What Kind of Language? Outlining a Preaching Text

Most biblical texts fall into one of three broad language categories: Prose, Poetry, or Story. Though they often overlap in many ways, each of these communicates, challenges, and shapes us differently. In fact, like the three modes of transportation to Australia, they give us such different journeys that the perspectives they give of the same truth might seem widely divergent, even when the destination is the same.

In your preparation process, these differences become impossible to ignore the moment you begin to try to outline the meaning of the text. Let’s think about each of these language categories specifically from the perspective of how we would outline the text.