A few years back, Pastor John was asked how he writes his sermons, and this is what he had to say. My pattern is not to be followed by anybody except those who are wired exactly like I am, which is probably no one, because we're all so different. So when I teach preaching to the guys, I really stress, "Please, please, please, look how I do it.

Take that into account, but don't try to imitate me because it might not work for you." So my approach is, if I know my text fairly well, if it's familiar to me, then I'm not on it until Friday. I just pick it out either weeks or days ahead of time.

I have to get a text entitled to the worship guys by Tuesday. And I'm not studying it, and I'm not writing or working on the sermon until Friday morning. Then I devote all of Friday to sermon preparation. And if I need to, I'll stay up all night. I've never stayed up all night on Friday, but I've stayed up until 2.

And that's when the text really blocked me. I just, "Oh, man, I don't know what I'm going to say about this. I need to study this a little more." Or I get an interruption in the day that's totally unexpected for a ministry crisis or whatever. But the nights are always there as buffers.

I almost never do that. So I'm starting on Friday, and I put on my computer English, Greek, or English, Hebrew. And I read through the original language, getting all the help I need with my little mouse. And I've got a half sheet of paper in front of me on the desk.

And I'm writing out the text, and I'm making comments as I go. And as I write out the text, I'm just praying, "God, show me. Show me what's here for my people. Show me what's really here, not in my head that I'm going to make be here, but is really here.

Let me see new things that I've never seen before." And as I write, for whatever reason, this works for me, I see things. The pen, the computer, the Greek, the Hebrew, the writing it out. And so I'm circling things and making little comments in the margin. This little half sheet looks like an absolute jumble when I'm done.

And when I'm done, I've generally got a whole slug of questions that can be answered. I've got lines drawn all over the place. And as I step back and say, "Now, Lord, what am I going to do with all that?" I could talk on that for three hours. I've got 35 or 45 minutes to do this.

And in prayer and thought, some of those circles just come together. And I say, "Okay, I'm going to make those three points or those two points or those four points." And I take out another sheet of paper and try to figure out, "Now, how might that fit together?" Should it go backwards, forwards, start in the middle, go this way?

And once I'm there, and that may happen by lunch, go eat lunch. And then I put up my Word document, and I just start writing. Here's my thoughts based on this little doodling here. And I compose straight onto the computer, and I'm editing as I go, and I'm thinking out loud, sometimes preaching out loud as I go, feeling it as I go, praying as I go.

And that takes four, five, six, seven, eight hours to get that written. And when it's written, I print it out, and I go to bed or go to be with Noelle or whatever. And then Saturday, after lunch, after telethon, I go to Lee and Chin or Jimmy John's. Then I come home, and then I really go to work on getting from there to here and here with all my little markings and so on.

So what I take into the pulpit on Sunday is about 10 double-spaced pages, about 10,000 to 11,000 bytes. And they're so marked up, they look like chicken scratch, and they function as my outline while I'm talking. Works for me. Most of the people, when they hear that I do it that way, say, "No way.

No way could I start on Friday," or, "No way could I take a manuscript into the pulpit and not have it be canned," and so on. Absolutely not a problem. Do it fine. You know, wear your armor, not my armor. That was Pastor John Piper, who is now back home from the Middle East, which means we will return soon with all new episodes of Ask Pastor John.

So please continue to email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.