most fruitful labour in my study.”2 Experts on formal speech preparation—including most homileticians—strongly emphasize the importance of having a central subject, or main object, of a public speech. For the preacher, this central subject springs from the central idea of the biblical text, the CIT. Through the years various homileticians have used different terms to describe Jowett’s “pregnant sentence.”3 However, in most discussions the word proposition has been used at some point to describe the