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Editor's note: As preachers develop their signature method of sermon preparation over the years, they often enhance their process by "cherry picking" from the sermon prep schedules and checklists of others. When someone preaches in a way that consistently intrigues and speaks to us, and we wonder how they do it, the answer may well be found in those schedules and checklists.

Kevin Miller

PreachingToday.com: Are there any key questions you normally answer, or paths of thought you typically take, as you study a text and write the sermon?

Miller: The questions I regularly ask are these:

• What are the big ideas in the text?
• Am I preaching from a natural unit of Scripture?
• What is this text about? What is it saying about what it's about?
• Why did the original audience need to hear this message?
• What question is this text answering? And what is its answer?
• What does this text say about Jesus? Have I stayed in this text until I met the Lord of this text?
• What is the good news of this text?
• How is this passage supposed to make me feel?
• Who has something at stake?
• Does the text really mean that? "But …"
• So what?
• What story is being told in this text? What is our part in that story?
• "Yes, but how?" How do I live out this truth in simple, practical ways?
• What questions will people have that I need to answer?
• Does this text bring any songs to mind?
• What props could be used as illustrations?
• Who could give a testimony as an illustration for this sermon?
• What would Tim Keller do?
• What are the implications of this text (not the same as applications)?
• What reality is the text introducing us to?
• What is God inviting us to?
• Why should people care?
• What are the words that catch the wind?
• Who will be in the audience? "A _____ who …"

Bryan Loritts

PreachingToday.com: Are there any key questions you normally answer, or paths of thought you typically take, as you study a text and write the sermon?

Loritts: Key questions for me: What is the genre of the text? Is it a narrative, an epistle, historical? Genre is absolutely huge, and most of us don't realize how much genre effects how we decipher words. Other questions I ask center around authorship, location, context of the text.

What schedule routine do you follow in sermon preparation?

Mondays and Tuesdays are research days. This is when I do all my reference work: observations, word studies, consulting parallel passages, reading theologies and commentaries.

Wednesday is outline and rough-draft day. On Thursday I write the final manuscript.

Saturday evening and Sunday morning are devoted to reading and praying over the manuscript, and practicing it once.

Leith Anderson

PreachingToday.com: Are there any key questions you normally answer, or paths of thought you typically take, as you study a text and write the sermon?

Anderson: One important question for me is, What would the Bible sound like if it was written today? My job is to take Bible truth and make it as interesting and applicable for today's listeners as for the first listeners.

What schedule routine do you follow in sermon preparation?

Every July I write the preaching schedule for the next calendar year. It includes titles, topics, texts, sermon summaries and creative features for the services (videos, drama, interactive elements; give-aways; and such). A file folder is set up for each of the next year's sermons where I accumulate ideas, articles, commentaries, and more. When the preparation days come before the preaching weekend, I already have a lot of the work done, and the worship, drama, and creative-arts teams have been working for months in advance to coordinate the entire service.