Preaching Today: In every sermon you preach, you strive to have what you call the three legs of preaching. What are they?

Randy Frazee: The three legs are simple — theological, biblical, and practical. I'm trying to present a message that's balanced — not just balanced in terms of preparing or crafting a sermon, but balanced for the listeners, the people you hope to be transformed into Christlikeness.

What we've done, first of all, is define what we believe are the core components of a Christian life. We call it the Christian Life Profile. It is made of ten core beliefs that we see are the predominant themes of the Scripture, and that should make up the way in which a believer thinks about the Bible and about life. These are ten core practices, as we read Genesis through Revelation, and particularly the New Testament, that the believer is to engage in.

Spiritual disciplines.

Spiritual disciplines, exactly right. We have a set of beliefs that renew our minds, and a set of practices that we put into play, and then finally a set of ten virtues, what God wants us to become. So it is a know, do, be structure.

We have also resurrected the idea of a church calendar. Instead of a church calendar built around doctrinal beliefs, to separate correct biblical ideas from heresy, we've created what we call " the spiritual formation calendar " where we place all 30 theological ideas in a calendar. We deal with the first core belief in January, and we deal with the final core virtue in December. We've been doing that for three years. We see a language of spiritual formation beginning to emerge in our congregation. People are not only talking about how a particular sermon hit them on a particular Sunday, but they're beginning to see how it fits in the overall scheme of things in terms of living.

Talk in depth about the first leg.

The first is the theological leg. It means to present an operating system for life. That requires the pastor to ask himself some questions. If the pastor gave a sermon on Galatians 4:19, that suggests Christ is to be formed in us. As a pastor and church we're going to work hard to see Christ formed in us. If a visitor said, " I'm excited about that. What might I expect? " I think the pastor would often step back and say, " Well, I don't know what to tell you. "

Here's where the preacher needs to become crystal clear in scope and sequence of what to work on. The preacher says, " While the Bible is made up of more than these topics or subtopics, we're going to lay out the core beliefs, the core practices, and the core virtues. And we're going to work hard to get those things working in your life. " That's the theological perspective.

We created a calendar to insure we have balance in our theological perspective.

For example, in the first decade of my ministry, I would pick out popular texts that I thought would work for the congregation either from a practical or preaching perspective. What I've come to discover is I have an obligation to the congregation to speak on subjects that may not be culturally attractive, but critical to making the Christian life work — subjects like biblical community and the nature of the church and God's desire for the church. In the individualistic world we live in most people aren't that interested in the idea of the corporate church, but I've got to teach on it. Going through the spiritual formation calendar every year requires that I present balance in speaking to subjects that our people need to hear.

What are the ten core beliefs?

The ten core beliefs are

1. The Trinity
   
2. Salvation by grace
   
3. Authority of the Bible
   
4. Personal God
   
5. Identity in Christ
   
6. Belief in the church
   
7. God's view of humanity
   
8. Compassion
   
9. Eternity
   
10. Stewardship
    

The ten practices are

1. Worship
   
2. Prayer
   
3. Bible study
   
4. Single mindedness
   
5. Biblical community
   
6. Giving away my time
   
7. Giving away my faith
   
8. Giving away my life
   
9. Giving away my money
   
10. Spiritual gifts
    

The virtues are things we're pursuing to become. Essentially they are the fruit of the Spirit. They are

1. Joy and peace
   
2. Self-control
   
3. Faith, and faithfulness
   
4. Humility
   
5. Love
   
6. Patience
   
7. Gentleness
   
8. Kindness
   
9. Goodness
   
10. Hope
    

We have gone back in church history and found how earlier Christians dealt with the burden of transferring Christian living to the people in a congregation. The church created creeds. So for each of these 30 ideas we created a creed we recite on Sunday. We've created banners. We put them everywhere. So while we're a contemporary church, we have found a new need for creeds.

For example, we are trying to create an understanding of what the Trinity is. And so our people memorize, " I believe the God of the Bible is the only true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit " (2 Corinthians 12:13).

Let's go to the second leg.

The second leg is the biblical. Hearers probably have been trained the most in this particular category. But I'd like to suggest we take a fresh look at it. By biblical, we are suggesting that each sermon must be rooted in a specific biblical text, and the message of that text in its historical and literary context must be maintained, so that what we proclaim is not just workable but profound and revelatory.

So it is true exposition of that text.

It's true exposition of the text. Now, at our church we don't necessarily go through a book verse by verse. When we deal with a specific text, we deal with it in its historical, literary context to extract the actual message of the text.

The reason that's important is as a contemporary church we are taught to be practical, which is the third leg. One of the temptations of being practical is not to be biblical. We desire to scratch where people itch. We know they scratch in the area of failure in their marriage the struggle of raising children, with finances, with desires to set goals in the areas of success for their career, with the desire to have meaningful relationships, or a happy life. So we in the contemporary church do all these practical series where people itch. But the solutions we give are often not rooted in the historical text of Scripture. At the end of the day the preachers who are overtly practical but not careful to be biblical will find they have developed a large crowd, but they're not profound in giving them solutions to life.

For example, it's possible a pastor would give a sermon on marriage communication, because the vast majority of people in his congregation are struggling to communicate in marriage. What he or she proceeds to do is lay out a series of practical things you could find in a self-help book. For example, before you speak, hold your breath and count to ten. That's a practical suggestion, but Scripture offers more than just teaching people how to contain the darkness within them.

Scripture offers, in an encounter with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, an opportunity to remove the darkness and to develop the fruit of the Spirit. You can say to a married couple, " If you really come to know Christ, we can teach you, as you develop a relationship with Christ, how joy and gentleness will emerge in your life. When Jesus said you need to turn the other cheek when someone insults you, he wasn't suggesting that you turn the other cheek in anger. He is suggesting that there should be no retaliation in your heart. Therefore, you can gladly turn the other cheek because you have no insult to return. "

That's the profound truth of Scripture. Practical preaching is absolutely central. It's one of the major legs in the stool, but one of the dangers of practical preaching is we speak a lot from the book of Proverbs or we use a lot of text but do not provide profound truth that comes from the Word of God. Therefore, I don't think it's as life changing as it would be if the message was rooted in the text.

Let's go then to the practical leg of preaching.

The practical leg of preaching is to take a theological idea grounded in a biblical text and address it in a way that touches your audience. This would be the burden of the preacher if you lived in 1980 or 1990 or 2090. We must speak to the culture we are working with. So we have to find creative ways to do that.

I'll give you a couple of examples. We want to do a series on some of the core virtues in our theological model — love, patience, gentleness, and kindness. That's a theological construction, the operating system we want our people to get. Every year we are going to speak on those topics. This year, however, we're going to look at the life of David in the Psalms and in First and Second Samuel. We will cover his life biographically in the text to show how David or the people in David's life either demonstrated or failed to demonstrate the core virtues. So we put together a series practically entitled " How to Really Love Someone. " This is a subject our people are interested in. They're not only interested in how can they really love someone, but they're interested in receiving that kind of love from someone else. That's starting where people are at.

We dealt with the core virtues. We dealt with them in a biblical way because each message was rooted in a specific text that dealt with David's life. So, for example, when we came to the issue of gentleness, we looked at the life of David in his encounter with Abigail and Nabal. It's a fascinating study on gentleness from all three characters. So in that series we were able to accomplish a balance in this three-legged stool.

If I want to preach with those three legs of the stool, how do I approach sermon preparation? Do you take a certain leg first?

We start with the theological because that's what drives what we're going to speak on. We have the calendar. I know in the first three weeks of every year I'm going to be talking about the Trinity — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — some aspect of God. It may be the person of the Father, the person of the Son, the person of the Holy Spirit, the works of God, the attributes of God, the decrees of God. Over the course of the year I'm going to spend at least three weeks talking about some aspect of God.

Then that determines what text you're going to choose.

That's exactly right. Each year we highlight a different aspect. For example, one year we did a series on the existence of God. The next year we did a series on the power of the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing transformation to our lives. Last year we did a series on the attribute of God's goodness in the face of trial. Each year we're bringing out a different aspect rooted in a different biblical text.

We'll sit in a creative session and say, " Okay, we know we're dealing with the Trinity. Which aspect of the Trinity do our people need to hear this year? Where are they at? " We might determine our people have experienced a lot of tragedy, and they are questioning God's goodness. " Let's deal with the attribute of God's goodness. " Then we'll say, " Where in Scripture will we teach this idea? " You can obviously teach out of the Book of Job. We chose to look at some of the Psalms as well as the Writings of Paul and his experience with pain, and the healing of the blind man, when it appeared as though God came through for somebody in the midst of tragedy. So the biblical leg comes second.

The final leg is the practical. We brainstorm. For example, we're in a series on the core practice of biblical community. Our creed says, " I fellowship with other Christians to accomplish God's purposes in my life, in other's lives, and in the world. " This year we wanted to talk about the value of inter-generational community and the need for accountability in community. A major issue to be addressed in the twenty-first century is individualism. It seeks to pawn itself off as community when it is really nothing more than a collection of individuals in a room. That's the major problem with American small groups right now. So we wanted to address this subject in a straightforward manner .

We decided to go to the Book of Titus. In Titus 2:1-15 and Titus 3:1-15 the apostle Paul addresses the topics of older women instructing the younger women, and he says Titus is to hold them accountable, to encourage them and rebuke them in sound doctrines. We did a two-week series. We wanted to capture that practically for people, and so we called the series " Survivors " — off the popular hit show, and we called it " Winning Immunity through Community. " We showed the contrast of Christian concepts of surviving through community versus the contemporary show which said you vote each other off the island. With all that in mind we were able to accomplish that three-legged balance.

Randy Frazee is senior minister of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas, and author of The Connecting Church.