Why, some people ask, do we devote so many hours at a Gospel Coalition conference to those huge plenary sessions, where one person stands up front and talks? Ours is an interactive age, and people aren’t used to listening for such long periods; couldn’t we cut a few of those talks?
Not really, and here’s why. The Gospel Coalition is one of those ministries that holds the preaching and teaching of God’s Word as centrally important. And we want that importance to show in our conferences—especially in an age when expository preaching is less and less valued.
This collection of talks from The Gospel Coalition’s 2014 National Women’s Conference (TCGW14) is a bit different from previous collections. Our aim in this volume is not just to share the talks, but also, in the process, to encourage readers to think about the nature and value of biblical exposition. We’d love for readers to be not only inspired by reading these messages on Nehemiah, but also better equipped to do the kind of study and preparation that would enable them to expound the Word themselves—perhaps to large audiences, to Bible study groups, to children, or to a friend over coffee.
To that end, we’ve included after each chapter not only reflection questions but also a few comments, including personal comments from the contributors, on the process of studying and preparing; these “Think Like an Expositor” sections focus on just one or two particular aspects of teaching that text. The conclusion looks back and reflects on the work of digging into Old Testament narrative in particular. The whole book, then, is an initial exploration of the how of exposition, through the various voices of these experienced Bible teachers. This introduction begins the conversation by asking three basic questions about biblical exposition: What? Why? and Where?
The What of Biblical Exposition
What do we mean by biblical exposition? The term is used quite often, and sometimes loosely, within the evangelical world. Exposition traditionally means some kind of public display—a “placing out,” according to the root meaning of the word, as in a museum’s exposition of a valuable collection. The items in the collection are laid out in an exhibit that allows people to take in the treasures that are there. That’s what biblical exposition is, at its heart: not creating new treasures—or decorating the old ones—but laying out the Word treasures that are there and helping people see them clearly in the form in which we’re given them—that is, passage by passage and book by book, within the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
Among those who embrace expositional teaching, various definitions (and various strategies) can be found. One helpful, succinct definition comes from Pastor David Helm: “Expositional preaching is empowered preaching that rightfully submits the shape and emphasis of the sermon to the shape and emphasis of a biblical text.”1 In other words, an expositor’s main job is not to expound an idea or ideas taken from a text; it is not to expound the present culture in relation to a text; and it is not to expound an argument supported by various fragments of texts. An expositor’s job is to expound a text of Scripture by bringing to light its whole form and content—and not simply as an academic exercise: notice these words in Helm’s definition: “empowered” and “rightfully submits.” The power of exposition comes not simply from right answers about the text and certainly not from a powerful personality that gets the text across, but from a right and full submission to the powerful Spirit of God who breathed out the Bible’s living and active words, who dwells in the Christian preacher or teacher, and who actively helps him or her rightly to articulate the meaning of the words in the text so that they penetrate hearts as they are intended to do, for the glory of Christ.
The Why of Biblical Exposition
We understand the what even better when we begin to ask the why of biblical exposition. Why is it so important to expound Scripture—to lay it out clearly, to let its shape and emphasis be the shape and emphasis we offer to our listeners? I will offer five reasons, but the list is not exhaustive. I recommend exploration of the various publications and authors noted in this introduction in order to study more exhaustively all sorts of questions relating to biblical exposition.
First, biblical exposition is so important because the Bible is God speaking. If we had to choose just one reason, this, of course, would be it. If it is true that these words are God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16), written by men who “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21), then nothing is more important than hearing these words clearly. The One who spoke these words made us. He also made a way to save us from his wrath, which we in our sin deserve. He loves us and lights the way to him. That way is found in his Word. That way is Jesus, who is at the center of this Word. Hearing this Word clearly and truly is a life-and-death matter. Submitting to God’s Word as to the Lord himself is what we human beings were created to do, for his glory and for our good. When a person stands up to handle the Word of the God of the universe, eternal realities are at stake.
These realities are personal, not abstract. God’s Word is alive and active because God is alive and active. Sometimes we actually forget he is there as we receive and discuss his words to us. Pastor Mike Bullmore offers a great reminder: “Preacher, imagine God sitting in the congregation as you preach. What will be the expression on his face? Will it say, ‘That’s not at all what I was getting at with that passage.’ Or will it say, ‘Yes that’s exactly what I intended.’”2
Second, biblical exposition is so important because it gives us confidence in our message. The above quotation from Pastor Bullmore can be a little scary. When we’re honest, we redeemed believers know our sins and limitations that regularly impede our teaching. We know we’re fully capable of missing what God is getting at, or perhaps being guided by our own concerns and perspectives more than by deep study of and submission to the actual text. We all miss the expositional mark regularly. Please be sure that we do not offer these talks on Nehemiah as perfect examples. (I think I can speak for all the contributors!) They are humbly offered as examples, conceived with the aim of pleasing God by letting people hear as clearly as possible his life-giving words.
The kind of confidence we’re talking about is a humble confidence developed through Word study that is not disconnected from personal communion with the God who spoke it. This communion is known only through Christ, who by his death and resurrection made that communion possible. It is encouraging that, as we dare to teach, we believers in Christ have the best help possible: not only his people around us, but his own Holy Spirit with us and in us to help us take in the words he breathed out. In a chapter that offers a most excellent summary of “The Hermeneutical Distinctives of Expository Preaching,” David Jackman comments on the importance of prayer as “central to the process of preparation”: “We are entirely dependent on God’s Spirit to open our blind eyes, unstop our deaf ears, and soften our hardened hearts, so at every stage in preparing to preach we seek the author’s help to rightly hear and handle his Word of truth.”3 For years, my husband and I, along with our children, sat under the expository preaching of Pastor Kent Hughes, who consistently pointed his congregation to a full awareness of the triune God’s presence as the Word was preached; that was a great gift.4
Our confidence comes ultimately from a personal trust in the first reason why biblical exposition is so important: that this is indeed God’s Word—God speaking. We are aiming to lay out for people not our own wisdom from inside of ourselves, but the wisdom of words that come down to us like the rain and the snow from heaven, watering the earth, bringing fruit, accomplishing that which God purposes (Isa. 55:10–11). We don’t have to rely on our wit, our rhetorical ability, or our winsome presence—although God can use all those things if he so chooses (the contributors to this volume have various and generous doses of those gifts). What we trust finally, though, is that what we have to offer, by God’s grace, is sure, unfailing, beautiful, and effective—his Word. Our job is to get out of the way and let it speak (or, rather, let God speak, by his Spirit). These words are alive with the breath of God.
In his book Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, Tim Keller offers an extremely helpful initial discussion of the call to “Word ministry” on multiple levels—clearly establishing the basic principle that those who teach the Bible in any context must faithfully present God’s words. Keller takes us to 1 Peter 4:10–11 and to Peter Davids’s instructive thoughts on that passage, in which the apostle Peter admonishes anyone who speaks to “do so as one who speaks the very words of God” (NIV).5 In doing so, we can trust his words to do his work, by his Spirit.
Third, biblical exposition is so important because those who preach or teach should be guides, not gurus. This point is obviously related to the last one. Because our confidence is in the Word itself, by the Spirit, we must aim to teach that confidence to others as we share the Word. We want to communicate not how much we have found in the text, but how much is to be found in the text—and, in the process, a bit about how to find it. We don’t want listeners to go away saying, “Wow, what a good speaker. She’s amazing. I never could have found all that in there”—but rather, “Wow, that was an amazing passage of Scripture. It struck my heart. I loved seeing how it holds together and fits into the whole book. I never thought about how directly it relates to Christ and to the gospel. I think I’ll try asking some of those same questions of this other text I’m studying . . .”
Maybe that sounds a little ambitious or contrived. But, again, maybe not. Maybe that’s really what we should be after. Don’t we want to send people away marveling at God himself, moved to follow him more closely, lifting up his Son more wholeheartedly? In one sense, it’s easier just to try to be witty or winsome and to pull a group of listeners along by those means. In another sense, it’s much harder and more pressure-filled to make the message depend on me. In the end, I want my listeners to be protected from me! We want our listeners to follow us, yes—but to follow us in the way of his commandments, in the delightful path of his testimonies (Ps. 119:24, 32). We want to be guides, not gurus.
Fourth, biblical exposition is so important because regular expository teaching tells God’s story truly. Biblical exposition works through passages of Scripture in context. Most pastors who are biblical expositors preach through biblical books, passage after passage and week after week, so that their congregations receive God’s Word in the form he ordained: in books, and in the collections of books we know as the Old and New Testaments. Many of these pastors, along with their elders, have made sure that this commitment to expository teaching trickles down through all the groups and programs in the church—so that a women’s Bible study, for example, also is working regularly through books of the Old and New Testament. This is not to say that from time to time there isn’t a great topical talk or series of talks. It is to say that the regular diet of Scripture intake consists of the whole Word of God, whole book by whole book.
We take in the Word in whole books because that is the form in which God has delivered his Word to us. He’s made us a “people of the book.” Even though in this day we all tend to be people of topics and snippets of information digested through one quick link after another, we must respect the beautiful coherence of the book we call the Bible. If an artist presented us with a magnificent sculpture, we probably would not feel free to break it apart and decorate our houses with one piece of it here and another fragment of it there. What if the artist visited us and saw his work of art torn to pieces? Now, it is certainly true that a topical or a nonexpositional Bible talk can do either a good or a bad job of respecting the coherence of Scripture. I would venture to guess that, if it does a good job, there’s a good chance the speaker has spent time doing some background work in biblical exposition related to the verse or verses mentioned in that talk. Occasionally, a nonexpositor has so satiated himself or herself in the whole of Scripture that one part naturally and beautifully resonates with another.
The Bible is God’s work of art. Each book’s form and content, and the unity of the whole Bible, represent an unparalleled literary masterpiece, with multiple genres combining to speak one unified story. It’s the universal story, the true story of the universe. It’s God’s telling of his redemption of a people for himself for his glory, through his Son. We like to summarize the arc of that story in four parts, as several of our TGCW14 speakers mention: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Every book, from Genesis to Revelation, finds its place and its ultimate meaning within that big story. And every passage within every book finds its meaning as part of that whole book and as part of the whole story.
There’s no other way to get the story right than to listen to it the way God tells it. There’s no other way to delight fully in the story than to contemplate it in its fullness. We deepen our knowledge of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Savior of the world, as we grasp his part in the story from the very beginning (in creation) to the very end (at his second coming and into eternity). The cross and resurrection that are the climax at the center of the story cannot be torn away from the beginning and the end—and all the other parts in between. Every passage of Scripture finds its fullness of revelation in the gospel of Jesus Christ; as Charles Haddon Spurgeon famously taught, just as from every town, village, and hamlet in England there is a road to London, “so from every text of Scripture there is a road to Christ.”6 In him are life and light, from the story’s start to finish. To know and to grow in Christ, we need to know God’s Word.
We may think that one topic and one verse on that topic are the most relevant stuff to offer the group we’re leading or speaking to, but in the end, the most relevant message we can offer is consistent teaching through the Word of God, by which God’s Spirit reveals God himself to us. And God is eternally relevant. We all think we know what we need to hear; God knew it from the beginning, and if we keep listening to his voice through his Word, we’ll keep getting to the topics we need to have addressed (some of which we didn’t know we needed). We will address these topics through passages we study in their contexts before we jump to our own contexts. We will discover a beautiful network of roads to Christ. And, in giving careful attention to God’s story the way he tells it, we will find our individual stories within it.
These talks on the book of Nehemiah have been exciting to so many because they uncover an amazing part of the story that not only connects beautifully to the whole Bible, but also connects with each of our own parts in the story right now. This story of returning exiles is our history as the people of God, and he is the same God yesterday, today, and forever—working out his eternal plan of redemption through his Son. It is hugely encouraging to find whole-Bible connections and deeply personal connections in the chapters of Nehemiah, as we follow the story from the opening scene in the capital of the Persian Empire to the final scene in Jerusalem.
Fifth, biblical exposition is so important because it grows us up into mature followers of Christ. “Little-snippet teaching” is one way to stay on a milk diet forever instead of moving on to meat (see 1 Cor. 3:1–2). For one thing, exposition challenges our minds and hearts to take in the literary logic of the larger biblical story; we stretch our thoughts, for example, to take in the details of the first Passover celebration, and then connect the Passover with Jesus, the Lamb of God; we picture the Jerusalem temple in all its intricacy, and then see the picture come alive in Christ, who is our temple—and who then calls us to become living stones in a living temple; or we follow the train of thought through those Old Testament sacrifices, which covered sin, to the sacrifice of Christ, which washed it away. Scripture asks of us complex progressions of thought and imagination, and we become mature in every way as we submit to following the life-giving ways of the Word. God himself is infinite and gloriously holy; the gift of his Word allows us the privilege of beginning to delve into the glorious depths of knowing him. This privilege lets us practice for life in eternity.
We’re not talking about knowledge just for the sake of pure knowledge, to be sure—although the kind of careful study involved in expository teaching will stretch any person intellectually. But biblical exposition is, at heart, about knowing God and making him known through his Word. First and foremost, the Word makes us “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). The kind of maturity the Word invites us to embrace, then, is a growing up in the Lord—in his ways, in his thoughts that are higher than ours, and ultimately in Christ, who is the full and perfect revelation of his Father. In knowing Jesus through the Word, we know and commune with God more and more deeply. In sharing the Word, we share not just knowledge about God; we share the living Christ. “Him we proclaim,” declares the apostle Paul, “warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Col. 1:28–29).
Sharing the Word in this way happens among people. Expository teaching is not a solo performance to be isolated from a community. This is the problem, of course, with conferences that pull people out of their normal communities and eventually connect virtually with millions of people whom the speakers never see or know. The Gospel Coalition is a ministry intent on helping to build up the church; our goal is to send preachers, teachers, and church members back from our conferences (and from listening to these conferences) to their local congregations, encouraged and equipped to serve even more fruitfully there, among real, live people!
The scene in Nehemiah 8 gives a powerful picture of what it looks like when God’s Word is expounded to God’s people. This huge assembly of returned exiles—“men and women and all who could understand” (vv. 2, 3)—gathered in the square before the Water Gate and listened attentively for hours to the reading of the Law, while Levites moved among them, helping them understand: “they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (v. 8). They explained the words so that the people got the meaning. They expounded the Word to God’s gathered people—who went away rejoicing “because they had understood the words that were declared to them” (v. 12).
Nehemiah goes on to show ongoing effects of the Word at work among God’s people as it is explained and received with clear understanding and open hearts. Of course, part of what the people understood from the biblical exposition was the story of their sin and their need for a deliverer from that sin. The ongoing effects of that part of the story are evident as well, in subsequent chapters. And part of our understanding of Nehemiah is the part he and his people played in God’s preparing of the way for the promised deliverer. The maturity required of all of us, at every point in redemptive history, comes from receiving and believing every word of God’s delivered revelation of himself, as the Spirit enables us—which means, for us now, receiving and believing in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Word made flesh. The believing people God is creating for himself through his Son are the great why of biblical exposition.
Why is biblical exposition so important? Because the Bible is God speaking. Only as we expound his Word can we be confident in our message, serving as guides, not gurus, telling God’s story truly so that people can know and grow up into Jesus Christ, God’s Son.
The Where of Biblical Exposition
We’ve said that biblical exposition takes place among God’s people. And we’ve used the terms preaching and teaching to refer to that activity practiced by both men and women. Where do women in particular fit in, in relation to the question of preaching and teaching? We at TGC joyfully and wholeheartedly affirm “the distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men,” a role that, according to Scripture, is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption.7 We also joyfully and wholeheartedly affirm that, along with the authoritative and teaching roles set apart for qualified men in the context of God’s gathered people, there are more opportunities to teach God’s Word in this wide world than all the women of the church together will ever be able to meet. Granted, among committed complementarians, there is not perfect unanimity concerning the hermeneutical significance of the conjunctions in 1 Timothy 2:12 or concerning certain contexts of teaching. We must all study hard and prayerfully, listen well, and articulate carefully—and we must do this in the context of the church, as members of Christ’s body who worship and serve in local congregations where we can fully commit ourselves to respect the authority of the elders in leadership.
And we must encourage women to learn to teach the Bible and train them to do it! The opportunities to teach other women are huge today. These opportunities are not to be scorned in a scramble for other or wider audiences that might seem more desirable; there is a significant need for well-trained, articulate women who can expound Scripture well to other women who want to learn. Opportunities exist in Western settings, where women are increasingly hungry to learn from each other in substantive ways, within the clear context of church life and leadership. And opportunities exist in spades in non-Western settings—in many cases, where no man would ever be allowed to venture. As global connections and awareness grow, so should our hearts—to take the good news of the living Word to women in places where they have never heard, and into women’s gatherings where only other women are able to infiltrate. Sometimes these gatherings are on the other side of the globe, and sometimes (often) they are just around a few corners from where we live.
Neither should we scorn opportunities to teach children, in both formal and informal contexts, shaping the whole trajectory of human lives in the pathways of the Word. And many kinds of teaching take place less formally—in a small-group discussion, over tea, or perhaps in a Priscilla/Aquila-like session (Acts 18:24–26). I appreciate the clear message of authors already noted that the principles of biblical exposition are crucial for all teachers of the Bible, in multiple contexts.8 In the end, every believer in Jesus Christ is called to study and share the Scriptures—to do Word ministry in all kinds of contexts. The where of biblical exposition for laypeople, including women, needs to grow and expand, as all God’s people become more and more equipped to share the Word faithfully and well.
May this volume of talks from TGCW14 help to further that end! By God’s grace, may we in the church be raising up many women and men who love the Word, who delight to lay out its treasures, and who encourage others to share those treasures through faithful biblical exposition, for the glory of Christ alone.
1 David Helm, Expositional Preaching: How We Speak God’s Word Today (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 13.
2 Mike Bullmore, “A Biblical Case for Expositional Preaching,” 9marks, Feb. 25, 2010, http://9marks.org/article/biblical-case-expositional-preaching/ (accessed June 11, 2015).
3 In Preach the Word: Essays on Expository Preaching: In Honor of R. Kent Hughes, ed. Leland Ryken and Todd Wilson (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 9–21.
4 See the Preaching the Word commentary series (Wheaton, IL: Crossway), many volumes of which Kent Hughes wrote, and every volume of which includes his Foreword, “A Word to Those Who Preach the Word,” in which he talks about knowing the presence and the pleasure of God while preaching. A fuller discussion can be found in his “Anatomy of Exposition: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos,” first delivered as part of the Mullins Lectures at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1998) and available at http://www.simeontrust.org/media/doc-khughes-anatomy.pdf.
5 Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Viking, 2015), 2–4. In this discussion, Keller references P. H. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 161.
6 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, “Christ Precious to Believers,” sermon at Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens, March 13, 1859, http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0242.htm (accessed June 17, 2015).
7 See The Gospel Coalition’s Foundation Documents: http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/about/foundation-documents
8 Keller’s Preaching, for example, emphasizes this point, recommending the same emphasis in the seminal work by Peter Adam, Speaking God’s Words: A Practical Theology of Preaching (Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 1996).