You ever start to prepare a sermon or teaching on a specific topic (say 'love'), but you really don't have any material on it? Finding yourself flipping to the concordance looking up the scriptures on 'love' and praying to G-d that he gives you a divine revelation or at least some sort of intervention!
This isn't the best way to preach. It's like trying to cook something w/o any of ingredients.
Get Your Ingredients First!
I have found that the discipline of collecting information, scripture, theology, practical application and personal experience makes all the difference when preparing to teach/preach. The hardest part is developing a system of collecting theses thoughts and making it a discipline.
In the last post I explained how to create a discipline of sermon preparation on your desktop. Rarely am I on the same computer, so I appreciate web applications and tools that I can access from any PC via the Internet. Know this is what I came up with. My system is similar to “Buckets, Chunks & Marinade” but instead of using my desktop applications I use a blog.
First, I created a private blog using Wordpress (any blogging system would do). Then when an idea, thought, quote, scripture, etc. comes my way, I make a new post on it. While making a post I tag it with as many keywords as possible that would make sense. (Example – Gospel, justice, love, marriage, church, family, death, kingdom, peace, possibly book of the bible the scripture comes from, etc.)
After a while you will accumulate many tags that will organize your information/thoughts for you. Your tags become your topics and sermon ideas will start to emerge with little effort. Then when someone asks you to preach/speak you can go back to your private blog and select any given tag to prepare that sermon.
This way you already have some ingredients to start with and your not completely starting from scratch.
I don't know if you've seen the experiments done with jott, but people have successfully created a blog where they use Jott to input their writing!