What are your resources for Advent and Christmas Sermon Prep

Fasil

What are your resources for Advent and Christmas Sermon Preparation? Just Curious to know your experience. Thanks!!

Al Het

I'll bite, since no one else did.

Generally, I don't access specific resources, based on seasons, holidays, or situations.  However, I have happened to read books, sometimes related to certain holidays or seasons, which gave me a jumping-off point for a sermon series.  In fact, these books are sometimes not centered around the topic that often inspires me.

As far as sermon topics, I'll find inspiration all over the place, during my daily life.  I was trained early to be prepared, always be alert, and when a thought floats through my over-active brain (any time, night or day), to make a quick note of it.  Often, these will become something of value for sermons, Bible studies, or articles.  Sometimes they don't make any sense at all, and I'll delete them.  All that to say, when I get close to Christmas, I will have often written down several ideas over the course of the year.  Sometimes, one of these will strike me, and I'll go with it.  If none inspire me, I will look at my early notes from the previous year.  I will often have two or three different ideas that I was working with in the beginning.  Sometimes one of those catches fire for me.  So far, I haven't had to go beyond that for ideas, though I have began working on something, only to remember that I did something like this in the past...  Usually a decade or more in the past.  In those situations, I tend to head back to the drawing board.  Also of note, I work hard to be praying through every step of this process.  I want to be led by God in each and every one of these steps, even in deciding topics.

For Christmas, I will almost always do a series, not just random Christmas-related sermons.  Once I have the over all topic, I'll break it down into parts.  Then, like any sermon, I'll start looking for the appropriate passage(s) to teach from.  Most of the time, the passage takes me in a slightly different direction than what I was thinking.  I will almost always go with that new direction, being conscious not to make what I wanted to say fit the passage.  On occasion, if the passage goes in an entirely different direction, I will try to find another passage that is more in line with the theme I was looking at.  And usually, my general topics are already related to a passage, or passages anyway, so this is not usually a difficult step.

I then develop the sermons, essentially the same as I normally do.  My illustrations and tone might be a bit more seasonally influenced then normal, but the process is primarily the same.

One exception to the above process.  More than once (many times, actually) someone has brought up something about Christmas, that has developed into our theme for that year.  The person (often my wife) is usually not suggesting the theme for the church.  It is often just ordinary conversation about Christmas.  Sometimes this has happened at planning meetings for our Christmas Eve service.  Something comes up that gets my mind churning.  Those topics are often the best, because it seems others are thinking about similar things going it.

I love the question.  I'd love to hear how others come up with topics, for Christmas and other special events.