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The Smart Sermon System

03. Thirdly, you get the 6-Video Course. Each video is about twenty minutes. One per element, plus one for the weaving rhythm, plus one for the weekly prep-system. You can watch the whole thing in one afternoon, or one video per day for a week.

The Smart Sermon System

For pastors and lay preachers who want their next sermon to be worth showing up for

There is a formula for a good sermon

There is a formula for a good sermon

You know the feeling.

It is the evening before preaching and the sermon is not ready.

You have notes. You have a passage. You have a rough shape.

You do not have the sermon.

You look at what you have and you know, honestly, that this is the version of you the congregation will get tomorrow.

The tired one. The scrambling one. The one who read one commentary instead of three, borrowed one story from a podcast instead of finding a better one in real life, and settled for an appeal that is really just a summary with the word "so" in front of it.

You will preach it. It will be fine. Nobody will complain.

Nobody will remember it either.

DEAR PASTOR

Intellectual. The congregation should have the experience "wow, I did not know that, that was interesting" several times during every sermon. That interesting thing is almost always sitting in a good commentary you have not opened yet.

Practical. Draw the lesson out of the text, not force it onto it. Then land it in a real appeal. We need our sermons to challenge our congregations, to change lives. Preaching that makes the Bible relevant for everyday life.

"I know I'm called to preach. I love the Word. But week after week, I feel like I'm leaving something on the table. Like my sermons are falling short of what they could be, and I don't know what to fix."

 — How many pastors have described this to me 
over 30 years of ministry

Todd Ervin

From preachers who have used it:

John Weigelt

Roly Rodriguez

Here is what you will get

02. Secondly, you get the weekly Sermon Prep Rhythm. The five-day workbook, Monday to Friday. Thirty minutes per day. What to do on each day, in what order, and what to stop doing. The trap of researching too early and applying too late. How to build the sermon in layers so it has time to breathe. How to carry a finished sermon into the preaching day, with no scramble the evening before.

01. First of all, you get The Formula. The four elements. The two-minute weaving rhythm. How to spot which elements you are underserving in your recent sermons. Where to find an interesting learning-nugget for every text you preach. How to make the Bible relevant and practical. Which stories work, which ones do not, and why analogies are the weakest forms of illustrations.

Frequently Asked Questions

You get access to the Formula, the PDF Workbook and Smart Sermon System Video Training.

PLUS you get 7 more courses on preaching, Bible teaching, and running Bible groups for just $7/month. 

You can cancel any time.

You are busy with ministry.

Ten hours of counselling this week. Six hours admin. Four hospital visits. An elders' meeting and a committee meeting. A funeral. Your kids' bedtimes. 

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the thing you were ordained to do.

The thing you understand as your calling.

The thing that is supposed to be first: Being a Minister of the Word.

You are not lazy. You are not short on passion. And you did not stop caring.

What you lack is a repeatable and doable process for preparing the sermon, and what to put into it.

As a pastor preaching for years, and as a theology professor training pastors for ministry, I have spent a lot of time finding a system for sermon prep and for sermon content that works.

This page is about what I found.

There is a formula. It is not new. Faithful preachers across two thousand years have used a version of it, and the ones whose sermons still get read today used all of it, most of the time.

I first saw it up close as a university student in England. I heard John Stott preach at All Souls, Langham Place in London. There was no mediocrity in that pulpit. No boring sermon. Ever. Week after week, biblical preaching that changed the people who heard it.

I was young, and I assumed the man was simply one of a kind.

I have spent much of my life since learning that I was wrong. What Stott did had parts. Spurgeon had the same parts. The Wesley brothers had them. And the parts can be learnt.

The Real Reason Your Sermons Aren't Landing the Way You Know They Should

Every sermon needs a good dose of these four elements.

The formula is: you want every sermon you preach to be solidly biblical, intellectually interesting, practically relevant, and emotionally inspiring. 

The 4 pillars of power-preaching.

Biblical. Read Scripture aloud with the congregation. A lot. Not just a few verses. At least ten or twenty verses. And do not bounce off reading a verse and straight back into your own talk without explaining the text. You need to stay 'in the Word' with your congregation and unpack what the Word of God says and what it means.

Introducing the Smart Sermon System: 
The 4-Element Framework That Every 
Powerful Biblical Sermon Needs

Emotional. Tell real stories. Nothing is as inspiring as hearing a real-life story about Christians who tried to live out the Bible. It can be a story of frustration and failure. Or slowly making it. Life as Christians can be messy, but real stories are always inspiring, it helps show what the implications of Scripture are for life today.

Now the part that changes everything.

These four elements are not four sections of a sermon. They are woven, roughly a couple of minutes at a time, cycling back and forth between the four elements from the first minute to the last. 

You might read a few verses (#biblical). You explain for a few minutes what is in the text, something they might not already know (#intellectual). Then make it relevant for life today (#practical). Maybe back to another round of verses, explanation, application. Then a touching story relevant to the lesson (#emotional). And revisit the application, and the Bible text.

Then reading some new verses, and so on.

The dynamic rhythm is the mechanism. Sermons that stack the elements in linear blocks feel like a lecture with a story on top. Sermons that weave them dynamically like a dance feel alive.

And the preparation that makes weaving possible does not happen on the day of.

It happens in five 30-minute steps during the week.

Monday you reflect on the passages. Tuesday you research - the longest step, and the one most preachers skip. Wednesday you find the practical application and the appeal. Thursday you find your stories. Friday you assemble.

By the time the day of preaching arrives, the sermon has had five days to breathe. You have had five days to be worked on by it. The Holy Spirit has had five days to speak - not one hour in a panic.

This is the difference between a sermon you delivered and a biblical sermon that delivered you.

The Smart Sermon System is the four elements and the five-day rhythm, taught in a way you can start using this Monday.

This is not a preaching seminar.
This is not a theology refresher.
This is not a homiletics textbook.

This is a working pastor's system for producing a sermon that is biblical, interesting, useful, and moving - every week, in the time you actually have.

The workbook and the video training lives inside Bibloy.com, my online membership for believers who take the Bible seriously. Bibloy is a growing library of courses for Bible-based Christians and leaders, and Smart Sermon is our flagship course.

The formula is included. So is the 6-video course, the daily workbook, and the rest of the Bibloy library while you are inside.

For $7 a month, when you join the membership.

About Reimar Vetne

My name is Reimar. I hold a PhD in New Testament from Andrews University. I have served as a pastor in Norway and in Denmark, and I taught theology at universities in Mexico and California - twenty-one different college courses over six years.

I have built my working life on one conviction: spiritual revival starts at the pulpit. Too many congregations are being underfed from the Word of God. Not because their preachers do not care, and not because they do not love God. Because nobody handed them a repeatable way of making the Bible come alive in a sermon that feeds all the spiritual needs of the congregation.

But the best evidence I have that this system works is not my resume.

A while back I taught a college class on the letters of Paul. Not theology students - chemistry majors, nursing students, a couple of business and English majors. For most of them, it was the first time they had ever stood up and talked about the Bible out loud in front of other people.

I gave them one recipe. Read a couple of verses. Tell the class something genuinely interesting you found in a commentary from the library. Draw one practical lesson out of the text. Finish with a relevant short story from your own life.

Then, during the semester, each of them gave an eight-minute devotional in front of the class.

They sounded like they had been preaching for years.

The recipe did the work - four elements, works every time.

If a nursing student can do it on the first try, a called preacher can too.

They were not more anointed. They were not more gifted. They followed the recipe.

If it works for a nursing student who has never opened a commentary, this system will work for you.

Reimar Vetne (PhD, New Testament)
Your preaching coach

This Is for You If...

• You preach most weeks, whether as a pastor, an elder, or a lay preacher, and you want a repeatable process
  
  
• You are seminary-trained and you know something is missing but the seminary never named it
  
  
• You are self-taught, you never went to seminary, and the pulpit is still yours to steward well
  
  
• You have thirty minutes a day across the working week. You do not have a free day to give it
  
  
• You suspect your sermons are flat, and you want to know exactly what to fix rather than "try harder"
  
  
• You believe the Bible is central to Christian life, and you want your preaching to reflect that
  

Ok, let's put this in perspective...

You will preach again next week. That is not in question.

The question is whether next week's sermon will be built the way this week's was, or built differently.

If you keep doing what you have been doing, the evening before preaching will keep looking like the evening before preaching. And the sermon will keep sounding the way it always has.

Think about what a year of that costs. You will preach dozens of sermons in the next twelve months - maybe thirty or forty. Prepared the old way, that is the same scramble forty more times, and forty sermons that were fine and forgettable.

The same year, prepared differently, is forty chances for the Word to do its work in your congregation.

Nobody gets that year back. Not you, and not the people who sat through it.

If you want a different kind of preparation, and a different kind of biblical sermons, there is a formula. It has four elements and a weekly rhythm. It works for university students in California and it will work for you.

Here is what happens next. You join the membership, create your account, and log in. The Smart Sermon System with the formula, the workbook and the videos are right there, in the left-hand menu.

Underneath are all the other courses - how to run a bible-based group, the Gospel of John verse by verse, and the rest of them.

If it is not the right time for you, the door to Bibloy is always open. You can join any time you want. I hope your next sermon is your best one yet.

- Reimar Vetne

Just $7/month. You can cancel any time.