Working With The Gospel Of John For Sermon Preparation
John's Gospel doesn't lend itself to straightforward verse-by-verse preaching the way the Synoptics do. The structure is thematic rather than chronological, the "I am" sayings overlap across chapters, and the discourses run long enough to test any preacher's congregation attention span. When you're building a sermon series through John, you need a commentary that respects the literary architecture rather than flattening it into isolated proof texts. I've spent years working through John with several resources on my shelf, and this one stays open because it handles the exegetical heavy lifting while still keeping the homiletical end in sight. What makes this set different from something like MAC or BECNT is the explicit dual purpose built into every entry. Most commentaries give you a solid exegesis section and maybe a paragraph or two at the end suggesting application. This one structures its homiletical portion around actual sermon preparation decisions: how to handle the pericope without forcing a narrative into a moral lesson, where the text's own climax sits, and what the Greek work actually requires you to preserve rather than paraphrase away. The volume format matters here too. Having the expository notes on the left pages and the homiletical guidance on the right means you're not flipping back and forth every time you move from understanding the text to figuring out what to do with it. I ran into a real problem early in a series through John 9, the healing of the man born blind. The passage sits awkwardly between the bread of life discourse in chapter 6 and the Lazarus narrative in chapter 11. Most commentaries treat it as a standalone miracle story and build a sermon around spiritual blindness or faith versus unbelief. The commentary here flags the intertexture with chapter 6 explicitly and shows how the lamplight imagery in 9:5 connects back to 8:12. That changed the entire shape of my series. Instead of preaching nine isolated sermons, I restructured it as a single theological movement about light and witness, which actually matches what the text is doing. Without that connection, I would have missed the author's intentional cross-referencing and produced a series that was theologically thin and homiletically repetitive.
The commentary's handling of the signs framework is also where it separates from the pack. A lot of preachers assume the seven signs in John are neatly arranged and identical in function. They're not. The commentary walks through each one and shows where the sign functions as a revelation of divine identity versus where it functions as a judgment trigger. The Cana wedding in chapter 2 works differently than the Bethesda healing in chapter 5, and the commentary makes that distinction explicit rather than flattening them into a generic "God can do miracles" message. That precision matters when you're teaching a congregation through the Gospel over months. They'll pick up on it if you're treating every sign the same way. The Greek work here is solid but not exhaustive. You won't find the kind of detailed lexical analysis you'd get from a BDAG-level reference, and the commentary doesn't attempt a full syntactical breakdown on every disputed passage. If you're working through something like the ending of chapter 8 or the Comma Johanneum question in 1 John, you'll still need your text-critical apparatus. The commentary acknowledges the textual variants but moves quickly to the interpretive decision. That's a practical choice for a preaching commentary. It saves time on passages where the textual issue doesn't affect the theological reading and doesn't waste space on debates that won't show up in a sermon. One limitation worth stating directly: this commentary assumes your congregation can handle sustained theological exposition. The homiletical section occasionally leans toward a more academic presentation style, with longer discursive flows that work fine in a college-educated setting but may lose people in a church that expects shorter, more illustration-driven sermons. I had to adjust my approach significantly when I was pastoring in a rural context where the average education level was lower and the congregation preferred clear narrative movement over theological synthesis. I shortened the homiletical sections dramatically and leaned more on the expository notes to reconstruct the sermon structure myself. The commentary didn't fail, but it wasn't optimized for that context and you'd need to adapt it.
Another practical thing about the physical book: the binding holds up reasonably well for a two-volume set used in weekly preparation, but the page cream color and font size make it slightly strained for extended sitting study. I keep a separate highlighter system for the expository sections so I can mark the key Greek terms and structural markers without losing my place. That's a minor workflow issue but one that adds up over a six-month sermon series. The homiletical guidance sections sometimes push toward a three-point structure that feels formulaic when applied to narrative pericopes. John 4 with the Samaritan woman isn't a passage that naturally breaks into three points without doing violence to the text. The commentary suggests a structured outline, and I found myself ignoring that suggestion and building the sermon around the conversation's natural turning points instead. The expository notes carried the weight there, not the homiletical framework. That's a recurring pattern: the exegetical content is where this commentary earns its keep, and the preaching outlines are useful starting points rather than finished products. If you're preparing a thorough John series and want something that treats the Gospel as literature rather than a collection of proof texts, this is one of the stronger options available. Pair it with a more detailed technical commentary like Morris or Craig Keener for the passages where the Greek or textual question needs deeper digging. The two-volume format keeps the physical weight manageable, and the expository-homiletical split cuts your preparation time noticeably once you get used to the layout. I'd estimate it saves roughly forty to fifty percent of the time compared to using a standard exposition commentary and then searching separately for homiletical material.
Get the Full Details
For the passages where it struggles, especially the more theologically dense sections like John 17, you'll want supplementary material. The commentary covers the high priestly prayer adequately but doesn't push hard on the scholarly debates about its liturgical origins or its relationship to early church worship practice. If your congregation includes people who ask those questions, you'll need to supplement from other sources. That's true of almost any single commentary on this material, but it's worth knowing upfront rather than discovering it mid-series. The index and cross-reference system within the volumes is functional rather than elegant. It'll get you to the relevant passages but isn't as thorough as something like the IVP Commentary series. For quick lookups during sermon review, it works fine. For research-mode preparation where you're tracking a theme across the entire Gospel, you're better off using a digital tool like Logos or Accordance to do the theme search and then coming back to the commentary for the exegetical notes. Bottom line: it does what it says it does. Solid exegesis, practical homiletical guidance, reasonable treatment of the major interpretive issues. Not perfect. Not exhaustive. A solid anchor commentary for anyone running a through-John series and wanting to stay close to the text while still producing preachable material.
