Sermon Preparation Help—from Beloved Baptist Pastors

The best sermon in the world won’t do any good unless it’s heard or read. With Logos Bible Software, you can access some of the best sermons in a few clicks—and gather insight from Baptist pastors on practically any biblical passage or topic you can quote in your sermons. 

Two features reduce hours of page-flipping to minutes:

• Passage Guide 
• Sermon Starter Guide 

In this post, you’ll see how to use the Passage Guide and Sermon Starter Guide with resources from Logos Baptist Gold. This evangelism and personal ministry-focused package offers over 1,215 digital books. Plus, it’s packed with sermons from respected Baptist pastors, including: 

• 3,127 sermons from John MacArthur
• 212 sermons from J. D. Greear
• 1,925 sermons from Adrian Rogers

For a step-by-step guide on how to get the most from your sermons in Logos, watch the short video below. In less than three minutes, find out how to pull from John MacArthur’s sermons for a message on Ephesians 5:22–33. Learn how to find the most relevant sermons by passage or topic—and how to search a sermon manuscript or collection for key words.

Rather not watch a video—or want to save the steps for later? Here’s the transcript:

Imagine you’re studying a passage of Scripture like Ephesians 5:22–33 in preparation for preaching or teaching. You’ve consulted your commentaries, tracked down key themes, and performed in-depth Bible word studies on important terms. But now you want to see how other preachers and teachers handle this text.

With Logos, you can quickly explore the sermons of some of your favorite preachers, like John MacArthur, and see how he presented and applied this passage of Scripture. 

First, open up a fresh passage guide, and enter Ephesians 5:22–33 into the passage box. Then scroll down and expand the sermon section, and note how Logos lists sermons from my favorite preachers related to this text. I have all the sermons John MacArthur preached on this section of Ephesians spanning from 1996–2012. Below that I have sermon links for all the related sermons archived in my library. 

Because I’m most interested in the first section of this passage, specifically the role of the husband, I’ll open the link entitled “God’s Pattern for the Husband, part one.” While there’s a treasure chest of spiritual insight in this sermon, I found MacArthur’s comments on maintaining forgiveness in the home most fascinating, so I’ll jump there now. 

In the paragraph that I highlighted, MacArthur boldly stated that unforgiveness will destroy a marriage. Then he urges his hearers that if they forgive continuously and completely, they’ll avoid the devastating actions and attitudes of bitterness and retaliation. 

Continuing to look into this idea of forgiveness in the family, I’ll open the sermon starter guide, and this time, I’ll search my sermons for the topic “family.” This action retrieves new sermons by MacArthur related to this topic. 

When I open the sermon entitled “The Key to Maintaining Family Unity,” I don’t have to read far to see that this sermon is replete with biblical advice regarding forgiveness. If you want to quickly find every time MacArthur mentions forgiveness here, open the inline search tool by clicking the small search icon in the resource toolbar. Then input the term “forgive” followed by an asterisk. This command will not only look up every time MacArthur uses the term “forgive,” but also the times he uses “forgives,” “forgiven,” or “forgiveness.” 

A little further down this manuscript, you’ll find some powerful biblical illustrations about forgiveness. MacArthur writes, “To forgive is to shoot an arrow so high and so far it can never be found again. To forgive is to take out the garbage and dispose of it once and for all, leaving the house fresh and clean. To forgive is to loose the anchor and set the ship free to sail.” And so on. These words put real meaning to MacArthur’s charge in the last sermon to forgive continuously and completely. 

And this is the power of Logos’s version of MacArthur’s sermon archive. With Logos, you can search his years of biblical teaching and preaching and find related sermons by passage or by topic. 

With just a few clicks, consider how other preachers handle the text. Since you won’t have to comb through hundreds or thousands of pages, you’ll be free to focus on sermon preparation—and serving your congregation. 

Explore the wealth of resources in Baptist Gold today, or take a look at all Logos traditions packages.