How to prepare a sermon, start to finish

There are as many ways to prepare a sermon as there are preachers. But the core work is always the same: you sit with a passage of Scripture until it speaks, and then you help others hear it too.

Biblelexical was built for this rhythm. Here is a walk through one way to use it for sermon preparation: from choosing your text to standing in the pulpit.

1. Start with the passage

Open the reader and find your text. Read it slowly, in more than one translation if you have them installed. Let the passage land before you start working on it. What surprises you? What confuses you? What repeats?

Use highlights to mark the verses that stand out. Do not overthink which colour. Just mark them. You can organise later. The point is to leave a trail of what caught your attention on the first few readings.

2. Go word by word

This is where an app with original-language tools changes everything. Tap the key words in your passage: the ones you might preach on, the ones that seem ambiguous, the ones you think you already understand.

For each word, look at:

• The original Hebrew or Greek. What does it look like in its own alphabet?
• The transliteration. How is it pronounced?
• The Strong's number. Where else does this word appear in Scripture? Tap it in cross-references to see.
• The lexicon definition. Is the English translation capturing the full meaning, or is there a richer sense underneath?

You do not need to be a scholar to do this. The app puts everything beside the verse, so you learn a little more each time. A single word study can open up a whole sermon you did not know was there.

3. Follow the threads

Use cross-references to see where your passage connects to the rest of Scripture. A verse in the Gospels might echo a prophet. A phrase in Paul might quote the Psalms. Following those threads turns a isolated passage into part of God's whole story.

Commentaries can help here too. Biblelexical includes Wesley, Henry, Gill, Calvin, and others, free to download and read right beside the verse. They are conversation partners, not authorities. Read them, note what resonates, and set aside what does not.

4. Write in the same space

Now open the editor and start writing. Do not switch apps. Do not copy verses into a separate document. Write with the text right there.

When you need to reference a verse, tap the insert button and find it by book, chapter, and verse, or search the whole Bible by a word. The verse appears in your text as a clean, linked reference, styled and easy to find later. This keeps your sermon connected to Scripture in a way that copy-paste never does.

Write the introduction last. You will not know how to start until you know what you are saying.

5. Let it sit

A sermon written in one sitting is rarely a sermon worth preaching in one sitting. Come back the next day. Read it aloud. Does it sound like you? Does it sound like the text?

Biblelexical keeps your sermons organised in a library, grouped however you like. You can search them by title, see which verses you quote most across all your sermons, and open any of them in seconds. A sermon you preached last year is not lost; it is a resource for the next one.

6. Preach from your phone

On Sunday morning, open the sermon in the app. The text is formatted cleanly, the verses are linked, and everything works offline. No worrying about whether the church wifi will hold up. No bright screen with distracting notifications. Just your preparation and the Word.