How to Dig a Well with a Folder

 

Currently, on my blog, I am working my way through a backlog of questions. Today’s post is an attempt to answer a question related to filing. Go ahead, yawn. I don’t mind. <grin> This one happens to be aimed at preachers anyway, and younger ones at that. So go have a cup of coffee, scroll mindlessly through Facebook, and check in again with me next week for more scintillating content. <still grinning>

Let me frame this as a series of questions.

“Pastor Brennan, do I really need a filing system in the age of AI and the internet?”

Yes. Filing content wisely is what seems like an extraneous bother at first, but when you do it consistently, you build a library of resources always at your fingertips. Fast forward a decade or two in ministry, and your filing system begins to save you hours of work while at the same time making the content you produce richer than ever. So, yeah, having a filing system that works for you is important. And since in the process of filing it you took mental ownership of the information, it carries much more weight than just asking an AI for a random answer.

“Do I have to use the filing system you are about to explain?”

No. But you have to use one. Consistently.

“Good. Because I probably won’t use yours. But just in case, what sorts of things do you file?”

Essentially, I file thought-provoking ideas/concepts I want to remember, as well as mental study/work I’ve done. For example, I read 50 books a year for a variety of reasons, but I want to cull the best of the content and retain it for future reference. So I make notations in the margin as I read. When I’m finished, I write an overall review of the book more for my own use in the future than anything. I post that online on Goodreads, so it is instantly available to me whenever I search for a particular book. Additionally, I work my way back through the book page by page, and select the best thoughts. These are the ones I use for my Quote List.

The Quote List is important to some of the people who receive it, but I’m really the one who gets the most out of it. After reading the book, annotating it, and selecting the best portions for quotes, I then type them out one at a time and send them daily to an email list of about 650 preachers. I then digitally archive that quote searchable primarily by subject, but also book and author. I have done this for, I don’t know, twenty-five years? A long time. My quote files – which are the curated best bits of every book I have read for several decades – currently contain thousands and thousands of quotes on just about every subject you can think of. If I need support for a point I am making, or I want to be reminded of things I have considered on the subject in the past, it is as easy as pulling up the file. Not to mention that every time I run that quote/thought across my mind, I deepen my mental grasp of it. I retain more each time I interact with it.

“Ok, but that’s not me. I don’t have a Quote List, or whatever you call it.”

Understood. You can still do the exact same thing, minus the email at the end. Make notes in all the books you read. Figure out a system to digitally archive those notes in a way that is searchable. In fact, anymore, you don’t even have to type them out as dinosaurs like me do. Ask an AI for a list of digital highlighters, and take your pick. They will do it for you.

“All right. That’s books sorted. What’s next?”

Your sermons. You should keep every single one you write, whether in outline or in manuscript form. Every single one. I am grateful that a pastor told me that when I was still a teenager. As of this writing, I have preached/taught almost 6,000 times. I still have practically every one of those outlines.

“What, throw them in a drawer or something?”

No. Archive them digitally so they are searchable.

Here is how I do it. I write every outline in Microsoft Word. I write it either as part of a larger document (for a series), or as a standalone document. I save it by date and service. For example, on Sunday morning, March 25, 2012, I preached a standalone message entitled, “How Long Halt Ye Between Two Opinions?” from I Kings 18.21. I wrote the outline and saved it as sam032512. That got put into a folder on Dropbox labeled, “SAM 2012.” That, in turn, was placed into a folder labeled “2012 Sermons”, and that within the folder “Archived Sermon Notes.” At the same time, I created a record of that sermon on an Excel spreadsheet. On that spreadsheet, titled “Sunday Morning Sermon Record”, I have a box for the number that sermon was, 3083, the date, 3/25/12, the title, the main idea condensed into a word, in this case, consecration, and the text.

Moving forward, let's say I am studying I Kings, and I come across this passage, and I say to myself, “Hmmm… I think I recall preaching a sermon on this passage.” I can pull up my Excel spreadsheet and search for the reference, or the main thought, or the title, and find exactly where/when I preached it. With that information, I can click through a few folders and, behold, there is my previous sermon from I Kings 18.21. I may be preaching a different thought now, but the work I did on understanding the context will still apply, and now I don’t have to do that work over again. Voila, I have just saved 30 minutes.

Being organized allows you to build knowledge momentum. Perhaps depth is a better word here. It allows you to bring to bear the best of decades' worth of study on any one particular message or lesson. In the process, it not only saves you time but it enriches your hearers in ways they instinctively feel, whether they understand how you did it or not. It’s not that you’re smarter than anyone else or that you studied more. No, you just determined to be organized, and the payoff from that, though long in arriving, comes through like exponentially increasing 401k returns.

In addition to deepening your own grasp of a subject, saving you time, and enriching your hearers, this also lets you help other preachers. If I had a dime for every time a preacher has asked me if I have any notes on fill-in-the-blank subject, I would be a millionaire. The answer is almost always, “Yes, I do. Let me track that down, and I’ll get it to you.” In fact, I did so much of that that I finally created a Dropbox folder specifically for it and shared it with all my Patreon supporters. I don’t have to answer those emails/texts as often, and my supporters have immediate, organized access to what is currently 1,460 messages extending over 78 different sermon series. That saves them time, makes their preaching richer, and edifies their people more. And all it took was a little consistent organization.

“Bruh. I am a sophomore in college. I have three messages. This is overkill.”

No, it isn’t. It is applied wisdom. Start now. Indeed, there will never be a better or easier time for you to start. No, you do not have to do it as I do, but in some form, archive your messages digitally and organize them so they are searchable. Your future self will thank me a thousand times.

Elsa Lisle demonstrating the card 
catologue at Penn State University
library, c 1950

So that’s my system for filing information from books I read and sermon/lesson content I produce. You may think of additional ways you can apply this. Good. You may think of better ways to apply this. Also, good. Regardless of how you do it or what you use, develop a system that works for you. Ideas and concepts and thoughts and work should not be fleetingly applied to the moment; they should be curated for the benefit of people you will come across in the future.

You can give someone a drink at the moment, or you can dig a well that will continue to produce good water for those in need for a long time.

Which one will your ministry be?

 

 

How to Pray for An Hour

 

Currently, on my blog, I am answering a backlog of questions. Today’s question revolves around a statement I put on Twitter some time ago: “Grateful to my Dad this morning, who taught me how to pray for longer periods of time. What a balm it has been through these years. If you do not, it is one of the most worthwhile things you can learn. What, could ye not watch with me one hour? (Matthew 26.40)” To which statement I received the query, “Well, what did he teach you? I want to learn!”

A pic I snapped while praying with
my Dad before a church service
in Chicago. 

I surrendered to preach at fourteen. Immediately, I began to take my walk with God seriously. But although I knew I should read my Bible and pray, I had done very little praying up to that point. I prayed for meals and in Bible class, things like that, but I did not know what it was like to labour in prayer, let alone to do so for lengthy periods of time. As I began to fumble my way toward that, I stopped my Dad one day and at random asked him, “Dad, do you ever pray for an hour at a time?” He affirmed he did. When I asked him how, he told me to give him a few days. Some time later, we sat down, and he handed me a piece of paper with a few simple handwritten thoughts. I think I still have that piece of paper in my files somewhere. Regardless, I remember what he said. Further, I put it into practice almost immediately and have used it in one form or another hundreds of times since.

Basically, he told me to do three things. Confession. Praise. Prayer.

First, if we want to be in the Lord’s presence, we must make sure we have made right what had been wrong between us. The Holy Spirit is always at His quiet work in our hearts, convicting us both of what we need to stop and of what we should begin. As I write this sentence, I am conscious of some areas of my own life where this is the case. If I am telling God, “No,” in either of these areas, I cannot reasonably expect Him to welcome me into His presence or listen to me when I talk to Him. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. (Psalm 66.18) Nor can you. Thus it is, we need to take the time to ensure the accounts are clear as we enter into prayer.

In my case, I have found it helpful through these years to write these things down. When I began praying at length as a young man, it was in a room with a whiteboard. I would begin not with words, but in silence, by listing the things I knew I needed to confess to Him. Nor would I rush through this. While it is not good to linger in sin, it is good to take the time necessary to realize how badly we have wronged Him.

This part of confession should be painful. Do not race through it. Only then, after the silence had stretched long between the Lord and me, would I begin to speak. I would say those awful things out loud, one by one, to Him. I would not justify or excuse them. Context may make sin understandable, but it cannot make sin better. I would admit I was wrong, tell Him I was sorry, and ask Him to teach me to view sin as He did. At the end of this period, usually about ten minutes or so, I would slowly lift the eraser to the whiteboard, and with tears pouring down my cheeks, I would erase those ugly terms. The board would be white again, and so would my heart.

It was in this suitable frame of mind that I would turn my mind toward the second of my father’s instructions: praise. Dad told me praise involved two sides or aspects. The first involved thanking God for what He had done for me. The second was more direct. I was to praise the Lord for who He was, for His attributes. I found biblical support for this in Psalm 150.2. In a lengthy stretch of psalms calling on us to praise the Lord, we find this admonition: Praise him for his mighty acts: Praise him according to his excellent greatness.

Over time, I developed two primary praise lists as a teenager. The first was a list of things or people for which I was grateful. For example…

…salvation, Heaven, the Holy Spirit, my Bible, my call to the ministry, friends, godly influences like my Sunday School and Christian school teachers, the sorrows that drove me to prayer, parents, siblings, food, clothing, shelter, church, America, health, answers to specific prayers, books, provision, protection, education, a good mind, hope, opportunities to preach, the beauty of creation, etc.

The second was a list of God’s attributes that I saw displayed in the Word of God and demonstrated in my life. For example…

…power, wisdom, strength, holiness, knowledge, understanding, justice, grace, creativity, thoughtfulness, kindness, care, mercy, love, faithfulness, etc.

Taking each one of those mental lists one at a time, I would write them down on the whiteboard. I would then walk around the room, thanking the Lord for each particular thing/person/attribute in detail as I thought about how they had impacted my life. After I had thanked God for His mighty acts in my life, I praised Him according to His excellent greatness.

At this point, my heart was well and truly warmed toward Him. I had cleared my soul of any accumulated refuse and spent time detailing His goodness in my life. In such a spirit, last, I turned to my requests. In such a frame of mind, I would not pray selfishly. I would not whine or complain. I would not bargain with God. I would not come to Him seeking the advancement of my kingdom. God, His aims in me, and His work through me would be uppermost in my mind. And the words of supplication which flowed from my tongue reflected that.

As the years of my life have become decades, my prayer requests have shifted. But the petitions I took to the Lord back in those days were sincere. I asked for help in difficult relationships, wisdom in responding to people and events around me, power and blessing on my preaching and my bus route, protection from temptation, for God to turn the hearts of those I loved who were doing wrong, for unsaved people to come to Christ, for missionaries and preachers I knew, for my father’s ministry and my mother’s sorrows, for my fellow students, and such like.

Sometimes I would list things on the whiteboard and pray through them. Other times, I would simply walk, and the jumbled fears and hopes of my heart would tumble out before Him. To this day, I still prefer to walk when I pray.

How long did each of these sections take to do? It varied, of course, with where I was spiritually and what was pressing in upon me on specific days and seasons of my life. Essentially, though, it worked out to be something in the neighborhood of this: 1) Confession, 10 minutes; 2) praise, each half about 10 or 15 minutes, and 3) prayer, about 20 minutes. Beloved, it is amazing how quickly an hour passes in such a delightful occupation.

There are, of course, many other approaches to prayer. As the years have turned to decades, my prayer and praise lists have multiplied. But the bones of what my Dad furnished me forty years ago became the skeleton of my prayer life ever since – confession, praise, and prayer.

If you have not yet prayed for an hour, let alone done so consistently, may I gently ask you to stop right here for a moment? Get down on the knees of your heart and ask the Lord to grow you deeper in prayer. Then set aside a time this week to begin. Then do it again next week and the week after that. Start at the beginning. You will find Him the most welcoming of hosts as you come to His throne.

I promise you this, if you will draw nigh to Him, He will draw nigh to you. He is there all the time. His heart is open toward you.

What, could ye not watch with Me one hour?

You can.