Smart Sermon System

4 elements in every sermon.

Preparation: Thirty minutes a day, Monday to Friday.
No more scrambling the evening before preaching.

Preparation that feeds you as well as your congregation.

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Dear Pastor

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.

"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

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

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.

Introducing the Smart Sermon System

The 4-Element Framework That Every Powerful Biblical Sermon Needs

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.

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.

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.

The Smart Sermon formula: biblical, intellectual, practical, emotional

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.

Three things this daily rhythm does for you:

First of all, it helps you find the time. By cutting up sermon prep in smaller bites it becomes easier to do.

Secondly, it makes sure all four vital elements end up in the sermon, so the end-product that you stand up to deliver is actually interesting and life-transforming. Monday keeps you in the text. Tuesday produces the interesting insight. Wednesday produces the application. Thursday produces the story. You are not hoping the four elements turn up on the day. The week builds them in.

And third, the one most preachers do not expect: it puts the fun back into sermon preparation. For many, these daily half-hours become the favorite part of the day. When you take away the stress of assembling a sermon at the last minute, preparing a biblical message becomes fulfilling and exciting again. This habit will feed your own mind and soul in ways you may have forgotten were possible, after years of letting urgent tasks drown out your own time in the Word.

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.

Reimar Vetne (PhD, New Testament)
Your preaching coach

Join Bibloy for $7/month Cancel any time. 14-day money-back guarantee.

From preachers who have used it

Best preaching resource I have ever used

Roly Rodriguez

"Smart Sermon is one of the best preaching resources that I have ever used. Not only did it help me as a pastor to deliver sermons that were more focused and true to the original text, but it was my go to training resource.

My elders approached me in training them in how to preach the word. I used the principles of Smart Sermon and I currently have 4 elders that are preaching biblically based sermons. One of them had spent 33 years in the church and had never participated in any church function. He came to the training and the Smart Sermon book gave him the confidence to preach the word. Not only does he participate now, but he is an active leader who preaches the Word in our preaching rotation and is starting a prayer ministry in his job from Monday-Friday."

Love your training!

Todd Ervin

"Absolutely, positively love your training!! We ministers need all the tools that we can get and to keep our tools polished!"

Very practical

John Weigelt

"Thank you - very practical. I will be passing this training on to some of those I am working with on sermon preparation."

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.

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.

Here is what you will get

01

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.

02

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.

03

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 course on a tablet

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.

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

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

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

14 Days Money Back Guarantee

If this training does not make your congregation more excited with your preaching, or you are unhappy for any reason at all, contact us by email for an immediate refund.

Reimar Vetne

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this really enough of a system to change my preaching, or is it just another framework?

You do not need another framework. You need the four elements and the weekly rhythm you can hold on to for the next fifty-two weeks. The mechanism is deliberately small. That is what makes it survive contact with a Tuesday.

I do not consider myself the academic type. Do I have to read commentaries?

Yes, but not for you. For the congregation. They want to learn something they did not know before, and a commentary is where you find it. Thirty minutes on Tuesday is enough.

I am not a storyteller. Will the emotional element work for me?

Yes. Storytelling is a skill, and the system teaches it. You do not need to be gifted. You need to know where to look for real events, and how to shape them. Analogy is the weakest form. Real event is stronger. Real event that happened to a Christian wrestling with your text is strongest of all.

My congregation is not that intellectual. Will this fit them?

Every congregation is interested in what they do not already know. Down-to-earth folks love to learn about the Bible as much as anyone else. The intellectual element is not a seminary lecture. It is one thing they did not know about the passage, and why it matters to them.

I am bi-vocational. Do I really have thirty minutes a day?

You have thirty minutes a day. You already spend more than that scrambling on the evening before preaching. This system moves the work from one long panic to five short sittings. Same total time. Better sermon.

Does this work for someone without a seminary degree?

Yes. Many of the preachers this serves were never seminary-trained, and the California student evidence is the point. The system does the work. You bring the honesty and the thirty minutes.

How is this different from a preaching podcast or a sermon prep newsletter?

Podcasts and newsletters give you inspiration and other people's outlines. This gives you a mechanism to build your own, from your text, every week.

What else is inside Bibloy?

Smart Sermon is the flagship course and the door I recommend walking through first. Around it sits a growing library of courses on the Christian life - prayer, time with God, reading Scripture well - plus the community. Stay for the library, or cancel the day you finish the course. Both are honest uses of $7.

What happens if I cancel?

You cancel. No hoops, no talking you out of it. The book, the workbook, and anything you downloaded are yours to keep. And if you are within the first fourteen days, write to me and I will refund you personally. The door stays open if you ever want to join the membership again.

Join Bibloy for $7/month

There is a formula for a good sermon