Explaining the Tool: What Prep King Is and What It’s For
A study companion for preachers, built to send you back to the text, not away from it
Every preacher knows the shape of the week. Sunday comes, the sermon is preached, and by Monday morning the next text is already waiting. Somewhere between hospital visits, counseling appointments, staff meetings, and the ordinary needs of a household, the pastor has to sit with a passage long enough to understand it, believe it, and say it clearly to people he loves.
I've lived that rhythm for a long time. Prep King grew out of it.
What it is
Prep King writes sermon-prep briefs. You send a Bible passage (or a topic), and you receive a written brief on that text, delivered to you on a private link. It isn't a public post, and it isn't a finished sermon. It's study material: the kind of resource you'd want spread across your desk on a Tuesday morning.
A brief typically gathers several things into one place:
- Context. Where the passage sits in its book and in the larger story of Scripture.
- Word study. Key terms in the original language, explained for a working preacher rather than a specialist.
- Voices from the classic library. What men like John Calvin, Matthew Henry, and Charles Spurgeon saw in the text. These are old friends of the pulpit, and they still have a great deal to teach us.
- Exegetical prompts. Questions that push you to observe the text more carefully before you decide what it means.
- Cross-references and quotations that help Scripture interpret Scripture and give you language worth borrowing.
- Application helps, including ways to think about how a text lands on different people in the congregation, plus discussion questions and ideas for prayer and singing in the service.
A brief on Psalm 23, for example, moves from the shepherd imagery of the ancient world, through the Hebrew words for “goodness” and “mercy” that pursue the believer, to what Spurgeon and Calvin noticed in the psalm, and finally to questions for prayer. A brief on 1 Kings 12 walks through Rehoboam's foolish counsel and Jeroboam's golden calves and asks what those choices expose in us.
What it's for
The goal is simple: to help pastors preach better.
That doesn't mean preaching faster, or preaching someone else's sermon. A preacher's authority comes from God's Word, and a sermon only carries weight when the man in the pulpit has wrestled with the text himself. No tool can do that for you, and I wouldn't want one to.
So Prep King is built to send you into the text, not around it. The best use of a brief starts before you open it: linger in the passage. Read it several times. Work through a sermon-prep worksheet. Pray. Let the text unsettle and comfort you before you open anyone else's book. Then turn to what the commentators have said.
There's wisdom in that order. The classic commentators are most useful to the preacher who has already met the text on his own. They confirm what you saw, correct what you missed, and occasionally open a door you didn't know was there. Reading them first can quietly replace your own seeing with theirs. Reading them second turns them into conversation partners.
Who it's for
Prep King is for the pastor who preaches week in and week out and wants a faithful study partner. It's for the bivocational pastor whose study hours are scarce. It's for the young preacher still learning how to move from text to sermon, and for the seasoned one who'd welcome a fresh angle on a familiar passage. It may also serve pastors in places where a good theological library is hard to come by.
Whatever you receive is yours to use in your own preaching. The sermon you write is yours.
A word about tools
Every generation of preachers has used tools: concordances, lexicons, commentaries, study Bibles. None of them preached a sermon. Each of them, used well, helped a man see the text more clearly and serve his people more faithfully. That's the only ambition Prep King has.
The Spirit still does the real work. He opens the Scriptures to the preacher in the study and opens hearts in the pews. Our part is to be diligent. “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).
If a tool can help with that diligence, it's worth having on the desk.
Try it
If you preach, you're welcome to try it. Send a passage you're preparing and see whether the brief serves your study. First one is free!