After yesterday’s sermon, we want to do what we can to help you take a next step to protect your heart. Because remember: sin is not just what you do with your body, it’s what you do with your heart!

- www.xxxchurch.com – Website full of resources for men, women, parents, teens, and more. Many helpful articles and next-steps.
- www.x3watch.com – Free accountability software for your computers and smart phones. Not a filter or blocker. A Pro version is available for cheap and has many other features.
- www.x3pure.com – 30-day, online workshops to help parents learn how to help their children, or to help men and women who may struggle with pornography issues. Can’t afford it? OneLife will pay half. Email pastor@onelifeknox.com.
- Safe Eyes – An internet filter that is great to protect kids, but also protect grown ups too!
- Passport2Purity – A weekend guide to having “The Talk” with your kids. Everything you need is provided for you in this easy-to-use guide.
- Every Man’s Battle – A book that has become the “textbook” of sorts for men to learn more about the battle we all face in this area.
- Every Young Man’s Battle – Similar to the book above, but targeted specifically for young, single, Christian men.
- Every Woman’s Battle – Discovering God’s plan for emotional and sexual fulfillment.

Yesterday’s sermon was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to preach and definitely the heaviest. The topic of divorce is one that – in my opinion – requires a delicate balance of truth and grace. Truth so that those in marriage or considering marriage will understand the seriousness and sanctity that God intends, while those who are divorced or going through a divorce understand they are not condemned (Romans 8:1) and that His grace is more than sufficient.

If you would like to read more of what I found in studying, check these out. There are various views represented, all from respected Bible scholars and pastors who hold the Bible in high regard.

- Mark Driscoll and Resurgence – A position paper by Resurgence, led by Pastor Mark Driscoll. By far the most in depth and comprehensive study on divorce in the Bible that can be read in a quick sitting.
- John Piper – A position paper by John Piper and Bethlehem Baptist Church. This view holds to a strict interpretation that no remarriage is permissible following divorce while both spouses are alive.
- John Murray – An author whose book on divorce and remarriage has been held by some as a standard for the argument that remarriage can be biblically permissible in certain cases.

A few days ago I shared the three things I strive for in each sermon. It must be biblical, memorable (one point!), and have a clear next step. Sometimes we hit a homerun on this and other times we evaluate and realize it could have been better. Oftentimes these evaluations carry over into what we should fix in the process. So what’s the process?

Glad you asked!

Series ideas come out of lots of prayer and God revealing what our church needs to focus on next. I usually plan sermon series six months at a time so we always know what is coming ahead. We then have an incredible creative process led by our Creative Director Tyler Goode. I give him my my rough ideas, bottom line for the series, and individual sermon points. He then takes a team through the process of coming up with series titles, stage designs, creative elements, sermon titles, song ideas, and anything else that could come from the series.

Before this creative meeting takes place I fill out a questionnaire that lets Tyler and his team know what each week of that series will cover, the scriptures we will use, and what I hope to communicate. I then take that information, combine it with the creative elements Tyler’s team comes up with, and turn it in to individual sermons. My process to get there starts with studying the scripture. This includes studying the Greek and Hebrew, reading commentaries, articles, and blogs, and listening to other sermons that deal with the text. That info then gets boiled down to only what will point to the main idea of the sermon, which means a lot of good stuff gets left out! The final step is organizing it in a way that will create tension, tell a story, and apply to every person at OneLife.

So OneLifers, as you can see we love you and what we do so much that by the time you hear a 35 minute sermon, a lot of hard work has gone in to making sure people far from God can discover him and how their one life can make a difference. And unlike a lot of churches, we have a team working to make it happen, not just one guy!

This process has evolved over the past 21 months thanks to the help of lots of other great churches and pastors. We constantly evaluate the process and are always learning, so I’m sure it will look even more different another 21 months from now.

But for now, that’s our process behind the sermons.

This post started radically different and half-way through I realized a change of course was needed. Instead of just doing one blog post about sermons at OneLife, I’m going to make this a little series. Lots of people ask me about how we decide to do certain sermons so I hope this will help answer that. And if nothing else, it will force me to think through what we do to see if we can do it even better!

When we started OneLife 21 months ago, there was key point that was important to me in this department: teach less for more! I’ve sat in literally thousands of church services in my life and can only remember a few sermons. Something’s wrong with that! The ones that I can remember were simple, biblical, and applicable. So here’s what I strive for, and this is what I ask some guys to keep me accountable to doing each week.

1. Stick to the Bible! There’s nothing that I hate worse than to hear some guy go on and on in a sermon about their opinion in an area. I want to know something with authority. So it is important to me that the meat of every sermon be based straight out of the Bible. That’s why 9 times out of 10 we will focus on just one passage of scripture to answer that day’s topic (yes, most sermons are expository because expository does NOT mean exclusively going through an entire book of the Bible at one time! But that’s another soapbox blog post for another day…). We dig deep into that passage to see what God wants us to know from His Word.

2. One point is all they need. I read a book that dramatically changed my view on this called Communicating for Change. In it the author, Andy Stanley, challenges preachers that have multiple points to break those points down into sermons and use what was just one sermon and make it a series. We did that recently with our Unstoppable series. Each sermon was about the importance of sharing your faith with those who don’t yet believe. But instead of throwing four points out at once, we focused each week on a different point and drove down deep. The results were people actually doing what the Bible says to do! PS…this usually means a sermon won’t be more than about 35 minutes long, which is a win-win for everyone! (I’ve never heard someone say “Man, I wish that guy had preached LONGER.” And those nursery volunteers start hating long-winded preachers after a while!) Not to mention, most of Jesus’ sermons were pretty simple and to the point. Again, another blog post for another day!

3. Make it doable. The last two things I always ask myself about a sermon before it gets preached is “So what?” and “Now what?” By asking “so what?” I am making sure that this topic won’t just be intellectual knowledge. The last thing people need is more trivia to remember. They need to know what in the world it has to do with them. Then the “now what?” makes sure there is a clear, next step for people to do something with what they’ve heard.

Improving in the area of sermon preparation and delivery is something I am in the midst of every week. My sermons are evaluated by one of my mentors, I read books about communication, and I listen to lots of other preachers. So I’m sure this will change as I get older. But for now, this is what we strive for at OneLife. And over the next few days, I’ll share how we get there each week with a little behind the scenes look!

In 20 months as a church, it just so happens that we’ve done 20 series of sermons. Some have been short, two-week series. Some have been longer, as long as seven weeks. We’ve covered everything from Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll to a study of Joseph from the Old Testament. All of them have had their own unique qualities.

But none – in my opinion – have been as life-changing as the most recent one we just finished. A series called “I am Unstoppable.”

The point of this series is that every person who calls themselves a follower of Christ has been put on a mission to change the world. And it’s a mission that Jesus promised would be unstoppable. It’s one that simply won’t fail. The main weapon he chose to use is the power of a story, a story of changed lives thanks to a Savior who paid a price we could never pay for ourselves. 11 guys were left on Earth with this story and the results 2,000 years later are nothing short of amazing. Now we play a part in writing the rest of that story.

Some of the highlights of this series over the past five weeks have been:

- More than 30 people gave their lives to Jesus! They now have an incredible story to tell. They are now unstoppable!
- More people than ever are getting plugged in to the local church. Dozens of new volunteers are in line to start making a difference at OneLife and nearly 20 new people just completed the Partnership process.
- Life-change isn’t just happening on Sundays. Literally every week we heard stories of people who were in conversations throughout the week that led to them giving up control of their life to Jesus.
- This series gave us the opportunity to study several different miracles and teachings of Jesus. I had more fun than ever studying for these sermons each week and learning all that Jesus has to teach us through His Word in so many ways.
- More than ever, this series reached men. Women seem to love everything we do. To be honest, they are the “easy” demographic to reach. Reaching men, on the other hand, is HARD! But one Sunday alone I had three grown men come to me and tell me of what Jesus is doing in their lives.
- We kicked off our online giving system called “Automate the Important,” and many new families signed up to make a difference with their generosity! Check it out here: www.onelifeknox.com/give
- For number crunchers out there, this was our highest attended series, too. Attendance is up nearly 40% from this time last year.
- OneLife is beginning to reach far beyond Powell and Knoxville. This past Sunday a young couple who had been watching our services online for several months in Atlanta drove up to Knoxville just to visit a service in person, then turned around and drove back to Atlanta. Oh yeah, the wife of this couple gave her heart to Jesus on Sunday, too!
- Speaking of online services, we average nearly 100 views of the service each week online. That blows my mind.
- This series spawned an idea to leverage summer to make a huge difference in our community. An Unstoppable Summer kicks off in June and WILL be INCREDIBLE! Stay tuned for more details…

OneLifers, I’ve never been more pumped up about our church and we’ve never had this much momentum. Let’s ride it through the summer and look forward to a huge fall! The best is yet to come!