The most consequential decision in sermon preparation happens before you write a single word. It is the moment you choose — or are given — your text.
That choice shapes everything that follows: the theology you will explore, the congregation's emotional journey, the demands you will make of them, the grace you will offer them. Choosing a text carelessly is like choosing a destination carelessly — you may end up somewhere, but not necessarily somewhere worth going.
The best preachers develop a theology of text selection. They have thought carefully about why they preach what they preach, how they choose what they choose, and how to trust that the Spirit is at work both in the choosing and in the proclamation. This guide is meant to help you develop that theology in practical terms.
The Four Sources of Text Selection
There are essentially four sources from which a preaching text may be drawn, and each has its own logic, gifts, and dangers.
1. Sequential Expository Preaching
Many of the strongest preaching ministries in the world are built around a simple commitment: we preach through books of the Bible, one passage at a time, in sequence. This approach has several profound advantages.
It removes the anxiety of text selection for most of the year. It ensures the congregation encounters the full breadth of biblical teaching rather than the preacher's favorite themes. It builds a culture in which Scripture is genuinely trusted to set the agenda. And it creates the conditions for depth — congregations who have been through Ephesians together, or through the Gospel of Luke, share a common vocabulary and a deepened biblical literacy.
The limitation of sequential preaching is that it cannot always respond to urgent pastoral moments. If your community is reeling from a tragedy, preaching the next passage in Romans may feel tone-deaf. The sequential preacher needs to hold the commitment to the text loosely enough to respond to the congregation's actual season.
2. Lectionary-Based Selection
The Christian lectionary — whether the Revised Common Lectionary or another tradition's version — offers a different gift: connection to the universal church across time and space. When you preach from the lectionary, you are preaching the same texts as thousands of other congregations around the world on the same Sunday. There is a humility and a catholicity in that.
The lectionary also ensures balance. Over three years, it covers an enormous range of Scripture — including passages most preachers would never choose on their own. The discomfort of preaching texts you didn't choose is, again, one of the lectionary's gifts.
3. Pastoral and Contextual Selection
Sometimes the pastoral moment determines the text. A community reeling from violence needs to hear from the Psalms of lament. A congregation navigating a painful church conflict needs Paul's instructions on unity. A season of rapid growth and change calls for biblical wisdom on transition and trust.
This kind of selection requires pastoral attentiveness — a deep knowledge of where your congregation actually is, not where you assume they are. It also requires genuine biblical range. The pastor who only knows ten passages will find pastoral text selection very limiting. The pastor who has spent years with the whole Bible will find that almost every pastoral moment has a text that speaks directly into it.
4. Personal and Spiritual Formation
Preachers who are reading widely and living deeply in Scripture will regularly encounter texts that will not let them go. A passage that has been troubling your prayer life, illuminating your own spiritual struggle, or cracking open a theological question you've been carrying — that is often the text the congregation most needs to hear, because it has been preached in your own soul before it was preached from your pulpit.
There is a difference between a preacher speaking from experience and a preacher making their experience the sermon. The former draws from the well of personal encounter with the text. The latter makes the congregation spectators in someone else's story. The distinction is important, but the principle stands: your own genuine wrestling with Scripture is a legitimate and often powerful source for sermon texts.
How to Evaluate a Potential Text
When you are considering a text, ask these questions before committing to it.
Does this text have a clear, unified main point? Every strong sermon is built on a passage with a clear theological claim. If a passage is so theologically dense that you cannot identify a single main point, it may need to be split across multiple sermons, or you may need to narrow your pericope.
Does this text speak to where my congregation actually is? This is not the same as asking whether the text is comfortable or easy. The text may be confrontational. But there is a difference between a text that is prophetically uncomfortable and a text that is simply irrelevant to the congregation's current season.
Have I been tempted to avoid this text? If so, that is probably a sign you should preach it. The texts that make preachers anxious are often the texts that carry the most transformative power — because they are the texts that have exposed the preacher's own inadequacy, pride, or unbelief.
Is there a reason this text has been preserved in Scripture at this point in the biblical story? Canonical context matters. Understanding why a text exists in its location within the larger story of Scripture often unlocks its deepest meaning.
Thinking in Series Rather Than Single Sermons
Experienced preachers think not only in individual texts but in series. A well-planned sermon series creates sustained engagement with a theme or book over multiple weeks, building momentum and depth in ways that individual stand-alone sermons cannot.
When selecting texts for a series, the governing question is: What sustained theme or book will most serve this congregation in this season? The answer requires both theological discernment and pastoral knowledge.
Series built around a book of the Bible give the expository preacher their best framework. Series built around a theme or question can serve specific congregational needs beautifully but require careful planning to ensure the texts genuinely illuminate the theme rather than being pressed into service.
A Word About Preaching What You Have Not Yet Lived
One final thought: preachers are sometimes called to preach texts they have not yet arrived at. You may preach on trusting God in suffering before you have faced your own deepest suffering. You may preach on forgiveness before you have had to forgive something that truly cost you.
This is not hypocrisy. It is the nature of preaching as proclamation — declaring the truth of God's word ahead of your own experience, trusting that it will be true when the test comes. The key is honesty. Preaching with the humility to say "I am still learning to live this" is not weakness. It is integrity.
Tools like RhemaAI can assist you in exploring potential texts, mapping series ideas, and understanding the canonical context of passages you are considering — so that your selection process is informed by the fullest possible understanding of what each text is doing in Scripture. But the final choice is a pastoral one, made in prayer, attentiveness, and dependence on the Spirit who gave us the Word.