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How to Use Bible Commentaries Effectively in Sermon Preparation

July 2, 2026

Most pastors own commentaries. Most pastors use them every week. And yet one of the most common — and most damaging — mistakes in sermon preparation is opening a commentary too early.

Survey data from Korea’s largest pastoral association (한목협, n=802) found that 84% of senior pastors cite commentaries as their primary sermon preparation resource, ranking higher than books of theology, denominational materials, and websites combined. The number likely reflects a similar reality in seminaries and pulpits across the English-speaking world.

This is not a problem of using commentaries. The problem is the sequence.

The Principle Fee and Stuart Got Right

In How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth — one of the most widely assigned biblical interpretation textbooks in evangelical seminaries — Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart make a simple but radical claim about commentary use:

“Consulting a commentary, as essential as this will be at times, is the last task you perform.”

Last. Not second. Not third. Last.

Fee and Stuart’s reasoning is not that commentaries are untrustworthy. It’s that when you read a commentary before observing the text yourself, you are effectively outsourcing your thinking. Someone else’s questions, someone else’s interpretive moves, and someone else’s conclusions become the invisible scaffolding of your sermon — without you ever noticing.

The goal of sermon preparation is not to discover what a scholar thinks about a passage. It’s to understand what the passage actually says, in its historical and literary context, and to communicate that faithfully to a specific congregation. Commentaries serve that goal. They cannot replace it.

Before You Open a Commentary: The Observation Phase

The discipline of text-first study requires time and a specific method. Here is what to do with the passage before any secondary literature:

1. Read the passage in multiple translations

Lay two or three translations side by side — an essentially literal version (ESV, NRSV), a dynamic equivalent (NIV), and if possible, a paraphrase (NLT, The Message). Notice where they diverge. Those divergences are not problems; they are your first set of exegetical questions. Why did two careful translation teams make different choices at the same word? That question will guide everything that follows.

2. Trace the structure and argument

Read the passage aloud, slowly. Mark repeated words, contrasts, turning points, and connective logic (therefore, because, but, so that). In epistles, map the argument. In narrative, trace the plot. In poetry, identify the movement of thought. Do this work in your own handwriting or in a document you control — not in the margin of a pre-annotated study Bible.

3. Generate a question list

The goal of this phase is not to produce answers. It’s to produce good questions. What words or phrases are unclear? What historical situation does the author seem to assume? How does this passage relate to what comes immediately before and after? What might the original audience have heard that we easily miss?

Write these questions down. They will become your guide when you finally open a commentary. Without them, you will read the commentary’s questions instead of your own.

The Right Order for Consulting Commentaries

Once your observation work is done and your question list is in hand, it’s time for commentaries — in a deliberate sequence that moves from broad to focused.

Stage 1: Genre and introductory resources

Before diving into verse-by-verse comment, consult a resource that orients you to the whole book and its literary form. Fee and Stuart’s How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth is organized by genre precisely for this reason. Understanding that Revelation is apocalyptic — not predictive newspaper-style prophecy — changes how you read every individual verse. This stage grounds interpretation in the right framework before the details arrive.

Stage 2: Accessible expositional commentaries

Expository commentary series — such as The Bible Speaks Today, Preaching the Word, or Focus on the Bible — are written to be read like books rather than consulted like dictionaries. They emphasize the flow of thought across a section and connect exegesis to application. Read these to grasp the larger interpretive shape of the passage before zooming into contested details.

Stage 3: Mid-level scholarly commentaries

This is the core of your commentary work. Series like the New International Commentary on the New Testament/Old Testament (NICNT/NICOT), New American Commentary (NAC), and Pillar New Testament Commentary combine sustained exegesis with sustained exposition. They engage the original languages and historical background while remaining accessible to working pastors.

D. A. Carson’s New Testament Commentary Survey and Tremper Longman’s Old Testament Commentary Survey are the best guides for deciding which commentary to purchase for each biblical book. Carson always evaluates commentaries with the preaching pastor in mind, noting which volumes are most useful for sermon preparation. Both books rate commentaries for theological perspective, level of technical difficulty, and practical utility — an invaluable tool for building a focused library.

At this stage, your earlier question list should be doing real work. You are not simply reading to absorb; you are checking whether the commentary addresses your questions, and whether its answers hold up under examination.

Stage 4: Technical exegetical commentaries (when needed)

Volumes like the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (BECNT), Word Biblical Commentary (WBC), or Hermeneia engage the Greek and Hebrew text at a level that requires some original-language training to follow in full. Reserve these for passages where a critical interpretive decision must be made — a textual variant, a disputed translation, a grammatical structure that changes the meaning of a whole paragraph.

Not every passage requires this depth. But when it does, these resources are irreplaceable.

How to Read a Commentary Critically

Reading a commentary is not the same as reading for information. It requires a specific posture.

Know the commentator’s assumptions

Every commentary is written from a theological and methodological vantage point. A scholar committed to source-critical approaches will handle narrative texts differently than a scholar who takes authorial unity as a given. A commentator shaped by Reformed covenant theology will read the Law differently than one working from a new perspective on Paul. None of this makes a commentary useless — but it makes the introduction of any commentary essential reading. Carson and Longman’s surveys identify these assumptions book by book.

Follow the argument, not just the conclusion

The most tempting misuse of commentaries is extracting conclusions. “This verse means X” gets noted, the book is closed, and the meaning is transferred to the sermon. But the value of a good commentary lies in how it got there: the lexical evidence considered, the parallel texts weighed, the interpretive options evaluated. Tracing that reasoning trains your own interpretive judgment over time. Following only conclusions trains you to outsource it.

Treat disagreements between commentaries as data

Tremper Longman states it plainly: “Many times [commentaries] will be of great help, but sometimes the reader will be right and the commentaries will be wrong.” When two respected commentators reach different conclusions on the same verse, that is not a frustration — it is a signal that the text itself is doing something interesting. The disagreement locates the exegetical decision you as a preacher must make and defend. Sitting with that tension, weighing the evidence, and arriving at your own reasoned interpretation is what separates a preacher from a lecturer.

What Commentaries Cannot Do

The best commentary in your library cannot tell you how Romans 8 speaks to a congregation living through grief. It cannot connect the wilderness imagery of Isaiah 40 to the specific dryness a particular community is experiencing. It cannot make the application specific, embodied, or pastoral.

That work belongs to the preacher alone — and it can only be done well by someone who has wrestled with the text before opening any book. When you bring your own observations and questions to the commentary, and let the commentary sharpen rather than substitute for your thinking, the result is a sermon with both exegetical rigor and pastoral specificity.

The sequence is everything: observe first, question second, consult last.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many commentaries should I consult for a single sermon?

Quality over quantity. Reading two to three commentaries carefully — at different levels of technical depth — is more valuable than skimming five. A good baseline for any biblical book: one mid-level scholarly commentary (NICNT/NICOT, NAC, or equivalent) and one accessible expositional commentary. Add a technical volume for passages where interpretation is genuinely contested.

I don’t know Greek or Hebrew. Can I still use exegetical commentaries?

Yes, meaningfully. Even without language training, you can follow the logical structure of a lexical argument: why a particular word was understood a particular way, what the range of meaning in the original is, which sense fits the context. The reasoning is accessible even when the Greek or Hebrew text itself is not. Engaging with it — even partially — deepens your understanding of the passage.

Does this approach work for topical sermons, not just expository series?

The observation-first principle applies regardless of sermon form. Even when you’ve chosen a theme before choosing a text, the text still deserves full attention before secondary sources shape your reading. If anything, topical preaching makes this discipline more important, because the temptation to force a pre-existing message onto a passage is stronger.

Where do I start building a commentary library?

Start with the books you preach most. If your tradition emphasizes the Gospels, invest in a strong commentary on Matthew and Luke before anything else. Let D. A. Carson’s New Testament Commentary Survey and Tremper Longman’s Old Testament Commentary Survey guide your purchasing decisions — both are inexpensive, regularly updated, and written specifically to help preachers choose wisely. Didymus Lab will be publishing its own guided commentary recommendations by biblical book in the coming months.

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