I’m away from home in revival this week. As usual, I brought along a number of books to read, several Bibles, and plenty of notepaper for working on sermons, drawing cartoons, and such. One of the books was a western.

“Lonely on the Mountain” is a “Sackett” novel by the king of westerns, Louis L’Amour. I picked it up somewhere along the way and have been reading it in the cracks of time when my brain needs a rest from heavier matters.

Something about this novel surprised me, and provides an insight into a matter we pastors face in sermon-building and preaching.

It’s a great story, as westerns go. L’Amour in his prime was as good as they come in delivering a tale of the old west. The Sacketts are a fictitious Tennessee mountain clan that has moved west. The various brothers and generations provided L’Amour material for 15 or 20 novels over the decades.

In this story, one of the Sackett brothers sends a cryptic SOS to his family from a remote Canadian village. His kinfolk come a-running. Most of the book details their adventures as they pull together supplies, cross prairies driving a herd, encounter Indians and outlaws, and gradually try to piece together what their brother meant by his plea for help.

The plot thickens, as the saying goes, as it builds toward a climatic showdown. And that’s where the problem with the book arose.

Finally, the rescuers arrive at the Canadian outpost on page 185 of the 194-page book. At this point, I have decided this must be part of a two-volume telling of this tale because there is no way this story can be resolved in the remaining 9 pages.

But it was.

Actually, the story just fizzled out. After building us up and teasing us along, Louis L’Amour punted. In the final 9 pages, the disparate clan members meet up and learn the problem in the village, have their obligatory gun battle, learn the answer to some of the riddles that have puzzled them during their drive west, and close the story.

It was awful.

Clearly, L’Amour got bored with his story and decided to put it out of its misery. His readers be hanged.

What I wish he had done was to lay it aside for a few days or weeks or even longer and work on something else before returning to it.

The book was published in 1980. By then the name Louis L’Amour was all the rage in western novels and the accolades and commissions were rolling in. It would appear that when it came to writing novels by then, he was “just phoning it in,” as the saying goes.

Preachers are known to do what I’m assuming L’Amour did in this case….

–craft a sermon, spend a lot of time on getting it right, and then forgetting all about the climax and the ending.

–become bored with the sermon.

–leave ourselves only a sliver of time for the climax and conclusion of the message. In the case of “Lonely on the Mountain,” Mr. L’Amour spent less than 5 percent of the book’s 194 pages on the coming together of the various plots, the climax, and the conclusion. That would be like a pastor preaching a 30 minute sermon and allowing one minute and a half to drive it home and bring it together.

I have to confess I’ve done all of these.

No way could I begin to count the times I went before the congregation with a carefully worked out sermon–a good introduction, a strong body of material with various points–that had everything except the conclusion. My attitude seems to have been that once I got to the conclusion, the momentum would take me the rest of the way home.

The fact that it rarely did “get me the rest of the way home” seldom got through to me, I fear. Next Sunday, I’d repeat the error. (It was not that I planned for the sermon to have no conclusion. Rather, I simply did not plan one. It was a sin of omission, not commission.)

Second, the times I’ve gotten bored with one of my sermons almost always occurred in the study when I was preparing it.

When that happens–and most pastors would admit it’s more often than you might think–there are several good things to do and only really bad one. The worst thing is to persevere and go ahead and preach it.

Better to lay the sermon aside and work on something else. Come back to it later. Read it from the beginning as though someone else had written it, and in many cases you’ll be able to see where it went astray and what it needs.

If, however, the preacher is locked into this subject and must preach this sermon, then an entirely different approach is required….

1) Use your imagination. Try looking at the sermon as a dramatist would, as the children in your congregation would, as your grandparents might. How would your favorite preacher approach this message? What does the devil think of what you have planned to say? An atheist? A cultist?

2) Make it a matter of prayer. Many a time I have prayed something like this: “Lord, you know all the sermons that have ever been preached throughout history on this text. You have them all in your files. I need help. Show me a better way, please.”

3) Come up with six different approaches for that sermon. You could preach it as a dramatic monologue, you could don a costume and be a biblical character reciting it, you could preach “5 things the devil does not like about this truth,” and such.

Under normal circumstances, I suggest the 10 percent rule for the introduction and 10 percent for the conclusion. That still leaves 80 percent of the time for the body of the sermon. If you have to vary any of these numbers, I vote for shortening the introduction and lengthening the conclusion (which I see not simply as ending the sermon but driving its points home and bringing together all its various threads into one single theme).

One of the best ideas “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” (the television quiz show) gave preachers was to “phone a friend.”

Sometimes on a Friday or Saturday, I receive a phone call or e-mail from a preacher friend. The conversation begins something like this: “Joe, you got a minute? I’m stuck.”

He tells me where he is in his sermon preparation and where he has gotten himself bogged down. The sermon is not working and he not only knows it, he cares deeply. He feels a deep sense of obligation to his congregation to communicate God’s message accurately and effectively.

I don’t exactly have a “Joe’s Fix-it Shop” for sermons. I’m no technician. What I do with my friend is brainstorm. “What if you did this? Have you thought of that?” And invariably, I’ll say, “That reminds me of a story….”

I never hear the finished product, never know if he used anything I said or not. Anyway, that’s not the point. As authors occasionally fight writers block, preachers have their own moments when the creative juices are not flowing and they need a little outside inspiration.

One more reason, guys, incidentally, to begin sermon preparation early. Saturday is no time to be struggling with this. That’s heart attack country.

Having said that, I’m reminded of a e-mail that came today. I’m writing this on Wednesday, October 7, and the request is for my sermon outline for the first Sunday of January when I speak in a church in Tennessee.

I’m tempted to reply, “Are you kidding? Man, I’ll preach 30 times between now and then! What if I let you know about December 26?”

What I actually did was to ask for a little more information about the nature of that service and what they want to accomplish. Then I’ll lay it before the Lord. After all, the Holy Spirit has no trouble inspiring a message today to be preached 3 months down the road. In fact, the message I delivered today at noon at a Mississippi church, the Lord gave me four years ago. So it can happen.

Pastor, remember the cardinal rule about boring sermons: if the message does not excite you, it’s a safe bet it will put the congregation to sleep.