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The Five-Minute Strong's Discipline
A weekly habit for ministers who want their lexical claims to hold up. Five minutes per word, three or four words per sermon.
Most ministers do not have time to do a serious word study on every word in a passage. They also know that every claim about a Greek or Hebrew word from the pulpit is a claim they will be asked about, eventually, by someone in the congregation who took a year of Greek in seminary or who is reading Wright on the side.
The five-minute Strong's discipline splits the difference. Five minutes per word. Three or four words per sermon. Enough to make any lexical claim that crosses the pulpit threshold defensible.
The five minutes
For each word you intend to make a claim about, the five minutes go like this.
One minute: identify the Strong's number and confirm the word's appearances in this passage and the writer's other uses.
Two minutes: open a serious lexicon — BDAG, LSJ, HALOT, or whatever fits the corpus — and read the entry. Note the senses listed. Note which sense the lexicon places this verse under, if it places it.
One minute: read the surrounding sentence and ask which sense the grammar supports. The lexicon's sense and the sentence's grammar should agree.
One minute: write down the claim you can defend. The form is "in this verse, the word means X, in the sense the lexicon catalogs as Y, supported by the construction Z."
If the claim survives the five minutes, you can preach it. If it does not, you cannot. Either narrow the claim to what the five minutes supports, or cut it from the sermon.
Why this is enough
Five minutes is not a serious word study by scholarly standards. It is a defensible word study by sermon standards. The minister who has done the five minutes knows three things they would not otherwise know: the lexicon's actual range for the word, the sense the construction supports, and a defensible form of the claim.
That trio is enough to keep most pulpit Greek out of trouble. It does not produce dissertation-quality readings. It produces honest sermon claims.
What about the words you do not study
Most words in a passage do not get the five minutes, because most words in a passage do not need a sermon-level claim made about them. The discipline is specifically for the words you intend to lean on — the words you are about to say something about, in front of the congregation, that depends on Greek or Hebrew detail.
If you are not making a lexical claim about a word, you do not need to do the five minutes for it. The discipline is specific to the load-bearing words.
A weekly habit
Three or four words per sermon, five minutes each. Fifteen to twenty minutes a week, dedicated to lexical grounding. Most ministers can fit this in. Most ministers do not, and the result is the slow accumulation of pulpit Greek that does not survive scrutiny.
Make it a habit. The sermon claims that survive the discipline are the ones that hold up over a long ministry.