One Main Idea

Acts 8 tells of a royal official from the kingdom the Bible calls Ethiopia, which lay south of Egypt along the Nile in what is now Sudan, and whose queens bore the title Candace. He has travelled a very long way to worship in Jerusalem, and he is riding home reading Isaiah aloud, as ancient readers usually did. The Spirit sends Philip to the chariot, and Philip hears what he is reading and asks the question every preacher must ask of himself first: 'Do you understand what you are reading?' The man's reply is the plain admission of a thoughtful reader with no teacher: 'How can I,' he said, 'unless someone guides me?'

The passage he is reading is Isaiah 53:7-8, the servant led like a sheep to the slaughter, silent before his shearers, deprived of justice, his life removed from the earth. He has one question, and it is exact: 'Tell me,' said the eunuch, 'who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?' And then comes the verse this lesson is anchored on: 'Then Philip began with this very Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.' Philip begins where the text is. He answers the question the text raised. And he arrives at one message the man can act on, which he does at the first water they come to.

There is a lesson in the shape of that exchange before there is any method. The eunuch's question names what the passage is about: the identity of the suffering servant. Philip's answer completes it: the servant is Jesus. Everything Philip said on that road, and it was probably a great deal, served that one answer to that one question. Module 3 will take up the larger question of whether every sermon should arrive at Christ as directly as this one, which is a live debate. The point here is narrower and is not in dispute. A sermon that guides someone through a text must know where it is taking them.

A note on the passage, since a careful student will notice it. Your BSB goes straight from Acts 8:36 to 8:38. Verse 37, the eunuch's confession of faith, appears in later manuscripts and in the King James Version but not in the earliest manuscripts, and most modern translations leave it out of the text or place it in a footnote. It does not change the story, which in either form ends with a baptism and a man going on his way rejoicing.

The preacher who did most to teach a generation to find the main idea of a passage was Haddon W. Robinson, who taught preaching at Dallas Theological Seminary, served as president of Denver Seminary, and finished his career at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His textbook Biblical Preaching, first published in 1980, has been used in seminaries for over forty years. Robinson argued that an expository sermon communicates a single biblical concept, drawn from a passage studied in its context, which the Spirit applies first to the preacher and then through him to the hearers. Everything else in the sermon serves that concept.

He was not the first to say it. Robinson liked to quote J. H. Jowett, the English preacher, who said in his 1912 Yale lectures, The Preacher: His Life and Work, that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. Jowett added that getting that sentence was the hardest, most exacting and most fruitful labour of his study. Anyone who has tried will agree with the first adjective.

Robinson's contribution was to make the sentence teachable. An idea, he said, has two parts. The subject is the complete, exact answer to the question: what am I talking about? The complement is the answer to the second question: what am I saying about what I am talking about? A subject alone is not an idea. 'Prayer' is a topic, not a thought, and no one can disagree with it. 'Why prayer is necessary' is a subject. 'Prayer is necessary because without it we try to do God's work in our own strength' is an idea: a subject with a complement, something that could be true or false and that a hearer could take home.

The discipline is in the word exact. Take Mark 4:35-41, the passage worked in the last lesson. The subject 'Jesus' is too broad; the passage does not say everything about Jesus. 'How to face the storms of life' is the wrong subject; it is not what Mark is talking about. 'Who Jesus is, as shown when he stills the storm' is close. Then the complement: he is the one who commands the sea as only the LORD does, so his presence calls frightened disciples from fear of the storm to the fear of faith. Now there is an idea. You may find a better one. But you can test it against the text, which is the point.

Robinson also gave preachers three questions to develop the idea once it is found, and they are worth carrying for life. What does it mean? Some ideas need mainly to be explained. Is it true? Some need to be argued, because the hearers doubt them. What difference does it make? Some are already understood and believed, and need to be applied. A passage usually leans towards one of the three, and so should the sermon. Robinson's own term for them was developmental questions.

Robinson distinguished two statements of the idea, and the distinction is the bridge from the study to the pulpit. The exegetical idea states what the passage meant, in its own terms and its own time, in the past tense: the sentence you wrote at the end of the last lesson. The homiletical idea states the same truth for the people in front of you, in the present tense, in words they can remember. Some of Robinson's students and successors added an explicit middle step, a theological statement of the timeless truth the passage teaches, so that the move from then to now is made consciously. The Hermeneutics track calls this the bridge from then to now, and it warns about building it too high.

Here is the move made on Luke 15:1-7. The exegetical idea: Jesus answered the Pharisees and scribes, who grumbled that he welcomed sinners, by telling them that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous who do not need to repent, so that they should rejoice with him rather than complain. The theological idea: God rejoices over the repentance of the lost, and those who belong to him are called to share his joy rather than resent his welcome. The homiletical idea, for a particular congregation: when God brings home someone you would rather keep out, heaven is celebrating, and you are invited to the party.

Notice what changed and what did not. The words changed. The tense changed. The setting moved from Pharisees to us, and the homiletical idea names a temptation the congregation has, which is the bridge done honestly. What did not change is the shape of the thought: the subject is still God's response to the lost being found and ours, and the complement still contains the sharp edge, that the righteous are the ones who need to change. A homiletical idea that dropped the edge, say, God loves the lost, would be true, and would no longer be what this passage says.

It helps to see the failure the method was designed to prevent. Here is a sermon on Mark 4:35-41 that many congregations have heard. Point one: Jesus slept in the boat, so we too need rest. Point two: the disciples woke him, so we should bring our troubles to him in prayer. Point three: he calmed the storm, so he can calm the storms in your life. Every sentence is true, and each could be defended from somewhere in scripture. But the three points do not make one idea, they do not come from what Mark is doing, and the question on which the passage ends, who is this, never gets asked. The hearers go home with three pieces of advice and no encounter with the text. Robinson's discipline would stop that sermon at the first stage, because no single subject holds the three points together, and the subject that does hold the passage together is not in the outline at all.

The same discipline helps when a passage seems to have several ideas. Usually one of them governs the others. In Romans 15:1-7 there are commands to bear with the weak, to please the neighbour and to accept one another; there is Christ's example, a claim about scripture and a prayer for harmony. They are not seven ideas. The subject is how believers who differ should treat one another, and every part of the passage answers it: as Christ treated you, sustained by scripture, so that together you may glorify God. Finding the governing idea is not ignoring the rest of the passage. It is seeing how the rest of the passage holds together.

A good homiletical idea passes four tests. It can be said in one breath. It is something a hearer could disagree with, which means it actually asserts something. It would be recognised by the original author as a fair restatement of what he meant. And it is worded for the ear, not the page; module 4 takes this up in detail. It need not be clever. A plain sentence that is true to the text is better than a memorable one that is not.

The big idea has had serious critics, and a student should hear them as their own defenders would put the case, not as objections to be brushed aside.

The first criticism comes from what is called the New Homiletic, a movement in North American preaching from the late 1960s onward. Fred Craddock's As One Without Authority (1971) argued that traditional preaching was deductive: it announced its conclusion and then proved it, which left hearers with nothing to do but agree or disagree. Craddock proposed inductive preaching, in which the sermon travels with the hearers through the text and lets them arrive at its meaning, as Jesus' parables often do. Eugene Lowry's The Homiletical Plot (1980) and David Buttrick's Homiletic: Moves and Structures (1987) developed related alternatives. Their shared objection to the big idea is that it reduces a text to a proposition, and many texts are not propositions. A psalm of lament, a parable or the story of Joseph does not state an idea so much as create an experience, and a sermon that boils it down to one sentence may have kept the content and lost the power.

The second criticism comes from texts themselves. Some passages carry more than one thought, and forcing a single idea on them can distort as badly as preaching ten unrelated points. Long narratives develop several themes at once. Wisdom literature sometimes sets two truths side by side deliberately; Proverbs 26:4-5 tells you both not to answer a fool according to his folly and to answer him. A preacher who insists on one idea may simply choose the one he likes.

The third criticism is cultural. In many oral cultures, preachers carry a sermon's meaning in a refrain, a proverb, a sung line or a story told and retold, rather than in a stated thesis, and some argue that the subject and complement reflect a literate, Western way of organising thought. The African American preaching tradition, discussed in module 1, often builds to a celebration rather than to a proposition, and its hearers remember it for decades.

The defenders answer each point, and their answers are also strong. Robinson himself insisted that the idea does not have to be stated at the start; a sermon can be inductive, holding back its idea until the end, and still be governed by it. The idea is not the sermon; it is what the sermon is about, and even a sermon shaped as an experience must be about something the preacher can name. On the second point, they argue that even a complex passage has a centre, and that finding it is the work of exegesis rather than an imposition on it. On the third, they point out that a refrain or a proverb is itself a main idea in memorable form, and that hearers in every culture struggle to retain a sermon that goes in five directions.

The critics have a reply of their own, and it should be heard too. A sermon that holds its idea back until the end, they say, is still built to deliver a proposition, so the form of the text still ends up serving a sentence the preacher has extracted. Being able to name what a sermon is about is not the same as reducing what it does to that sentence. A parable that leaves its hearers caught and silent has done its work even if no one can state its thesis afterwards. Neither side, then, is defending a sermon without content or a sermon without shape. They disagree about which of the two should govern the other.

Thomas Long's The Witness of Preaching (1989) offers a widely used middle path. Long asks the preacher to write two sentences rather than one: a focus statement, saying what the sermon will be about, and a function statement, saying what the sermon hopes to do in the hearers, whether to comfort, warn, call to action or lead to praise. The function statement answers the critics' point that texts do things as well as say things, while the focus statement keeps the unity Robinson insisted on. What is settled across these positions is this: a preacher must know what the passage is saying and what it is for, and the message must come from the text, not be brought to it. What remains open is how that message should be stated and how early the hearers should hear it.

Now turn to your own passage, with the notebook pages from the last lesson open beside you. This step usually takes longer than any other in sermon preparation, and Jowett was right that it is the most fruitful. Do not hurry it.

First, write the subject as a question. Look at your exegetical sentence and ask: what exactly is this passage talking about? Write the answer as a question beginning with a word like why, how, who, what or when: who is the one the sea obeys? why should the righteous rejoice over sinners? Then test it. Is it too broad, so that the passage does not say everything about it? Is it too narrow, so that half the passage is left out? Rewrite it until it fits.

Second, write the complement as the passage's answer to that question. Then put the two together into a single sentence in the past tense, about the original hearers. That is your exegetical idea. Check it against every verse of your passage: does each part of the passage contribute to this idea, or support it, or illustrate it? If a large part of the passage does not, either your idea is too small or your passage is two units.

Third, write the homiletical idea: the same truth, in the present tense, for the people you expect to preach to, in words you could say aloud in one breath. Write five versions, and read each aloud. Keep the one that is truest to the text, not the cleverest. Then, following Long, write one more sentence beneath it: what do you hope this sermon will do in your hearers? Leave that sentence provisional. The last lesson of this module will sharpen it by asking what need in them the text was written to meet.