Preaching the Whole Counsel of God: Design and Deliver Gospel-Centered Sermons

Part of my year-long series A Year of Books on Preaching

It’s a question every Christian preacher must answer: how can we prepare and deliver biblical, Christ-centered messages? I’ve appreciated books like Haddon Robinson’s Biblical Preaching and Bryan Chapell’s Christ-Centered Preaching which walk us through every step of preparation. I’m adding a new book to the list: Julius Kim’s Preaching the Whole Counsel of God: Design and Deliver Gospel-Centered Sermons. It’s not a replacement for Robinson and Chapell, but it’s a nice complement.

Preaching the Whole Counsel of God is broken into four parts:

1. Discovering the Truth of the Human Text According to the Human Author
2. Discerning Christ in the Text According to the Divine Author
3. Designing the Sermon According to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
4. Delivering the Sermon for Attention, Retention, Integration, and Transformation

Part one is basic but useful. Part two is a little more unique: it explains why it’s important to preach Christ-centered messages, and explains how to do so using Old Testament prose/narrative and poetry and the New Testament gospel and ethical/law passages. It provides a couple of sample sermons to model what he teaches.

Parts three and four are really unique. Kim argues for the importance of effective sermon design and taps into neuroscience to help us with sermon design and delivery. I’ve read other books that have touched on these subjects, but none that cover them in such detail.

Here’s where I benefited most from this book:

• I loved the clear instruction on how to preach Christ from the various genres of Scripture. The steps are clear, and his use of three layers helps honor both the immediate text and the overall context of Scripture.
• His description of how to structure our sermons using a story framework is helpful.
• I love his advice on creating preaching notes with the core 25% of the sermon: following: the sermon proposition, main points, applications, pastoral insights, transitions, introduction, and conclusion.
• The tips on design and delivery, with help from neuroscience, are actionable and will help any preacher.

My only reservation: I enjoyed a scattershot of insights from this book. I couldn’t completely tell if it was designed to be a basic manual on preaching, a manual on preaching Christ from the various sections of Scripture, or a book on sermon design and delivery based on neuroscience and good design principles. It’s all of those things, but not just any one of them, which left me a little unclear about the central message of the book.

Still, Preaching the Whole Counsel of God was useful. It may try to do too much, but I still found a lot of useful information in the book. It’s a good refresher for seasoned preachers, and a good introduction to some important topics for those just starting out.

I’ll post some highlights and tips from this book on Thursday.

More from Amazon.com | 9Marks