When creating your next sermon, I want you to consider thinking movement versus main points.
This is important because so many of us are used to thinking in main points when crafting a sermon, which could be a challenging obstacle to overcome.
Preaching with main points is not wrong. Not at all. In fact, in the PPGR course, I show you how to use the PPGR model as the main points.
But it helps to note that when we observe the preaching in Scripture, we do not find anyone mentioning main points.
What we do see is movement.
That’s what I want you to consider. Moving from a main point mindset to a movement mindset when approaching the sermon preparation process.
Every biblical, redemptive, practical sermon will have four movements. In our system, each of the four movements is represented by its own letter: P, P, G, and R.
- The first P stands for Principle.
- The second P stands for Problem.
- The G stands for Gospel.
- And the R stands for Response.
These four letters and the concepts they represent are the four movements of your sermon.
Every sermon. Every youth talk. Every morning staff devotion. Every wedding, funeral, and other special occasion sermon you'll preach.
PPGR.
Principle. Problem. Gospel. Response.
That is the framework we’ll use for outlining entire sermons in under an hour.
The more you practice, the less time you’ll need.
For fun, I took Paul’s letter to the Colossians to see how many complete sermon messages I could outline using the four simple movements.
I wrote twenty in ten days.
Each was explicitly connected to a specific text. Each had a real-life, “why we need to hear this message” problem to address with the gospel, which set up a very natural faith response that was tethered to the cross.
And not one outline took me over an hour to complete.
This is not a testimony to my experience or education. Not at all!
Twenty sermon outlines in ten days was possible because I had a preaching system.
Using the PPGR system, you’ll be able to create the narrative of an entire sermon on a napkin. Or even the back of a business card.
If this sounds simple, it is.
But don't get me wrong. Sermon prep is work.
But from experience, I think we've made it harder than it needs to be because we don’t follow a simple process.
You don’t get simpler than PPGR, where the work is defining how a text addresses each letter.
If you can do that, you’ve got a plug-and-play preaching system that is going to cause you to look forward to sermon prep more than ever before.
The simplicity and focus of the PPGR system are why designing an entire sermon series of pre-outlined messages can be accomplished in a matter of days.
A sermon that requires at least three, independent, creatively constructed developmental points takes far more time and lends itself to greater complexity than simply following four natural sermonic movements.
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