PREACHING THE WORD
If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God.
—1 Peter 4:11
The unfolding of your words gives light.
—Psalm 119:130
God’s Word and Human Skill
In the first Protestant preaching manual, The Art of Prophesying (1592), William Perkins wrote, “The Word of God alone is to be preached, in its perfection and inner consistency.”1 This may seem to many today to be an obvious point. Of course a Christian preacher or teacher should be communicating the Bible, they say. In Perkins’s cultural moment, however, this was not obvious. For many preachers of his day, “[God’s] grace was not irresistible. It needed to be supported by eloquence. . . . The faithful needed the miraculous power of preaching to buttress the Scripture.”2
Preaching in England at that time had become filled with verbal pyrotechnics, thick with ornate language, classical allusions and quotations, poetic images, and soaring rhetoric. Of course, preachers were still beginning with Bible passages—but very little time was given to actually unfolding the texts. They seemed to think the Bible needed a lot of help. A baseline confidence in the power and authority of the Scripture itself had been lost.
William Perkins and his contemporaries reacted against “the cultivated oratory” of their time. They believed that the main aim in preaching had been lost: that we let the Bible itself speak, so it can pour forth its own power. The early part of Perkins’s brief volume spends substantial time establishing that the Bible is God’s perfect, pure, and eternal wisdom and that it has the power to convict the conscience and penetrate the heart.3 Perkins knew that communicators’ beliefs about the character of the Bible had a major effect on how they actually handled it. Do we, as communicators of the Bible, truly know that it carries God’s own authority and power? If we do, we will be more focused on unfolding its insights than on using it merely to support our own. “The preaching of the Word is the testimony of God and the profession of the knowledge of Christ, not of human skill,” argues Perkins. He quickly adds, however, “but this does not mean that pulpits will be marked by a lack of knowledge and education. . . . The minister may, and in fact must, privately make free use of the general arts and of philosophy as well as employ a wide variety of reading while he is preparing his sermon.” These things should “not [be] ostentatiously paraded” before the congregation.4
Perkins means that the purpose of preaching is not to present the results of your empirical investigation or philosophical reasoning or scholarly research. Nor is it to sense an insight or burden—one that you believe has been put on your heart by God—and then hunt for a biblical text that gives you an occasion for telling people what you want to tell them anyway. The purpose of preaching is to preach the Scripture with its own insights, directives, and teachings. Along the way, as Perkins says, we can and must use all the “arts” to help our hearers understand the biblical author’s meaning. All of this is done in subservience to the first great task of preaching: to preach God’s Word, and to let listeners sense its very authority.
Expository and Topical Preaching
What is the best way to do that?
Hughes Oliphant Old has written a magisterial seven-volume series on the history of preaching.5 Old looks at Christian preaching in every century and in every branch of the church—Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, and Pentecostal—and, by the end of the survey, at churches on virtually every continent. The scope and variety of his research are breathtaking. In his introduction to the series he names five basic types of sermons that he discerns over the centuries, which he calls expository, evangelistic, catechetical, festal, and prophetic.
He defines expository preaching as “the systematic explanation of Scripture done on a week-by-week . . . basis at the regular meeting of the congregation.”6 The other four types of preaching may at first glance seem quite different from one another, but in one key respect they are the same. Unlike exposition, these other four forms of preaching are not necessarily organized around a single passage of Scripture. That is because the main purpose of each is not the unfolding of the ideas within a single biblical text but rather the communication of a biblical idea from a number of texts. Old calls this broad approach “thematic” or “topical” preaching. The topical sermon may have any one of several aims. It may be to convey truth to nonbelievers (evangelistic preaching) or to instruct believers in a particular aspect of their church’s confession and theology (catechetical preaching). Festal preaching helps listeners celebrate observances in the church year such as Christmas, Easter, or Pentecost, while prophetic preaching speaks to a particular historical or cultural moment.
There are, then, in the end, two basic forms of preaching: expository and topical. Throughout the centuries both have been widely used—and, as Old demonstrates, they must both be used. For example, in the book of Acts Paul did Bible exposition in a synagogue but employed topical oratory, using no Scripture at all, in the public square of Mars Hill. His points were all truths taken from the Bible, but the method of presentation was more like classical oratory in which he set forth theses and made arguments in their favor. In Paul’s judgment, it was not appropriate to offer a careful Bible exposition to an audience who not only disbelieved in the Bible but also was profoundly ignorant of even its most basic assumptions. Evangelistic occasions are, then, one place where more topical Christian messages may be appropriate.
There are other occasions when the basic message you want to share is a biblical one, but it may not be possible to say enough of what the Bible has to say on your subject from one passage alone. Imagine you want to teach college students what the Bible says about the Trinity—that God is one and three. There is virtually no single biblical text that would enable you to expound this profoundly biblical doctrine. Instead you will need to quote and cite several texts to support the teaching. In expository preaching, by contrast, your job is to go wherever the single text takes you. The points of the message emerge as the text is explained, as its meaning is drawn out.
It is also worth noting that the two types of preaching are not mutually exclusive, and absolutely pure forms of either are rare. They are actually overlapping categories or two poles on a spectrum. Even the most careful verse-by-verse exposition will usually refer to other places in the Bible that treat the same topic. For example, if the Holy Spirit appears in your text, you may need to explain that the Holy Spirit is an equal divine person with the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is a “he,” not an “it.” It is likely that in your text there is nothing said directly about the personality of the Holy Spirit, but unless you give a brief topical overview of the biblical doctrine of the Spirit, the message of your passage will be misunderstood. So all expository preaching is partially topical. Then again, any topical sermon that is faithful to the Scripture will have to consist of several “mini expositions” of various texts. That is, passages of Scripture used to fill in the topic must be explained within their own context.
Expository preaching grounds the message in the text so that all the sermon’s points are points in the text, and it majors in the text’s major ideas. It aligns the interpretation of the text with the doctrinal truths of the rest of the Bible (being sensitive to systematic theology). And it always situates the passage within the Bible’s narrative, showing how Christ is the final fulfillment of the text’s theme (being sensitive to biblical theology).
The Case for (Usually) Doing Expository Preaching
Just as throughout church history both kinds of preaching have been necessary, so Christian teachers and preachers today need to see both as legitimate forms they can skillfully use. Nevertheless, I would say that expository preaching should provide the main diet of preaching for a Christian community. Why? I can think of at least six reasons, though I will dwell on the first one at greater length.
Expository preaching is the best method for displaying and conveying your conviction that the whole Bible is true. This approach testifies that you believe every part of the Bible to be God’s Word, not just particular themes and not just the parts you feel comfortable agreeing with. A full confidence and rich grasp of the authority and inspiration of the Bible is absolutely crucial for a sustained, life-changing ministry of Bible teaching and preaching. When you have settled that, a sustained expository approach over time—in which you take care to draw out the meaning of each text, to ground all your assertions in the text, and to move through large chunks of the Bible systematically—will best pass your confidence in the Scripture along to your listeners.
It is not enough for you to just have a general respect for the Bible that you may have inherited from your upbringing. As a preacher or teacher you will come upon many difficulties in the Bible; and inevitably the biblical authors say things that not only contradict the spirit of the age but also your own convictions and intuitions. Unless your understanding of the Bible—and your confidence in its inspiration and authority—are deep and comprehensive, you will not be able to do the hard work necessary to understand and present it convincingly. Your lack of conviction will also show up in your public teaching, blunting its impact. Instead of proclaiming, warning, and inviting, you will be sharing, musing, and conjecturing.
Of course, there is also a danger that a preacher of the gospel of grace will be overbearing and unnecessarily dogmatic at places where faithful believers differ. We will address that issue later. Here I want to stress the danger of making the opposite mistake. It is no more effective to be apologetic and unassertive than to be too confrontational and harsh. The balance is important. As Timothy Ward writes, “[If] the preacher exercises too much power he can be fought. If he is too weak he can be ignored.”7
One way to develop an appropriate confidence in the Scripture is by seeing what the Bible says about itself. Start with a thorough study and analysis of Psalm 119, and distill all it says about the character of the Scripture and its role and use in our lives. Then there are several volumes and essays about the authority of the Scripture that are crucial for you to read carefully and know well, if your communication is going to bear fruit.8 It is important to know not only in general that the Bible is true but also that in the Bible God’s words are identical to his actions. When he says, “Let there be light,” there is light (Genesis 1:3). When God renames someone, it automatically remakes him (Genesis 17:5). The Bible does not say that God speaks and then proceeds to act, that he names and then proceeds to shape—but that God’s speaking and acting are the same thing. His word is his action, his divine power.9
So how do we hear God’s active Word today if we are not prophets or apostles who actually sat at Jesus’ feet? God’s words in the mouths of the prophets (Jeremiah 1:9–10), written down, are still God’s words to us when we read them today (Jeremiah 36:1–32). Ward says that it is crucial for the preacher to recognize this. “God’s ongoing dynamic action through the Spirit” is “supremely related to the language and meanings of Scripture.”10 In other words, as we unfold the meaning of the language of Scripture, God becomes powerfully active in our lives. The Bible is not merely information, not even just completely true information. It is “alive and active” (Hebrews 4:12)—God’s power in verbal form. It is only as we understand the meaning of the words that God names us and shapes us and recreates us.
If you, the Christian communicator, know and believe this doctrine of the Bible, it will have a profound influence on how you preach. If you believe only that the Spirit may, in some general way, attend to the preaching of the Bible under some circumstances, then you are likely to undermine its power and authority as you preach by overemphasizing your own experiences or by locating the authority in your church’s tradition and beliefs rather than in the Bible itself. Or you may use the Bible as a set of assorted wise remedies for contemporary social and personal problems. If, however, you believe that the preaching of the Word is one of the main channels for God’s action in the world, then with great care and confidence you will uncover the meaning of the text, fully expecting that God’s Spirit will act in listeners’ lives.11
Therefore famous verses about God’s Word being “like fire . . . and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces” (Jeremiah 23:29) are not mere rhetoric. I have seen hundreds of specific cases in which the Bible itself contained a power to penetrate people’s spiritual indifference and defenses in a way that went far beyond my powers of public speaking. A handful of times I have even had conversations with angry people who were sure that one of their friends had told me about them and that I had singled them out in the sermon. I was able to swear honestly that I had had no idea at all about their issue—that it was the Bible itself exercising its power to lay bare the “secrets of their hearts” (1 Corinthians 14:25). I don’t enjoy angry listeners, but I must say I love those conversations.
So the primary reason we should normally do expository preaching is that it expresses and unleashes our belief in the whole Bible as God’s authoritative, living, and active Word.
The other reasons to make expository preaching a church’s main diet are more practical but no less important. One is that a careful expository sermon makes it easier for the hearers to recognize that the authority rests not in the speaker’s opinions or reasoning but in God, in his revelation through the text itself. This is unclear in sermons that touch lightly on Scripture and spend most of the time in stories, lengthy arguments, or thoughtful musings. The listener might easily wiggle out from under the uncomfortable message by thinking, Well, that’s just your interpretation. Clear and solid exposition, however, takes pains to show what the passage means—and better attests that what is being said is not the product of the speaker’s views or prejudices but has come from this authoritative text.
Expository preaching enables God to set the agenda for your Christian community. Exposition is something of an adventure for the preacher. You set out into a book or a passage intent on submitting to its authority yourself and following where it may lead. Of course, you still have to choose which books and passages of the Bible to preach, and any experienced student of the Bible will know basically what is within particular parts of the Bible. However, expository preaching means you can’t completely predetermine what your people will be hearing over the next few weeks or months. As the texts are opened, questions and answers emerge that no one might have seen coming. We tend to think of the Bible as a book of answers to our questions, and it is that. However, if we really let the text speak, we may find that God will show us that we are not even asking the right questions.
Modern people, for example, may come to the Bible looking for answers to the question “How do I build up my self-esteem and feel better about myself?” Yet in the biblical passages on sin and repentance, they will discover that the more basic human problem is too high a view of ourselves. We are blind to the depths of our own self-centeredness and overconfident that we have the wisdom to manage our own lives. Then in passages on adoption and justification they will learn that by asking to “feel better about themselves” they were asking for too little—too little in comparison with what our new identity in Christ can be. In the end, unfolding God’s Word carefully will so transform our thinking that we will see the inadequacy of the original line of questions we brought to it.
A related reason is that expository preaching lets the text set the agenda for the preacher as well. It helps preachers resist the pressure to adapt messages too much to the culture’s preferences. It brings you to subjects that you would rather not touch on and that you might not have chosen to address, since some of the Bible’s positions—on subjects like sexuality—are so unpopular right now. Expository preaching only encourages you to declare God’s will on such matters and also forces you to find ways of addressing and handling tough issues publicly.
In this way exposition can prevent us from riding our personal hobbyhorses and pet issues. It has been said that even the best preachers have only a dozen or so sermons that they repreach, simply using the biblical passages as starting points. It is then added that the worst preachers have only one, repeated until it drives everyone crazy. That criticism is closer to the truth than we preachers would like to admit, but only the discipline of expository preaching will give us a fighting chance of escaping that trap.
A steady diet of expository sermons also teaches your audience how to read their own Bibles, how to think through a passage and figure it out. Exposition helps them pay more attention to the specifics of the text and helps them understand why different phrases mean what they do within the story line of the Bible. They become savvier and more sensitive readers in their own study.
I’d like to give one last reason to rely on expository preaching, and in light of what we just observed, it may seem counterintuitive. As we saw, sustained expository preaching keeps you away from pet themes and gets you into a greater range of passages and subjects. Yet it also should lead you to see even more clearly the one main biblical theme. Twice in my life I have spoken to men who explained to me that they came to vital faith in Christ only after they had become preachers and, in fact, had been converted by their own sermons. I also know of a minister who came to vital faith listening to his associate pastor’s expositions. How did that happen?
In expository preaching the meaning is discovered by looking at context, context, context. To understand a meaning of a sentence, we must ask, “How does this verse fit in with the rest of the passage?” To understand the meaning of the passage, we must ask, “How does this fit in with the rest of the book?” To understand the message of the book, we must ask, “How does this fit in with the rest of the Bible?” If you do this week after week you will discover the main story line of the Bible—the gospel of Jesus itself. Because the gospel is the resolution of every plotline and narrative and the fulfillment of every concept and image in the Bible, then week after week the listeners—and the preacher—will become ever clearer about the character of Christ’s gracious salvation. And yet no one will be bored because you will see the gospel in all its endlessly variegated, multidimensional glory. Expository preaching can imprint that reality on people better than its alternatives.
Dangers to Avoid
Exposition should be the main diet of preaching for every congregation. Nevertheless, there are dangers attending this approach as well.
One is that some exposition enthusiasts are unwilling to take the mobility of our society into account. Hughes Old shows us that the original preaching of the church in its first five centuries used the lectio continua method—consecutive, verse-by-verse exposition through whole books of the Bible, taking years to bring the congregation through great swaths of biblical material. As time went on the number of feast days and holy days multiplied in the church calendar until, in the medieval church, the lectio selecta method ruled. It meant that people got short devotionals on various subjects rather than robust systematic teaching through the Bible.12 In the twentieth century prominent preachers D. M. Lloyd-Jones, James M. Boice, and John MacArthur made it a hallmark of their ministries to take months or years to work through entire books of the Bible, leaving no stone unturned. This has led to a welcome revival of old-school expository preaching.
Many today believe this is the best and purest form of expository preaching. Yet most people in ancient times, and even in more recent times, lived all their lives near where they grew up. A preacher knew he would be preaching to the same basic group of people for years with little change in the membership. Today the population is far more mobile and church attenders much more transient. In the lectio continua method it is easy to spend a year or more on a single book of the Bible. However, if a family is going to be at your church for two years, do you really want them to learn only from 1 Samuel? Or even just from the Gospel of John with no time in the Old Testament? One of the strengths of exposition, as we have seen, is that it exposes the congregation to the full range of biblical teachings and subjects. Yet a strict, consecutive, whole-Bible-book approach will guarantee that most of your people will actually be exposed to less of the Bible’s variety.
Even D. M. Lloyd-Jones did not use this approach for his Sunday-evening congregation. That audience was full of non-Christians and other inquirers brought by Christian friends from all over the city. And Lloyd-Jones did his most deliberate, years-long exposition of Bible books on Friday nights for Christians who wanted more extensive and advanced teaching.
Those speaking to congregations filled with many people at different stages of belief, and with highly mobile people, would do better following the lead of the British Anglican evangelicals like John Stott and Dick Lucas. They are excellent models of preaching by the expository method. Their sermon outlines follow the main ideas of the passage and they are careful, crisp, and clear teachers of the text. Yet as pastors of congregations in highly mobile center-city settings they knew that they had many listeners for a couple of years at most. Their response was to modify the lectio continua. Rather than tackling whole long books of the Bible they offered expository series of consecutive passages through short books of the Bible, or they worked through longer books without covering every chapter, or they worked verse by verse through a couple of longer significant chapters in one book.13
If you are going to cover all the various parts and genres of the Bible—Old and New Testaments, narrative and didactic literature, prophets and poets—in a reasonable amount of time, you will have to move around in the Bible and do expository mini series.14
This isn’t the only danger that comes with a commitment to exposition. While most topical preaching puts more emphasis on rhetorical devices such as image and illustrations, eloquent and skillful language, and use of story, expository preachers rightly put greater energy into the exegesis of the passage. However, preaching is not only explaining the text but also using it to engage the heart. I often see preachers giving so much time to the first task that they put little thought and ingenuity into the second. Indeed, some schools of expository preaching actively discourage preachers from doing much more than presenting the data from their biblical research. Anything beyond that is seen to be entertainment and showmanship. As we saw in the prologue this attitude comes, ironically, from an inaccurate reading of Paul’s warnings in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 against using “human wisdom” in preaching. Neglecting persuasion, illustration, and other ways to affect the heart undermines the effectiveness of preaching—first because it’s boring and second because it’s unfaithful to the very purpose of preaching.
On a related point, there is a danger in overdefining expository preaching. Enthusiasts of expository preaching (and I am one of them!) are eager to guard its quality, and for good reason, as a great deal of it is woeful. But this desire can lead some to define exposition too narrowly.
Some say exposition must be a verse-by-verse running commentary without sermon outlines and headings. Though that was the main approach to preaching in the earliest centuries, over the last few centuries most expository preachers have moved to using sermon outlines to good effect. On the other hand, if we are tempted to insist (as many preaching professors do today) that verse-by-verse commentary is absolutely wrong, we must remember that both John Calvin and John Chrysostom, two of the greatest preachers in history, did it that way. We must not try to define expository preaching too strictly in either direction. Some expositors move through the text consecutively, covering almost every verse, while others use outlines that extract the main ideas of the passage and treat it more selectively.
It is also customary today to define an expository sermon as one in which “the main point of the text is the main point of the sermon.” This assumes that every biblical text has only one big idea or main point to it.15 Then, it is said, the preacher must structure the sermon outline and points around this main theme, passing by any other matters in the text. Certainly in the majority of cases, the message will be clearer if the speaker is ruthless in pruning tangents out of the presentation, but this rule can be applied too rigidly.
In some Bible passages it is not easy to discern one clear central idea.16 This is especially true in narratives. What is the one main point of Jacob’s wrestling with the Lord in Genesis 32? What is the one reason the genealogies of Jesus were included at the beginning of Jesus’ life in Matthew 1? What is the one point of the account of the dead man who came to life when his corpse came into contact with the bones of the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings 13? Then there is the strange account of the seven sons of Sceva (Acts 19:11–20) who tried to cast a demon out of a man “in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches.” In the comical result, the demon talked back through the man to the would-be exorcisers: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” before leaping upon and beating all seven of the sons. What was Luke trying to get across to us by including this incident in his book of Acts? I’ve heard a number of great expositions of this passage, and all of them were well grounded in the text and not contradictory of one another. Nevertheless, they were not the same. Multiple valid inferences can be drawn from such narratives, from which a wise preacher can select one or two to fit the capacities and needs of the listeners.17
The Bible is particularly rich, and this is why nearly always when you return to a text several years after having studied it or preached on it you see new ideas and meanings that you hadn’t seen before. That doesn’t mean that you should throw out the notes or the recording of the earlier sermon! Your new study and treatment will supplement and sharpen what you understood about the passage before. The richness of Scripture means that there are always new things to see and find.
This is why Alan M. Stibbs, in his forgotten classic Expounding God’s Word, defines expository preaching as presenting the ideas (plural) and even the implications of the text, what the Westminster Confession of Faith calls “good and necessary inference.”18 He writes that expository preaching is
to stick to the passage chosen and to set forth exclusively what it has to say or to suggest, so that the ideas and the principles enunciated during the course of the sermon plainly come out of the written Word of God, and have its authority for their support rather than just the opinion . . . of their human expositor.19
Having said this, often the biblical author does have one main theme that becomes evident with careful study.20 Expository preachers must major in the text’s major ideas and not get lost in the details and tangents that misrepresent the biblical author.21
Defending the Lion
It would be natural at this point to ask how effective the careful exposition of the Bible could possibly be in a culture that is becoming more and more averse to authority, particularly religious authority. Recently Fred Craddock died. He was a great United Methodist preacher whose book As One Without Authority moved mainline Protestant preaching decisively away from the expository method. He sensed that people did not accept the authority of either the Bible or the preacher to tell them how to live. Instead he called for preaching consisting of “open-ended stories” that allow listeners to “draw their own conclusions.”22
This differs sharply from the advice of the nineteenth-century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, who famously said:
There seems to me to have been twice as much done in some ages in defending the Bible as in expounding it, but if the whole of our strength shall henceforth go to the exposition and spreading of it, we may leave it pretty much to defend itself. I do not know whether you see that lion—it is very distinctly before my eyes; a number of persons advance to attack him, while a host of us would defend [him]. . . . Pardon me if I offer a quiet suggestion. Open the door and let the lion out; he will take care of himself. Why, they are gone! He no sooner goes forth in his strength than his assailants flee. The way to meet infidelity is to spread the Bible. The answer to every objection against the Bible is the Bible.23
The Bible is like a lion, Spurgeon claims, so you must not spend too much of your breath describing it, defending it, or arguing about why it should be believed. Instead, he urges you to put your energy into simply preaching it—into actually exposing people to it in its clearest and most vivid form. Then the extraordinary power and authority of the Word will become self-evident—even in the most antiauthoritarian settings, among the most skeptical people. I know this to be true.