Got up at six this morning and left before seven to go fill the pulpit for a church a couple of hours away. I had my clothes laid out: I had already showered; I had my sermon script to read through if I got there early; I had my notes for teaching Sunday school, and I had a page folded once and inserted in my Bible where my sermon text was located.

You see, near the end of my pastorate in Minco I had started going into the pulpit whithout my written-out sermon. The first time I did this I stepped into the pulpit with nothing but a sheet of paper with some verses I wanted to refer to. Most other times, I had some sort of outline or at least basic clue words that coresponded to the paragraphs in my sermon. It was the outline I was going to take into the pulpit with me. The script would be left in the car.

So I got to the church in plenty of time. Today I got to sit through worship and just slot in to preach. It was relaxing because I knew I was prepared.

So when the time was right, I went up into the pulpit, opened my Bible, prayed, and began preaching (the text had already been read). And as I spoke, saying some introductory remarks, it began to dawn on me that something wasn’t right. I looked down and realized that I had not printed out my outline. I had printed out the first couple of pages of my sermon text. They both began with my Bible text and the file names were almost identical. If there was any information to be gleaned from the fragment, I wasn’t going to stand there searching for it. In any case, I had already covered just about everything that was written there. I was preaching in church without any notes at all, without having expected to do any such thing.

God was good. We survived.

For seminarians, one reason to make sure your sermon is simple to remember (has a basic outline, in most cases) is because someday you might lose your planned script or your outline.