Tim Keller on Writing a Sermon

The Pastor goes through his creative process.

Question: How do you write a sermon?Tim Keller:    So, two weeks ahead I sit down with the text of the passage of the Bible I'm going to preach on and I spent about four hours figuring out what I think the outline of that text is, the meaning of the text. I need to look up what the commentators think about, maybe problematic verses. And I come up with an outline and a basic, you might say, an exegesis or an exposition of the passage itself. 
I write this up and I send it to my musicians. We're going to be putting it in a bulletin and then they're going to be choosing music for it.  I send it to other preachers who some of them are going to be preaching sermons on the same text. 
Then, three days before, I sit down with this outline and I spend another four hours turning the bible study into a sermon--and they're not the same thing.  Bible study is more abstract, what does the text say.  The sermon is more life related, what does this mean to me. 
So I spend four hours two weeks ahead on the text.  I spend four hours turning it into a life-related sermon and that's usually on the Friday before.  And then on Saturday, I spend another six hours on it just trying to make it shorter, because it's always too long and so I make it shorter, make it shorter, make it shorter, make it shorter. 
So I spend about 14 to 16 hours a week writing a sermon and I spend all day preaching it because I speak four times on a Sunday.  And so I actually put in about 25 hours a week into producing and delivering one public speaking presentation before I do anything else in my job.
 
Recorded on: Dec 8, 2008.