that we're better than we really are. It was so powerful that it motivated me to look into my life to see if there were any situations where I had done the same thing. Fortunately there were, and I used one of those as an introduction to a sermon on our need for a Savior. This technique not only saves us time, it also enables our messages to come out of the reality of our own lives.

Use all the available homiletical resources at your disposal. While there is danger in borrowing, it's an enormous blessing to have so many legitimate and available resources at hand.

Get up earlier.

Since we're all pressed for time and cannot create more, we must use more efficiently what we already possess. Getting up 15 minutes earlier on the days of our workweek and then an hour on both Saturday and Sunday gives us three extra hours per week. I don't think it's realistic to ask more of ourselves than this since we're already strapped. But if we dedicate these few additional hours to prayer and sermon preparation, in due course our preaching will really benefit. Minimally, this allows us to invest more time in both biblical exegesis and meditation with the Lord.

But what if you're able to add only one extra hour, not three? How should it be best invested? My suggestion is to use that extra sixty minutes rehearsing the sermon's delivery and asking God for his anointing.

Regardless of the amount of time at our disposal, we can prepare to the best of our ability given those constraints and preach in a Spirit-filled fashion.

Scott Wenig is associate professor of applied theology at Denver Seminary in Denver, Colorado, and author of Straightening the Altars.