Perhaps the most effective thing a preacher can do to strengthen the connection between the congregation and the scripture is to interpret the Bible with your senses.  Here you use all of your senses …

Exegesis is simply a close reading of the scripture so that you can extract the meaning from the text. Before you can preach a text you must understand the text. You can look …

Often preachers can make it seem as though the Bible is irrelevant for contemporary needs and society. Part of the problem is that we don’t truly allow the Bible to speak to us. …

When exegeting a text of scripture, we often spend a lot of time looking at what is in the text. And this is right. We put forth a lot of effort to read the text in the original languages if we have facility in them. We put forth effort to look at the narrative, theological, socio-cultural, and other important dimensions of the text.

Subscribers to the SoulPreacher have already received this article in the 31st edition of the Soul Preacher email magazine. In addition, those who have attended our second web seminars have seen the expansion of this concept. However, everyone else can now learn from this very powerful way of looking at exegesis of the text for preaching.

Frank Thomas, in his important book They Like to Never Quit Praisin’ God: The Role of Celebration in Preaching writes:

Ok, up to this point we have only used the Bible. We have not looked in any Bible commentaries or Bible Dictionaries. Now we want to go to these resources to find out what was going on when the text was written and why the text was written.

To understand the history of the text, we need to answer three questions as completely as possible. The first of these questions is: Who is writing the Text? The second question is: Who is reading the text? The final question is, Why was the text written?

I just realized that I do not have any posts that give an outline of my method for exegesis. Here is the basic process.

1. Prayer – You should not open the Bible without praying for the guidance of the Spirit in understanding the principles found in the text.
   

When you are preaching the Gospel, you need various tools to help you understand the Biblical text. As noted in other places on this site and others, you should never begin your preparation looking at these tools, however, you should always ensure that your preaching is in line with what is truth.

[amazon cover 0801057574]One of the important components of effective preaching is to help the congregation experience the sermon in as many sense as possible, not just hear the sermon. This book by Warren Wiersbe entitled Preaching and Teaching with Imagination provides an apologetic for using the imagination in preaching.