Here is the preaching pdf for my sermon tomorrow, “God Blesses Us When We Worship”: God blesses us when we worship him (John 12.1-11).

This will be the first sermon in a series that takes us through the summer, although we have guest speakers etc., so the series will skip weeks here or there.

This pdf will be on my iPad; this is what I preach from, although I generally also carry a Bible into the pulpit and read from it.

To prepare my notes, I generally follow this process:

1. I generally start workin on the sermon text ten days before I preach.  I want to have plenty of time for it to percolate.
2. During sermon week: as I am working on the sermon text, I generally also prepare a Powerpoint deck.  I do this earlier in the week, Monday or Tuesday, so that my assistant has time to translate English into Croatian for the dual language slides.  And I use a printout of the Powerpoint deck (notes view) to outline the sermon as it is developing.
3. Later in the week, I create a Word file with a two column table.  I export the Powerpoint slides as jpegs, then insert them into the columns of the Word file.  I usually do this late in the process, because I want to minimize double changes (i.e., when I change the slide in the sermon notes I also have to change the slide in the Powerpoint deck.)
4. On Friday or Saturday before I preach, I save that Word file as a pdf and upload it to my iPad, into Good Reader.  That’s the reading app I use for preaching.  I could also use Notes Plus.
5. All day Saturday, especially Saturday night, I pray through the text and add notes by hand.  Sometimes these are transitions, sometimes I move a sentence or an illustration to another place.  Sometimes I add an illustration that I thought of at the last moment.

Then on Sunday, I go into the pulpit with a sermon that I know well, that I’ve prayed through thoroughly, and that I am confident God can speak through.  (He used a donkey once; he can use me, too.)