Archive for December, 2011

Expository Preaching: An Introduction

The heartbeat of this blog is the call by Paul to Timothy to “preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2) by “rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).   Beginning with this post I want to examine the what, why, how and who of expository preaching.   Each of the posts ,in what will be a regular and lengthy series, will also get ‘filed’ in a more structured format under the new section of this blog called Expository Preaching

To be a preacher of God’s Word is, without doubt, the highest calling and greatest privilege known to man.    When a discouraged preacher wrote to the great Scottish preacher, Alexander Whyte, and asked at what point he should give up, Whyte’s response was forthright.  “Never think of giving up preaching; the angels around the throne envy you your great work.”

However, you don’t need me to tell you that the days we live in, even within churches that claim to be evangelical, are not days when faithful, earnest, passionate, Bible based, Christ centred, God glorifying preaching is the norm.

My conviction, which I will defend throughout this series of articles, is that true preaching is always expository preaching.  Or to state it in another, perhaps even bolder way – non-expository preaching is not true preaching at all.   The only legitimate way to teach and preach God’s Word is to do so by means of exposition.

Sometimes the best way to understand what something is to identify what it is not.  Let’s look at some approaches to teaching Scripture that are not expositional or expository.

Derek Newton in his excellent book, ‘And the Word became….a sermon’[1],  identifies several popular types of sermons or talks, including:

1. Rocket Sermons

In these talks, the Bible text is simply used as a launch-pad, from which the preacher goes off in some direction that is clearly unconnected from the passage and context of Scripture altogether.  As you listen, with your Bible open, trying to follow the link between spoken and written word you will quickly become bewildered and lost.

2. Heart on the Sleeve Sermons

The sermon or talk is simply an opportunity for the speaker to express their own opinions or insights, possibly very loosely based on but not rooted in a Scripture passage.

3. Grasshopper Sermons

Here the preacher extracts a theme or even a word from a passage of Scripture and then hops all around the Bible, showing its occurrences and uses in various parts of Scripture.

4. Skyscraper Sermons

Like a block of high rise flats, these messages are little more than one story after another.  Their entertainment value may be high but their Bible content is low.

In the words of Walter Kaiser, “It is no secret that Christ’s Church is not at all in good health in many places of the world.  She has been languishing because she has been fed, as the current line has it, “junk food”; all kinds of artificial preservatives and all sorts of unnatural substitutes have been served up to her.  As a result, theological and Biblical malnutrition has afflicted the very generation that has taken such giant steps to make sure its physical health is not damaged by using foods or products that are not carcinogenic or otherwise harmful to their physical bodies.  Simultaneously a worldwide spiritual famine resulting from the absence of any genuine publication of the Word of God (Amos 8:11) continues to run wild and almost unabated in most quarters of the Church.”[3]

If we could continue with Kaiser’s food analogy for a moment, what happens if people live on a diet of junk food rather than a well balanced and nutritious diet?  Well the answer is clear for all to see in the Church of today – spiritual malnutrition, truth decay, and even, strange as it may seem,  obesity.

•  spiritual malnutrition:  If we adopt these generally random, haphazard, agenda driven approaches to God’s Word, then the men and women who sit under that sort of preaching week in and week out do not grow in their knowledge and understanding of God’s Word or of the God of that Word.   They will never grow past the knowledge or maturity level of the preacher.  In the words of Colin Smith, formerly of Edinburgh and now in Illinois, “Topical preaching, for example, can only take you where you have already gone with what you already know.”[4]

•  truth decay: Our listeners will never become familiar with, or stretched by, vast tracts of God’s Word and, perhaps most dangerously of all, they will end up with a very strange view of the Bible itself.  Instead of seeing the Bible as being a series of carefully constructed books with progressions of thought and teaching, they will see it as a collection of proof texts or as some sort of leather bound ‘promise box’ that you dip into every now and then for a blessed thought or word of comfort.

• obesity: Why then are some of the places where they have abandoned expository preaching, if ever they practised it, packing the numbers in?  This seems to be what people want and are attracted to so surely we should provide anecdotal, entertaining talks because at least that gets people into Church.  The idea of a man standing up for 30, 40 or 50 minutes and talking is so out of date and unattractive so lets abandon it.  Let’s have short, entertaining messages, ideally strung together with lots of visual images like video clips etc.

The issue is, the congregation may have been entertained but have they been fed?   Churches do not exist simply to pack crowds in on a Sunday morning but to be a place where the authoritative word of the living God is heard.

Expository messages, on the other hand, begin with a text of Scripture, continue with a text of Scripture and finish with the text of Scripture.  They use illustrations and cross-references from elsewhere in the Bible but only to show more clearly what the text says and what the text means.   The popular but false forms of preaching listed above do exactly the opposite.  Far from being expositions of the Bible they are, in fact, impositions – for they reads into God’s Word something that isn’t there.  As Alex Motyer so succinctly put it, “Central to it all is that concern which the word ‘exposition’ itself enshrines: a display of what is there.”^[5]