Roughly forty percent of the Old Testament is narrative. The Gospels are fundamentally story. The book of Acts reads like a great travel narrative punctuated by speeches. If you cannot preach narrative well, you cannot preach the Bible well. It is that simple.
Yet narrative passages are among the most commonly mishandled texts in the evangelical pulpit. The failures tend to cluster around two opposite errors. Some preachers moralize narrative — they reduce David and Goliath to five smooth stones and a lesson about facing your giants. Others simply retell the story with color and energy but never arrive anywhere theologically. Neither approach does justice to what these texts are actually doing.
Biblical narrative is not illustration for doctrine. It is doctrine — presented in the most humanly compelling form available. Learning to preach it well is one of the most important skills a preacher can develop.
Understand What Biblical Narrative Is Doing
The first step is understanding the purpose of biblical narrative. These stories are not preserved in Scripture simply because they are interesting or because they model good behavior. They are preserved because they reveal the character, purposes, and activity of God. The primary protagonist in every biblical story is not the human being at the center but the God who is working through and around that human being.
This changes the exegetical question you bring to every narrative. The question is not primarily "What should I learn from David?" or "How can I be more like Joseph?" The question is "What does this story reveal about God — about who he is, how he acts, what he values, and where he is taking his redemptive purposes?"
That reorientation is not a minor adjustment. It is the difference between preaching the Bible and using the Bible as a source of biographical moralism.
Do the Narrative Exegesis
Narrative exegesis looks different from epistle exegesis, and preachers who apply identical methods to both will miss what the narrative is doing.
Identify the scene structure. Biblical stories have scenes — discrete units of action with a setting, characters, and movement. Map these carefully. Where does one scene end and another begin? What changes between scenes?
Track the plot movement. Every narrative has a complication — a problem, a tension, a gap between what is and what should be — and a resolution. Identify both. The theology of the narrative often lives in how the complication is resolved, and by whom.
Notice what the narrator emphasizes. Biblical narrators are extremely economical. When they give you two verses of description, pay attention. When they repeat a phrase, they are telling you something is important. When they slow down and add detail, they are drawing your eye to something significant.
Follow the characters' relationships with God. In biblical narrative, the most theologically significant movement is almost always in the vertical relationship — what is happening between the character and God? Where is faith? Where is failure? Where is mercy arriving without being deserved?
Read the story in its canonical context. Where does this narrative fit in the larger biblical story? How does it contribute to the movement from creation to redemption? What does it anticipate? What does it fulfill?
Find the Theological Center
Once you have done the narrative exegesis, your task is to identify the theological center — the claim about God and his ways that this story most fundamentally establishes.
This is not the moral of the story. It is the theological truth the story enacts. In the Joseph narrative, the theological center is not "keep your integrity when you are mistreated." It is something like "God's sovereign purposes advance through human suffering and betrayal to accomplish a rescue far larger than any individual could imagine." The former is a maxim. The latter is the Gospel in embryo.
Your sermon's Big Idea should grow directly from this theological center. And it should be a complete sentence — subject and complement — that captures both what the text is saying and what it demands of the listener.
Choose Your Sermon Structure
Here is where preaching narrative gets genuinely interesting, because the structure of your sermon can mirror the structure of the story itself.
One powerful approach is to follow the narrative sequence, building tension as the story builds tension and delivering theological commentary at the moments of greatest significance. This structure allows the story's own dramatic logic to carry the sermon's energy. You are not fighting the text's momentum — you are riding it.
Another approach is to open the sermon with the theological question or tension the story addresses, then use the narrative to answer that question. This is more explicitly didactic but can be very effective when the theological question is one your congregation is actually asking.
A third approach, particularly useful with familiar stories, is to begin by subverting your congregation's assumptions — showing them something in the familiar story they have never noticed or considered — and then unpacking the implications of that fresh observation. This approach honors both the intelligence of your congregation and the inexhaustibility of Scripture.
Preach the Story, Don't Just Reference It
One of the most common failures in narrative preaching is treating the story as a starting point that the sermon quickly leaves behind. The preacher spends two minutes summarizing the story and then thirty minutes on theological exposition that could have come from any number of texts.
Preach the story. Stay in it. Let the narrative do the work. Bring the characters to life not for entertainment but because character and scene carry the theology in ways that abstractions cannot.
This means using the present tense. It means describing scenes vividly enough that your congregation can see them. It means naming the emotions and motivations and tensions that the text surfaces — not inventing them, but drawing them out.
But it also means knowing when to step outside the story to make the theological point explicit. The preacher who never surfaces from the narrative leaves the congregation moved but not necessarily taught. The preacher who surfaces too often breaks the story's power. Learning the balance is part of the art.
Connect to Christ and His Gospel
Every Old Testament narrative ultimately participates in the larger story that reaches its climax in Jesus. The preacher's job is to trace that connection — not artificially, but authentically, following the canonical thread that biblical theology provides.
This does not mean every sermon about David needs to end with "and Jesus is the greater David." It means asking genuinely where this story fits in the movement toward the cross and resurrection, and what the cross and resurrection say back to this story. That dialogue between Old Testament narrative and New Testament fulfillment is where some of the most profound preaching lives.
Tools like RhemaAI can help you trace intertextual connections in narrative passages, identify where the theological themes of a story echo forward into the New Testament, and develop the structural outline for a narrative sermon — giving you more of your preparation time for the prayerful, imaginative reading that narrative preaching requires.
Biblical stories have been changing lives for three thousand years. They will change lives in your congregation too — if you trust them enough to let them breathe.