Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Preaching and Teaching in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I would like, now, to assume the definition of preaching that I have already given and move on to a definition of expository preaching. If we may agree as to what preaching is, then … What sub-branch of preaching is expository preaching?
1. Expository preaching is preaching subject matter that emerges directly and demonstrably from a passage or passages of Scripture.
Now there is more to say about expository preaching than that, but this is basic. That is to say, exposition is expounding what is there. It is not, then, that you speak the truth and hang it on a text that does not actually articulate that truth. That still may be Christian truth, and in the mercy of God, it still may do some good, but it is not expository preaching.
Expository preaching is, in the first instance, the exposition, the unpacking, the expounding, and the unfolding of what is there in a passage or many passages, but above all, it is saying what is there. Now it is still worth distinguishing expository preaching from topical preaching, textual preaching, and some other kinds. In fact, these categories overlap. They are not all cut-and-dried, neatly mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, in their center, they are worth distinguishing.
A. Textual preaching.
This is well exemplified in someone like C.H. Spurgeon if you read his sermons. It overlaps with topical preaching in that, at his best, Spurgeon really does explain the particular text, the half verse or verse that he is dealing with, usually within its context. However, very frequently then, from that launching pad, Spurgeon gets on his white horse and rides merrily off in all directions.
Now the directions that he takes up are biblical directions. He is a biblically instructed thinker. So that on many issues, not all perhaps, but on issue after issue after issue, the content is superb. However, a fair bit of it is not demonstrably tied to the text at hand, nor, except by proof-texting, to any other text. It is an exposition of this text that is fair and then a topical scattering that is not exposition … at least that part of the textual sermon is not exposition.
B. Topical preaching.
This is controlled in its very structure and theme by extrabiblical agendas. Now you may choose something like the love of God, the nature of propitiation, or the like, and find some texts to justify your outline. Insofar, then, as your topical exposition fairly explains those texts, then at that point, you’re overlapping with textual preaching and even, if it really does fairly explain those texts in their contexts, expository preaching. You are explaining those texts.
However, because in most brands of topical preaching, the ordering, the structure, the valuation, the hierarchy of points, and so forth is all generated by extrabiblical constraints … inevitably, to a greater or lesser extent, and regrettably, frequently to a greater extent … the actual use to which Scripture is put is distorted. At that point, you are no longer anywhere near exposition.
C. Exegetical preaching.
Some people, such as Sinclair Ferguson, use expository preaching and exegetical preaching indistinguishably. I know what he’s saying. What he means by this is that expository preaching must be grounded in exegesis. Exegesis is the reading out of what is there.
The reason, however, why I’m a bit reluctant to use the two interchangeably is that exegetical preaching, in my ears, sounds just a shade too narrow. It cuts you down to the actual reading out of this particular verse or paragraph, in a grammatical sense, such that how that passage is related to thematic structures in the book, the corpus, or the whole canon are somehow excluded. I will return to that point, because in my view it’s quite important.
2. Expository preaching is not simply running commentary on the text.
Competent running commentary on the text is, in fact, unpacking the text. So someone might say, “Well, then, that surely is expository preaching at its best and finest.” Not so, for several reasons. The definition of preaching that I gave includes appropriate application, so if you simply unpack a text you might be giving an excellent exegetical survey or an exegetical commentary, but you may not yet be preaching.
Moreover, because you are not simply running through verbal forms, semantic ranges of nouns, how they fit together semantically and syntactically, and so forth, but are preaching a message, the running commentary which focuses much more on the mechanical structures of things must be devoured by this concern to get at the heart of what the whole passage is about.
It must gel it into a message that becomes a burden that works through your personality in power. So I’m very loath to allow simply running commentary, without further comment, to be confused with something as important as expository preaching.
3. Expository preaching is not necessarily preaching through a book or large parts of a book.
It is often that, but it is not necessarily that. Many other structures are possible. When I was here five or six years ago, instead of expounding Philippians on weekday nights at St. Jude’s, I did a series on visions of God. The first night was Exodus 19; the second was, if I recall, Isaiah 6, and so forth, ending up with Revelation 4 and 5.
Now, each of those nights was an exposition of the relevant passage, but the ordering of the material was extrabiblically constrained. That is to say, it was a topical ordering of the material, but each of the passages involved, then, was subjected to exposition. It is still exposition since it is expounding and applying the Word of God that is before us in any particular meeting.
One message that I give this week at this conference is going to overlap with a Belgrave Heights series on temptation. There, I’m taking the temptations of various individuals in Scripture and unpacking those passages in their canonical framework and applying them to the kinds of temptations we face today. Again, the topic is constrained from the outside, but each passage is being dealt with in an expository fashion.
Now there are many ways of ordering material like that. There’s a church in Toronto, Knox Presbyterian Church, which, every summer for close to 30 years now, has undertaken a very interesting approach to ministry. Toronto is on a lake, and then 100 miles north is the Canadian Shield, with its endless lakes and forests and so forth, so everyone is within striking distance of wonderful vacation land. In the winter, it’s skiing and Ski-Doos and snowshoeing. In the summer, it’s canoeing and so forth.
In the summer, especially, Toronto opens out. There’s just nobody there except general maintenance services and those who have to be. As a result, the churches suffer a great deal as well. Sunday evening meetings, if they have any, close. Prayer meetings shut down and so on. So instead of going all defensive and self-pitying about this, what Knox has done is run, every summer, what they call Summer Fellowship.
On Wednesday nights, they bring in expositors from around the continent and do a whole series of expositions where the whole aim of the exercise is to bring as many people, who are still in Toronto and who don’t have a place of their own to go, to come together. They have a bit of tea in the fellowship hall at the back, sing hymns for half an hour or so, and then have an hour or an hour-and-a-half exposition. It’s a straightforward exposition. Then they perhaps have tea at the end, again, and then they dismiss.
Because they try hard to make these expositions sing and bite and be useful and so forth, they regularly draw 500 on these Wednesday night meetings all through the summer. How they are ordered is varied a great deal. Sometimes there will be an exposition of a large chunk of a book, and each week another expositor comes in and takes the next chunk.
There have been some other creative orderings, however. Once, they did the Apostles’ Creed. That doesn’t mean they were expounding the Apostles’ Creed. What it means is that they took each clause in the Apostles’ Creed, and then the expositor who had that clause could choose any part of Scripture that was felt to be most suitable for unpacking that theme.
I’ve been going up there, for one night, almost every summer for 10 years. Now that particular summer, I had “I believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God.” So I chose John 5:16–30, and that was what I expounded. The result, however, was that in the ordering of the whole summer, the entire Apostles’ Creed was expounded out of Scripture. So this is another possible ordering.
I know a preacher in Britain who did a lengthy series called Songs of Experience, which was really an exposition of quite a number of psalms: a psalm of doubt, a psalm of fear, a psalm of rejoicing, a psalm of hope, and so forth. All of that is still expository preaching.
4. In expository preaching, the length of the passage is exceedingly variable.
We are all familiar with the helpful and edifying ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, with volume after volume after volume on Romans. Now it is important, in order to read Lloyd-Jones sympathetically, to understand the tradition out of which he comes, which springs from the Puritans through the best of the Evangelical Awakening, into the Welsh Revival, and was refreshed by himself and others in the twentieth century.
In this view of preaching, every time you come across a word or a clause of any theological weight in the text you pause and unpack the theme connected with that word or clause. Thus, in effect, your text becomes a peg for systematic theology. Now if your systematic theology is well and truly biblically grounded, then, of course, you are still teaching the Bible.
However, it becomes less clear that you are expounding that text if your entire structure of sermon depends on probing that theme, that word, or that notion through many parts of texts, yet somehow you’re treating it, you’re presenting it, as if it is coming out of that text, when in fact it isn’t. It’s really coming out of your whole structure of systematic theology.
Lloyd-Jones, at his best, certainly in his more senior years, in the latter half of his ministry, really combined a kind of expository ministry with a kind of systematic theology ministry. That is, he really did explain the half verse that he was dealing with this week, in the flow of the whole passage, so that if you compare sermon with sermon with sermon over the weeks and months and years, in fact, all those little bits of half verses do link up. He has them well and truly linked up.
In addition to that, in most sermons, he’s off in all directions along the systematics front. So he’s doing both at the same time. That is why, although he may take six or eight years to handle six or eight chapters of Romans, in fact, he has given you much more than Romans during that time because he has moved out, through the structures of systematic theology, into dealing with Old Testament law, the notion of Wisdom Literature, where judgment fits into this, eschatology, and who knows what else.
So if you look at the corpus of Romans topically and then analyze it across the whole canon or across an index of systematic theology, you discover that there are very few topics that he hasn’t dealt with fairly somewhere along the line. On the other hand, it is not clear that all of that material has come out of Romans.
So I am not objecting to going slowly, verse by verse or half verse by half verse. However, if you go very slowly and don’t have a mind as good as Lloyd-Jones, the chances that you remain anywhere near the expository camp are slight. You will really be running off into topical sermons or, at the best, textual sermons, and people will not see the flow of the argument in a discourse.
At the other end, I have heard Roy Clements give four brilliant and moving sermons to cover the whole book of Job. In a moment of unprecedented folly, I tackled all of Hebrews in one night. William Fitch, a great preacher in Toronto who is now with the Lord, once gave a series on the 12 Minor Prophets, preaching on one Minor Prophet a night, which was great for Obadiah but was a little thin on Daniel. Nevertheless, it did give an overview on the Minor Prophets.
Nevertheless, I do think that our age needs a certain style. I think that a certain length, a longer length, is very important. I don’t lay it down as a piece of legislation, but I do think it is very important for reasons I’ll come to in a moment.
5. At its best, expository preaching is preaching which, however dependent it may be for its content on the text or texts at hand, draws attention to inner-canonical connections that inexorably move to Jesus Christ.
Supposing you’re doing expository preaching from Jeremiah. You can go Sunday after Sunday after Sunday and never get anywhere near the gospel, or Jesus, for that matter. Precisely because you’re so concerned to keep close to the text and not say more than what the text says, less somehow you fall into systematic theology.
You can go through psalm after psalm after psalm and somehow forget that Jesus has come along the scene somewhere. Then suddenly you say, “Well, I must say something about Jesus,” so since there’s a mention of grace, then you say, “And there’s also grace in the gospel,” or “Under the new covenant, this also works.”
One of the most important things for expository preachers to learn is how the bits of the Bible work together. Not only how they hang together in terms of biblical theology but how they actually hang together intertextually, which is the buzzword of the moment. That is, how texts cite texts, pick up themes from previous texts, and form part of a long grid that moves on, with everything, ultimately, in canonical terms, centering on Jesus Christ. Now such connections, in my view, are part of expository preaching.
In other words, expository preaching does not necessarily keep you limited to the paragraph or half chapter that you’ve chosen for the particular sermon. What it does insist, however, is that if you stretch out beyond that paragraph you show what the connections are. They must be clear. You haven’t just pulled them out of the air. You must do this so that people see that this text genuinely is related, thematically, though the corpus, to larger issues, until you finally make connections with Jesus Christ.
Very often it is the student trained in the better theological college that misses this point. If you come out of rather poor theological training, you hold that everything is connected in any case, so you go wandering around and rather grab the nice jewels together and make a pretty crown. Of course, it’s not very responsible from the point of view of handling texts, but the net package isn’t bad!
Then along comes an expositor trained in Greek and Hebrew. “Keep your finger on the text! I don’t mind if you preach a topical sermon once a year, provided you repent of it!” What do they do? They come across a text, and, with admirable clarity, they explain what a Hebrew infinitive construct is, but somehow, it doesn’t get to Jesus, because this is Ezekiel. If you think I’m exaggerating, you are right, but I’m only exaggerating a little!
Now almost all of the points that I’ve raised now, in this preliminary definition of expository preaching, could be expanded for the rest of the week. This last point alone could be expanded for the next month or so. In other words, what this really does is introduce you to intertextuality in biblical theology.
Perhaps sometime you’ll have another conference and have somebody else around, just to deal with this question of how you move through Scripture, from any particular text, to get to Jesus. We’ll see some of that this week, but only peripherally since it’s not the primary focus of this course. This course is focusing on different genres of Scripture.
Nevertheless, it is an extraordinarily important element because if you get this right, you will help people to tie their entire Bibles together. You will be teaching people how to read their Bibles. You will be moving, if not in every sermon, yet in sermon after sermon after sermon, through demonstrably clear and observable channels, to Jesus Christ. Then you will use your excellent training in a still more excellent way, to get people to read their Bibles carefully and come to see Jesus Christ’s rightful place in the history of redemption.
Now then, that’s my preliminary definition of expository preaching. I wish I could unpack more of its elements, but I press on, now, to this question … Why establish expository preaching as primary?
I would not want to say that it is the only legitimate form of preaching. There are some subjects, in my view, that are better handled as topics. Supposing you have to give a whole series, because of crises developing in your church, on divorce and remarriage and that sort of thing. You might well choose a whole sequence of texts and put them together topically for a long sermon, or two sermons, on the topic.
Now if you were working through Matthew, you would also come across Matthew 19 in due course, and you would deal with part of it there. However, it may be that people need something beyond Matthew 19 … they need 1 Corinthians 7, and so on … so you make a pastoral judgment that this topic is so delicate and so urgent that you’re going to do a bit of a pick-and-choose approach to texts for a bit, just to deal with this topic. Oh yes, there are some things that are well handled like that.
Moreover, it may be that, although you have laid out your entire sequence of sermon expositions for the next six months or the next year, put them up on a little term card or the like, and circulated them to your parishioners, then suddenly there’s a disaster in Melbourne. Perhaps a bomb goes off, there’s a terrible crash and 30 people die, there’s some crisis that has arisen in the press, or maybe there has been a huge scandal in the local state government (which I find hard to believe, but it could conceivably happen). You feel that you have to address it at that moment.
It just does no good from a pastoral point of view to say, “My term card is printed; it is done,” and just go merrily on your way and ignore current events. You must not set your entire agenda of preaching by current events, but when certain things come up, sometimes they have to be addressed holistically out of a biblical mind. Which should, nevertheless, in a sermon, be anchored in Scripture, but might, on occasion, be well handled in a topical fashion once a year or maybe twice a year (and then repent).
Why, then, establish expository preaching as primary?
1. Expository preaching is the method least likely to stray too far from Scripture.
It is, after all, the Word of God that is to be preached, not tradition, not our history in the movement, not our experience, and not the structures of systematic theology. You see, I would want to insist that systematic theology is still the queen of the sciences.
I myself like to move from text, through intertextuality, ultimately to a systematic formulation on some subjects. It is important to develop elementary structures of thought that people can hang things on. It orders their minds. Yet at the end of the day, what is authoritative is not your systematics but the Word of God.
2. Expository preaching, using sections of suitable length, teaches people how to read their Bibles.
By suitable length, I mean not, on the one hand, a quarter of a verse. Because if it’s a lengthy sermon based on a quarter of a verse, you’ve already moved off into many other forms of preaching, and the likelihood that people catch the connection of that quarter verse with the rest of the whole context is probably pretty slim.
Moreover, I do not mean, then, going through all of Hebrews in one night. What they will hear is not how to read Hebrews, but certain topics from Hebrews. They might be useful topics, important topics, and maybe a sermon like that is justified now and then, but they will not learn how to read their Bibles from it.
However, if you take a suitable passage then people do learn how to read their Bibles. One of the things we’ll be dealing with, as the week goes on, is how long a suitable passage is. In narrative material, it might be longer. It might be a chapter, a chapter and a half, two chapters, or even three chapters, conceivably, where there’s a whole storyline that has to be unpacked as a storyline.
In discourse material in Romans, on the whole, it’s not wise to handle three chapters at once, but it is often wise to handle half a chapter, at least a solid paragraph, or maybe a chapter if it’s not too long. This helps people learn how to read their Bibles. I would want to argue that this is becoming increasingly important in our age, for two reasons:
A. The rising biblical illiteracy.
When people are already steeped in Scripture … when they know the storylines, have memorized endless verses, and so on … I suppose you can make a better case for taking a half verse and giving an entire structure of systematic theology out of it. Because there are structures of thought that are worth thinking about in that regard.
However, when people may have never read the book in front of you … when the vast majority of people to whom you preach have never read the Bible right through; when you’re preaching evangelistically, and some of them have never even held a Bible in their hands; when, for many people in the streets, Moses is not a name that they know unless they confuse him with Charlton Heston … then suddenly, you’re in a problem if you take a half verse and use all the evangelical jargon and so forth. They don’t even know how to read the text!
Good expository preaching will have the effect of helping people to read their Bibles. That is eminently to be desired. The second reason, in addition to the rise in biblical illiteracy, is …
B. The challenge of postmodernism.
Postmodernism is, of course, primarily a problem in epistemology; that is, how you know what you know, or how you think you know what you think you know. Postmodernism, in its various forms, argues that at the end of the day, there is no transcultural objective truth. Truth is person-related, or it is community-related, depending on the postmodernist reader, writer, scholar, or thinker that you are canvassing. Either truth is related to your reading or it’s related to the interpretive community to which you belong.
Out of this endless subjectivism, then, you can defend deconstruction. Since all readings aren’t necessarily arbitrary, then there’s nothing wrong with approaching a text and choosing from it the elements that are particularly appropriate to you and your community and that you’re interested in, construct something out of them, and use that new structure to challenge and deconstruct the text. There’s nothing wrong with it. Since there’s no authority in the text, we cannot speak meaningfully of authorial intent.
Now somewhere along the line, in evangelizing postmoderns, it is important to construct an entire biblical worldview, just as Paul had to do in Athens. He had to construct a biblical worldview before he even introduced Jesus, or the mention of Jesus would have been incoherent. So also in dealing with postmoderns, one of the things you have to do is build a worldview.
One of the things you’re helping them to do, if they come often to expositions of Scripture, is helping them build a worldview as you work through text. They’re beginning to discover that there is meaning in text; that is, meaning not in them as they read text, but in text itself! At the end of the day, you have to shatter the illusion that meaning resides not in the text, but in the knower, in the reader, in the interpretative community.
You have to insist, “No, the meaning is in text,” and that meaning is tied to authorial intent. Otherwise, there is no sensible way in which we can speak of God speaking or what God means or of culture-transcending truth. Now do not misunderstand me. I’m not a logical positivist; I have no truck with modernity. It seems to me that a Christianly responsible approach to modernity and postmodernity is roughly a plague on both your houses.
Having said that, however, the house that is becoming really problematic, in university evangelism and the like today, is now postmodernism, not modernism. One of the contributing elements, as we address the situation, is getting people to read text (in this case, that which has been given to us by God) in such a way that you connect its meaning with truth, rather than your meaning that you find in text given your interpretive community.
3. Expository preaching gives confidence to the preacher and, rightly done, authorizes the sermon.
Peter Adam just came back from India and Pakistan, and he told me of a sermon he heard in one of those two countries (but I won’t tell you which one, to protect the guilty) which was a wonderful sermon.
I think it was on Christian marriage, based on Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd …” Now the truth that was articulated could, doubtless, for the most part, be squared with some Scripture or another somewhere, but as Peter Adam put it, in his inestimable proclivity for saying things memorably, you could just as well preach a sermon on pet care from Psalm 23.
In other words, if you’re not really explaining what is there, but if your real text is not the ostensible text but sort of Christian living (“principles I have learned in 30 years as a bishop”), and then you hang them on this text over here, in point of fact, it’s not expository preaching, even if you speak the truth! You are not helping people to handle the Word of God aright. (Believe me, I’m not really criticizing bishops. There’s the odd ordinary parish minister who does this too.)
Expository preaching that really listens to the meaning of the text, expounds it, and explains it, then, gives you courage. It gives you confidence. This is the Word of the Lord. You have worked hard at finding out what the text means. You have studied. You have prayed. When you come to a part of it that you didn’t understand, then you’re prepared to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand it.” You just keep quiet about that bit and go on to the bits that you do manage.
You know how some people duck what the text says, because they surround things with difficulties? “I don’t like what the text says about hell.” Of course, there are all kinds of difficulties. “I don’t like what the text says about this or that ethical issue.” Of course, there are so many difficulties. That’s what Athanasius was told too, of course.
Let’s take “Ask and it shall be given; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened.” Do you believe that? Do you? Do you believe that? Is it always true? Ask for whatever you want and knock on any door alike? No, no, no. One has to constrain things. I mean, there are difficulties, after all.
God still remains sovereign. You have to ask in the right way. You must remember to be seeking God first and have a pure heart, and at the end of the day, you want what God wants because he’s transformed you. You find out what God wants by studying the Bible. Until finally, the thing is so constrained that it no longer controls your prayer life. We do the same thing in almost every area of ethics, with a little effort.
You can do it with Christology too, can’t you? It’s just that nobody cares about Christology these days. Yes, Jesus is God and Man, but you know, he says he doesn’t know the day nor the time nor the hour when the Son of Man is coming back. Only the Father knows that. So there goes omniscience! So if he doesn’t have all the attributes of God, how is he God? Of course, when he’s in Galilee, he’s not in Jericho, is he? So where’s omnipresence? Then sometimes the text says he’s surprised.
Am I troubling you? It’s not that no one has ever thought of these things in the entire history of the church. It’s that, nowadays, the agenda is not Arianism or Socinianism. Yet the procedures for tapping the Word of God are very similar. Focus so much on the things you don’t understand that, ultimately, you deny the things that are clear.
Does the Bible teach that Jesus is God? You bet your life it does. Does it teach that he’s human? Of course, it does that too. Are there difficulties? Yes, there are quite a number of those. Have there been people thinking about these things and working them out and explaining them in the entire history of the church? Yes. Some of them marvelously, and some of them just a bit off the wall. On the other hand, preach the things that are clear. If you don’t understand something, shut up about it! It doesn’t matter. Preach what’s clear!
There’s the story of the famous semi-literate black slave preacher in antebellum America. He was asked by a wealthy white slave owner (who was somewhat resentful of this preacher’s popularity) what he thought the text meant which declares, “Those whom he foreknew, them also he did predestinate, and those whom he predestinated, them also he …” Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Those words have stumped better minds than that one. The preacher said, “Well, where’s that text found?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it is found in Romans.”
“Oh, well, that’s your problem, sir,” he said. “What you do is read all of Matthew first and do that, then read all of Mark and do that, then all of Luke and do that, then all of John and do that, and then all of Acts and do that. Then when you get to Romans, you won’t have any trouble.”
Preach what is clear. Preach what is central. If you have difficulties, admit it. Your congregation really doesn’t think you’re omniscient, you know! You won’t be surprising them if you admit you don’t understand. Preach the clear bits. Preach them powerfully. Preach them well.
In that sense, then, if your task, as you conceive it, is expository preaching (that is, explaining the text that is there), you are authorized by God himself. It is wonderfully confidence-building in the task itself. You may fear what men and women will think, but you will not fear God in a bad way. You will be looking forward to his “Well done.”
4. If truly applied, as all true preaching is, expository preaching meets the need for relevance without letting the clamor for relevance dictate the message.
Now if you do not apply the Word of God, but you merely expound it in a dry lecture, then you’re going to have rising numbers of people think your sermons are boring and wish you would move off to something topical and relevant.
In fact, many layfolk in the churches have only heard boring expository lectures. As a result, if you mention expository preaching, a sort of dull glaze comes over their eyes. “Ooh boy, I hope our pastor not getting into this one.” If, on the other hand, you are expounding the Word of God in a way that is fresh and lively and applied, you meet the need for relevance, the importance of relevance, without letting the clamor for relevance ultimately dictate and domesticate your message.
5. The best of expository preaching not only enables but forces preachers to deal with tough questions.
In other words, if you start working systematically through text, you start coming across text which, thank you very much, you’d rather not expound. There are some things that are extremely difficult to handle.
You may be in a really posh church, an upmarket church, with several millionaires in it, and that sort of thing. What do you do when you come to certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount or some of the teaching of Jesus about it being easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God?
I went to India a number of years ago, and when I came back, a few weeks later, I was preaching in a large Baptist church in Dallas, Texas. I looked around at the deacons. They weren’t all there. There were something like … I can’t remember … 70 deacons or 140 deacons. It’s a huge church with thousands and thousands of people. There were about 15 or so, in this room, that were praying for me before I went out to preach.
I looked around the room. I didn’t recognize them all, but those I recognized had, between them, personal wealth amounting to the GNP of about half the countries in the world. They were billionaires. Now how am I going to handle that when I get to this bit about the eye in the needle? Boy, I was glad I hadn’t chosen that text that night! Supposing you just had the cherished daughter of your churchwarden, or the daughter of your strongest deacon, break up in a messy divorce, and next week you preach on Matthew 19 because last week you were on Matthew 18?
In this postmodernist age, who really wants to preach on hell? Not I! You can’t go through the Synoptic Gospels, however, without seeing that Jesus did it. There was a chapel in Cambridge that opened a number of years ago, and Prince Philip went through it and other things. He asked the preacher there, who was a friend of mine, “Are you one of these preachers who doles out hellfire and damnation?” My friend muttered something or other, and then he told me afterward what he should have said was, “No more than Jesus and, unfortunately, a little less.”
Then you add in the current hottest disputes that most of us, unless we’re really caught up in them, would, quite frankly, rather not touch: women’s ordination (for or against), abortion (for or against), and a whole lot of other things. Sooner or later, if you are handling the Pastorals or 1 Corinthians, you will come across them! The issue at the moment is not which side you come down on them. The point is you must deal with them, and expository preaching both enables you and forces you to do so. You cannot restrict yourself to the easy bits.
6. Expository preaching enables the preacher, most systematically, to expound the whole counsel of God.
This is true provided the units you take are substantial and provided you work intertextually to get to Jesus often. It only works if you show the inner-canonical connections and get to Jesus and if you use substantial chunks.
Now I would want to argue that the best of the Protestant tradition has always done that. It’s just that we’ve lost that tradition. Calvin, in the last 15 years of his ministry, expounded Genesis, Deuteronomy, Judges, Job, some Psalms, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, the Major and Minor Prophets, the Gospels in a harmony, Acts, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles.
Matthew Henry, at Chester in England from 1687 to 1712, preached the Old Testament in the morning, the New Testament in the evening, and got through the whole Bible twice. Midweek, he preached through the Psalms and got through them five times in about a 40-year ministry. A friend of mine in Liverpool has made it his goal to handle the whole Bible, in some respect, every 10 years.
However, it has to be said, brothers and sisters, that there are many of us who, in the course of 40 years of ministry, will never handle more than 10 or 15 percent of all of the Word of God. There’s something wrong with that.
Now I have two or three more points here on expository preaching and why it is primary, but in my last five or six minutes, let me just change the pace entirely and give you 12 tips for preaching a bad sermon. (You don’t need to take notes on this unless you really are passionate about preaching bad sermons!)
- Rely on your charm, gift of the gab, storytelling ability, organizational genius, and clerical distance. Forget preaching.
- Be sure that sermon preparation is a low item on your list of priorities. Never budget any time for it. Squeeze it in here and there in order to garner a few precious thoughts.
- Look for the juicy morsel in the text, the esoteric tidbit. Pay as little attention as possible to the context. That way, even when you speak the truth, people won’t know where you got it and they will think you are wonderfully clever.
- Read no commentaries, or if you must, read only one sort of commentary. Alternatively, read only commentaries, but don’t meditate on the Word; just read commentaries and churn out digested commentaries.
- Devote hours and hours to study, commentaries, theologies, lexica, Greek, Hebrew (in short, to understanding the text) and not more than the last 15 minutes on outlines, applications, presentation, order, and polish. (I say, as an aside, if you don’t want to produce a bad sermon, you need to devote about 50 percent of your preparation time to these sorts of considerations).
- Focus so narrowly on the text at hand that you forget there is a canon to which it is connected.
- Waffle. Avoid structure and disciplined writing. Be as disorganized as possible. That way, people can rest when they go to church.
- Go for very clever outlines, witty sayings, and brilliant quotations. That way, they’ll never hear the gospel but they’ll sure be admiring of you.
- View sermons as an art form.
- Never plan how you will begin or end. That way, people will be snookered by your introduction and into the sermon before they realize it. On the other hand, they may wish you knew when to shut up.
- Neglect prayer and self-examination. Don’t think at all about heart attitude or relationships with your spouse, children, or leaders in the church. Remember that unction is a very old-fashioned word.
- Prepare with only one or two people in mind, especially those who are getting your goat. That way, everybody will know against whom the sermon is directed.
Well, I hope these will help you in your preparation of bad sermons.
