This is theologically driven and suggested by suggested by homiletician Paul Scott Wilson.. p. 148
Wilson builds his homiletics upon the classic theological distinction between law and gospel. The law is God’s judgment upon human sin as well as the tragic quality of broken existence. The gospel is God’s ultimate saving mercy and divine redemptive moments woven into everyday life. Wilson renames law and gospel in more accessible terms, “trouble” and “grace,” and he claims that the move from trouble to grace reflects the basic structure (or, as he puts it, the “deep grammar”) of the gospel. p. 148
Wilson calls for a sermon form which ensures that the sermon discloses trouble and grace both in the scriptural world and in the contemporary world, allowing for the energy that sparks between these two theological poles to animate the process of hearing the sermon. Having heard far too many sermons in which God plays little or no role, Wilson is keen to ensure that the action of God always appears. p. 148
Homiletician Stephen Farris agrees: “The most important task of the interpreter is to ask, *What is God doing in the text? The most difficult question for the interpreter to answer is, ‘Is God doing anything similar in the world?”’ p. 148
Wilson has settled on the clever and helpful image of “the four pages of the sermon.”^’* The idea of the “four pages” is that sermons should be divided into four basic movements, and each of these movements should take up about one- fourth of the sermon time: p. 148
Page one—Trouble in the biblical text
Page two—Trouble in our world
Page three—Grace in the biblical text
Page four—Grace in our world
p.149
The sermon does not have to present these four pages in this order; the preacher is free to shuffle the pages around, thereby creating many possible sermon sequences.
p.149
Normally, though, page four will come last in the sermon, because grace finally triumphs in the Christian gospel and, as Wilson puts it, the move “from trouble to grace in a sermon helps ensure that grace is stronger and reinforces the overall movement of the faith.”^^ p. 149
However, a sermon’s form, as we have argued, is a part of its meaning, and if a congregation is treated week after week only to the problem solving design, it is inevitably being subtly taught that the purpose of the gospel is to resolve problems or that the best experience of hearing the gospel is a deeply felt “Aha!” Sometimes the gospel does not resolve ambiguity; it creates it. Sometimes the gospel does not come to us as an Aha!—an unexpected word surprising us or turning our world upside down—but instead as a familiar and trusted word of confirmation, as the “old, old story.” The Bible itself, taken as a larger narrative, does not in fact move from problem to resolution, or from “trouble” to “grace,” but begins with creation, with what God says is “very good.” Trouble happens later. Wilson has objected that his critics who say that his ideas about sermon structure constitute a problem-resolution model have missed the point that “the gospel is relationship.”^® But, as a matter of fact, sermons that are routinely built according to the pattern of “from trouble to grace” are finally theologically nuanced versions of the problem-resolution form. p.150
Wilson also underscores the important truth that any proclamation of grace oblivious to human brokenness is cheap grace and any hammering away at human trouble and sin that does not also speak a word of grace is mere moralizing. p. 150