Tools for Sermon Development in Logos Bible Software - Part 1 Explanation

Every sermon should include four essential tools of Sermon Development. We looked at these in the last post here on this site as we study how to develop a sermon. Now, let’s look at how to use Logos Bible Software to explain a text. We’ll look at illustration, proof, and application in three other parts of this series on how to develop a sermon outline that we can transform into a great message.

If you read our previous post that defined each of the four essential aspects of Sermon Development, you know that one helps achieve the other three. An influential preacher uses many illustrations to explain his sermon's ideas. Illustrations show what we mean so the hearer can understand the passage.

Read the post that explains the 4 Essential Tools for Good Sermon Development.

Jesus Used Illustrations to Explain His Teaching

Read scripture, and you'll see Jesus used illustrations called Natural Analogies in his parables. He explained the concept of faith using the example of the Temple Mount and mustard seeds, two things his listeners would know about. You either have faith, or you don’t.

20- So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. 21- However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”

Matthew 17:20-21, NKJV

Jesus explained the concept of faith using the Natural Analogy of a mustard seed. We might want to make this point in a sermon on this passage.

Today, we talk about degrees of faith, from weak to strong. However, Jesus taught that faith is binary. You either have it or you don't. You believe, or you don't. A mustard seed is the smallest seed that people commonly saw in Jesus' day. He might have even had one to show the audience.

https://youtu.be/HBMl6L_bjjI

A Modern Example of an Illustration Used to Explain Faith in Sermon Development

Since people today don't often plant mustard seeds, we might use a different Natural Analogy that we commonly experience, like a slight switch.

Faith is like a binary on/off switch, not a dimmer.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov

The average homeowner controls her overhead lights with a binary light switch with only off and on positions. It’s unlike a dimmer switch, which turns a light on in degrees of light. You can slide the switch up to ten percent for a romantic evening, halfway for average use, or 100 percent when you’re looking for a lost earring.

Jesus didn’t have two kinds of light switches. He didn’t have any light switches. Instead, he used a mustard seed. You either have faith, or you don't. You can't get less than that tiny seed's worth of faith. If you have it, then you can do something extreme, like commanding the Temple Mount to hurl itself into the nearby Dead Sea. That would seem insane to those listening to him and modern audiences if the temple still existed. But he said, if you have as much as a mustard seed of faith, you could command such a thing, and the Temple Mount would obey. This assumes you're acting in God's will; He'd need to want the temple mount thrown into the sea by an ordinary person's command.

By Novalis at en.wikipedia - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

The mustard seed illustration explained Jesus’ teaching about the binary nature of faith. He used a real-world or natural analogy to accomplish this.

Exegetical Guide in Logos Bible Software for Sermon Development

When I first discovered Logos in version 3 almost 20 years ago, the Guides sold me on the value of the software. Enter your passage, and Logos finds all the tools or books in your library that refer to a passage or topic. You can do this with the Exegetical Guide and discover many language study tools to help you understand the passage. Then, you’re ready to explain these Biblical ideas to your audience.

To open the Exegetical Guide, use either the right-click menu or the Guides button on the toolbar when selecting your passage. See the screenshot below.

Open the Exegetical Guide by clicking the Guides button and choose Exegetical Guide.

You'll see a list of the different sections in the Exegetical Guide. These include tools for language study.

The WORD BY WORD Section of the Exegetical Outline

I focus on using the WORD BY WORD section. It shows your passage in both Greek or Hebrew on the left and English on the right (see below). Click a word to jump to that word's entry in the section. Each word's section shows the Greek or Hebrew lemma, an icon that, when clicked, will pronounce the word, a transliteration, and a simple translation.

The second line shows the parsing info. On the third line, you get the Sense info, a kind of translation that shows how the text uses the word in context. After the Sense, you get a list of your lexicons, which displays a short translation. Click on any of the blue links to get more information.

Hover over a blue hyperlink in the WORD BY WORD section of the Exegetical Guide. It shows a popup of the abbreviated info the link will show you when you click it.

For example, in our passage on Matthew 17:20-21, we see the word for seed in the WORD BY WORD section. You can click the blue link to open NTGED if you own it and read more about the word translated seed in The New Testament Greek English Dictionary from Gilbrant, Thoralf. 1991. The New Testament Greek-English Dictionary comes as part of The Complete Biblical Library. There you find under "New Testament Usage" the following:

In all of its New Testament occurrences kokkos is used figuratively. Even with faith the size of a small mustard seed, one can live a miraculous life.

Gilbrant, Thoralf. 1991. “Κόκκος.” In The New Testament Greek-English Dictionary. The Complete Biblical Library. WORDsearch.

The above might help you as you study and try to explain the idea of a mustard seed representing such an infinitesimal amount of faith to explain that you either have faith or don't have faith. If you have it, you can move mountains, like the Temple Mount, which eventually happened in 70 AD after Jesus made the temple sacrifice moot.

If you don't own the NTGED or the Complete Biblical Library, head over to Logos to get it (Affiliate Link).

Passage Guide in Logos Bible Software for Sermon Development

Like the Exegetical Guide, the Passage Guide starts by asking you to enter your passage. The Guide will then show you different kinds of content when compared to the Exegetical Guide. It focuses less on language study and more on references like Commentaries and other tools like Biblical People, Places, and Things or Sermons and Illustrations. Let’s take a look.

Open the Passage Guide using the right-click menu. Select your passage and right-click. Make sure to select the Reference on the left and click on Passage Guide on the right.

Follow the same procedure as opening the Exegetical Guide. Select the passage, right-click it, and choose the Reference on the left list of the popup and the Passage Guide on the right list. The Guide will open and search all of your books in the Passage Guide categories for the selected Reference.

Alternatively, open the Passage Guide from the Guides button on the toolbar of Logos 10 using the same steps above when opening the Exegetical Guide.

Using Search Results to Explain an Idea in Logos 10

Let's use our Matthew 17:20 example from above. With the Passage Guide open as instructed in the previous section, begin opening tools by clicking on them in the Guide. I prioritized the New American Commentary so the Matthew volume sits atop the list of commentaries near the top of the Passage Guide.

Click the book to buy this wonderful commentary set from Logos.

When you read the section on verses 19-20 you'll see the author of the commentary writes:

“Nothing will be impossible for you” must thus be interpreted as nothing Jesus has given you the authority to do, such as this exorcism.22 Obviously, many other things are impossible for believers—based on the limitations of their humanity and of God’s will. As v. 22 immediately makes plain, even Jesus’ own miracle-working abilities did not permit him to escape the cross despite repeated temptation to do precisely that.

Blomberg, Craig. 1992. Matthew. Vol. 22. The New American Commentary. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

This helps us explain that faith is not like a blank check. We can use the ideas presented in the commentaries and then give an illustration of a blank check to help our listeners understand that godly, Biblical faith is not an unlimited promise to let us do anything we please outside God's plan.

Notice that we have our passage selected (1 above). We opened the Passage Guide, which searched for the selected Reference (2 above). Scroll down to Biblical Things, and you'll see images of Mustard Seeds (3 above).

You'll find other excellent lists of resources in the Passage Guide. Look at the Cross References section, which refers to Luke 17:6, the parable of the Mustard Seed, modified by Jesus to refer to the miraculous ability to transplant a mulberry tree. The Passage Guide also includes links to the Factbook. So you could head down to the Biblical Things section of our Passage Guide. There, you'll find links to images from the Factbook.

You will also find these sections in other Guides like the Sermon Starter Guide and Topic Guide.

Power Lookup to Learn What a Passage Means for Explanation in Sermon Development

Users often forget the Power Lookup tool, but it works like a kind of Guide to search for content on a selected text or word. Right-click on the Passage and either choose the Selection or Reference on the left side of the popup. Scroll down to the Lookup section on the right side of the popup. You'll find Power Lookup.

Right-click your passage and choose the Reference on the left of the popup menu. On the right, scroll down to Power Lookup. If you're looking up a word, right-click it, choose Selection on the left, and scroll to Power Lookup. The Power Lookup window opens on the left side of your Logos 10 screen.

The Power Lookup window opens in a small section along the right side of the Logos screen. It includes links to and short previews of things like...

• Footnotes
• Bible passages
• Commentaries
• Language tools

The Power Lookup panel links to the Bible you have active and moves when you move to a new passage. This helps when studying longer passages.

Note that all links to Logos resources are Logos Affiliate Links. I will receive a small percentage of the price if you purchase them using my links.

Sermon Development Always Include These Four Essentials

I don’t care how entertaining, interesting, or exciting your sermon seems to your audience. You fail your congregation if you don’t include these four essential elements in your sermon development. They are essentials because you have to include them. Can I make it any clearer? You have to do these four things!! They help you learn how to develop a sermon outline effectively.

What four elements should you include in your sermon development, regardless of what kind of sermon you preach? Developing an idea means making it understandable, memorable, and visible. Then, the truth needs to be doable. So, we explain, illustrate, and prove an idea. Finally, we show them how they can apply the truth by doing something, believing something, or understanding something.

Why are these so important to call them essential? A listener must understand what the preacher means and where the scripture says what the preacher said. Then, if I don’t see it, regardless of how much you explain it, the idea won’t come to life and plant itself in the audience's memory.

Not every listener will believe a statement just because they understand it and see it in scripture and they see examples. However, the more concrete the preacher makes their idea, the more the listener will believe it. Eventually, he must prove it’s true for a skeptical listener to accept and live the truth. If they do, we need to help them understand how they can live the truth.

Sermon Development Includes Clear Explanation

There’s a reason why “plain” is at the heart of Explanation. Not really, but that’s one way to think about it. When you state a truth, you must explain what it means. This becomes more important when using creative sermon ideas or sermon points. It’s best to avoid cutesy or gimmicky sermon points if they make things less clear and require you to spend extra time explaining the statement.

Please see part 1 of this series on Explanation.

Explanation is the Sermon Development that appeals to the mind and answers the question, "What does it mean?" Explanation makes things more clear.

To explain an idea, you need to make it clear or plain. What does it mean to say, “Discipleship is the heart of growth in Christ?” What do you mean by discipleship, heart, and growth?

The heart could mean something that pumps blood throughout the body. It illustrates driving growth and giving life to your spiritual existence. But most of us would likely mean that it’s central to our spiritual existence, like the heart sitting at the center of the body and circulatory system.

In a recent sermon, I said, “Jesus Empowers Us to Fulfill Our Purpose,” from Matthew 28:18, where Jesus said, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” Jesus empowers us thanks to his authority. He gave us the proper authority to go and make disciples and teach them.

An Example of Explanation

My sermon answered, “Why did God leave us behind after saving our souls?" We make disciples and stay in communion with Jesus until he returns, or we go to Him in death (v. 20).

To effectively clarify a spiritual truth like the one from my sermon on the Great Commission, the preacher should explain each part of the idea that a listener could misunderstand without it. What do we mean by empowering us? How does empowering us aid in fulfilling our purpose? If the sermon hasn't explained that the Great Commission is part of our purpose, we must do so now.

One tool a preacher reaches for when explaining ideas is natural analogies. These are real-world things that make abstract ideas clearer. We also call these sermon illustrations. So, let's look at that category of sermon development.

Sermon Development Includes Illustration

We've all seen or even used one of those books of stale old sermon illustrations. Back in the nineties, I used a program on my computer that collected sermon illustrations in a database. The illustrations in those books or that program often told stories of 19th-century missionaries or historical figures from the Civil War or Revolutionary War. They were boring and out of date.

Your life and experience provide the best source for natural analogies or sermon illustrations.

Illustration helps us see the idea. It appeals to our creativity and answers, "What does it look like?"
Photo by Kenaz Nepomuceno on Pexels.com

A sermon illustration includes anything that one can visualize. Illustrations in books show what the words say. A human anatomy book might illustrate how blood flows through the heart and to the extremities. A book about auto repair will show the proper fuel pump installation on a 2017 Honda Ridgeline.

A sermon illustration aims at the imagination. It shows what an idea looks like. It tells a story about how to live a life of kindness by telling how a friend showed the preacher kindness even though he didn't deserve it. The hearer can see how they might apply this truth, or they can see what the preacher means by kindness.

Illustrations will explain an idea, showing what it means. This clarifies the idea and gives examples of how to live out an idea by applying it. In other words, an illustration can explain, prove, and apply the truth.

Examples of What Many Call Sermon Illustrations

Before we move on to the sermon development element we call proof, let's look at an example of what is not a sermon illustration.

Too many of those sermon illustration websites, books, or databases include quotes by famous Christians or historical figures. Unless that quote includes a natural analogy or a story that shows us something, it isn't a sermon illustration. It might explain, prove, or apply an idea, but quotes are not illustrations unless they appeal to the imagination.

Illustrations can effectively prove ideas. So, what do we mean by proof?

Sermon Development Includes Proof

If explanation appeals to the mind and illustration appeals to the imagination, then proof appeals to the will. We explain by answering, "What does it mean?" We illustrate by answering, "What does it look like?" We prove a truth by answering, "Is this true?"

Click the image above or the link below to buy the book.
Image = hardcover and link = Logos Bible Software link.

Haddon Robinson wrote in Biblical Preaching, my favorite text on Expository Preaching:

An initial response of those of us who take the Scriptures seriously is to ignore this question. We assume that an idea should be accepted as true because it comes from the Bible. That is not necessarily a valid assumption. We may need to gain psychological acceptance in our hearers through reasoning, proofs, or illustrations. Even the inspired writers of the New Testament (all of whom believed that the Old Testament was a God-breathed witness) sometimes established the validity of their statements, not only by quoting the Old Testament but by referring to common life as well.

(Robinson, Haddon W. 2001. Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. p. 80)

Strategies for Proof

Some effective strategies for proving a truth include:

• Illustrations that show how an event validated the truth in someone's life.
• Quotations from a trusted source that the hearers would believe.
• Statistics, facts, and figures.
• Logical arguments, which philosophers interestingly call proofs.
• Appeal to "a prior" knowledge, which means using ideas we all assume are true.

Most preachers will assume a truth that comes directly from scripture carries enough weight that it should not need proof. "The Bible says it, that settles it." However, if a church does a good job of appealing to non-believers, then a preacher might address people who don't believe the Bible is necessarily true. Also, believers might struggle to maintain their faith in the authority of the Bible. These people need proof! A modern preacher will appeal to Scripture and rely on the convicting power of the Holy Spirit, but will also appeal to the above kinds of proof to bring people to the point of trusting Scripture.

Once the hearer understands what we mean, can see what it looks like, and understands that the ideas are true, then we need to help them see and understand how to live what the Bible says.

Sermon Development Includes Practical Application

One preaching professor said, "If you don't apply the text, you didn't really preach it." I fully agree with this.

Imagine you take your car to a mechanic and he diagnoses the problem. You need to replace the fuel pump. The mechanic explains that the car won't run properly without a new fuel pump. He convinces you with a fantastic argument proving the need for a new pump. Then, the mechanic explains what the fuel pump does and what fixing it would do for the engine. He convinced you, and you're ready to swipe your credit card.

If you don't apply the text, you didn't really preach it.

Unknown Preaching Professor

The mechanic then turned around and walked away, saying, "Thanks for stopping by."

What do you do now? He never explained how you could get the fuel pump fixed or what it would cost. You can't fix it without direct application from the mechanic.

A sermon must also include application for the same reason. If the listener doesn't know what to do now, then you failed in the preaching task. "You didn't really preach."

Examples of Practical Application in Sermon Development

Sermons always include clear, concrete examples of how to apply the truth of the text. My sermon on The Great Commission from Matthew 28:18-20 ended with four ways the listener could apply the text. I told them to begin praying for one person they knew needed to hear the Gospel. Second, I suggested they learn how to share the Gospel. Third, I offered a tool called Life on Mission, an app that takes a person through the Gospel and invites the person to trust Jesus for salvation and forgiveness. You can also buy the book that shows how to present the 3 Circles Gospel Presentation (affiliate link at Amazon). Finally, I suggested that they ask the Lord to give them a chance to be a witness to their friend, not by inviting them to church, but by inviting them to trust Jesus.

Get the Life on Mission app from your app store.

Application can take on multiple forms including doing something. That's the most common form of Application as Sermon Development. You ask the congregation to do something based on the message you preach.

Application also means believing something. Sometimes, the passage simply asks us to believe something about God or his Kingdom.

Finally, some sermons ask us to understand something that we need to understand to change our behavior, character, or beliefs.