How do you decide which book of the bible to preach through?
1. Well balanced diet:
Have you only been preaching through Paul’s letters, or the Gospels or the Psalms? What about OT Narrative, or the Minor Prophets, or Wisdom Lit, or Apocalyptic? Switching between genres and testaments helps to teach “the whole counsel of God”(Acts 20:27)
2. Maturity
What are the most obvious areas your church needs to grow in? Are they fixated on the present, then OT prophets or Revelation could lift their eyes up. Is there a lack of understanding about how the church should operate, especially the pastor’s relationship to the congregation? The Pastoral Epistles is the goto. If general biblical illiteracy is a problem, try preaching through the large OT narratives of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. And of course, it is always good to preach about the life of our Lord Jesus in the Gospels.
3. Calendar:
Churches operate on an annual calendar, even if they don’t follow the historic Christian calendar with its mushroomed number of saints’ days. You need to decide if you are going to have an open-ended series that pauses for Christmas and Easter. You can have a series that runs for a season (spring, summer, winter). You may want to have a short series then a long one. Estimating how many sermons match the number of Sundays available can give you a rough idea of how the series fits into your church calendar. Or you can ditch the calendar and keep your congregation guessing if you like.
4. Ability:
Few young men have the ability to sustain a long series like D.M. Lloyd-Jones. By long I mean a series that goes through a large book of the Bible at a slow, lingering pace. What ends up happening is that each single verse sermon becomes a springboard to talk about other things. However, when this is repeated, usually a sense of the context of a book of the bible is lost. We have to remember that New Testament epistles were letters read aloud in a single sitting. So the ability of a young preacher (or older one) may not match the skill needed to sustain the attention of the congregation in a granular study. Or the young preacher may easily distort the message of a whole book of the bible by granular proof-texting. Of course, if a preacher can engage in such epic sermon series, the congregation may be richly blessed. But there are many pastors whose own hubris assumed that they could “do like MLJ” and not get off track.
5. Challenge:
It is good to challenge yourself to try to preach difficult books of the bible. You shouldn’t do this as self-indulgence out of intellectual curiosity. But thinking about the souls of your people, ask yourself if they would be fed and equipped by a more challenging study like the book of Hebrews or the book of Job. Often, congregants are excited to have a sermon series preached on books of the bible that they have struggled to understand. So challenging yourself as a preacher and the congregation as listeners can be very fruitful.
6. Desire:
At the heart of the matter, the preacher should recognize what their soul needs. Does your soul need confrontation, encouragement, examples, instruction or application? Knowing what you want and what you think you need goes a long way to determining what you will preach. In other words, it is the question, “What is God teaching you?” You will find that if God has been teaching you from his Word, what you preach from that Word learned in your study will become remarkably relevant to your hearers. In this way, the Word is “living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4:12). This will be true for you and them too.
