Organising sermon preparationPosts in this series
If you're blessed with a theological college nearby, then you really should take advantage of their library and raid their commentaries each time you prepare your sermon. The college library will save you from buying lots of commentaries, meaning you can spend your book allowance on other books that the library doesn't have.
Preparing to visit the library
Before you go to the library, if you've already made a commentary list as described here, then the only thing you need to do is sort the list by call number and print it off.
The printed list will save you significant time at the library as you won't need to use the library computers to find everything you need. And hopefully you have even been able to make your list by visiting the library's online catalogue so you don't need to use their (often clunky) computers at all.
Also, before you go to the library, take a stack of those cheap bookmarks I described here.
Visiting the library
Once you arrive, take your list to the shelves and get the commentaries that are currently there (this is the only drawback to using their commentaries - sometimes the best ones have been borrowed).
Then once you have read the commentaries, put bookmarks in the place where you were up to so you can easily find your spot next week when you visit the library. I've been doing this for years and my bookmarks have rarely moved. This is probably because the library is part of a relatively small college. But it may also be because I consult a wide variety of commentaries, whereas students tend to stick to the more recent volumes.
Finally, you should also have a quick look at the shelves of commentaries for your relevant book of the Bible whenever you preach on a book of the Bible for the first time, or have been away from it for a while. This is in order to find recently published commentaries that are not on your list. When you made your commentary list, you used recommendations from bigwigs like Carson, Longman and Spurgeon. But they are not always as up to date as you'd like (after all Spurgeon has been dead for a while now). Thus some recent high quality commentaries can slip through the cracks. If your quick look unearths some new reliable commentaries, add them to your list and print off a fresh copy of your list when you get back to the office ready for your visit in the following week. (None of this is to suggest that Carson or Longman may have nothing to say about these new commentaries, often you can use their recommendations on commentary series to tell whether a new commentary is worth checking. For example Carson says about the New International Greek Testament Commentary series: 'For clergy and others well trained in Greek and exegesis the series is the one to watch'. Thus if you spy a fresh commentary in this series, you'd be wise to add it to your list).
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