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The What and Why of Expository Preaching

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.


My mandate, as I understand it, is to articulate the what and why of expository preaching. The what is simply the heraldic teaching of the Word of God. The why is, it is the Word of God. Basically, I’m done. I can sit down. In many respects, I’m sure in this crowd everything else I say is like bringing coals to Newcastle. I’m not going to be saying anything extraordinarily clever.

This is really a matter of stirring up your pure minds by way of remembrance, to use the King James Version of Peter. It’s a matter of going over some things that most of us are already well familiar with, but it might help to have a fresh voice articulate some of these things. What I propose to do is to begin with a preliminary definition of preaching and then explain that definition in greater detail. Next I’ll turn to a definition of expository preaching, explain that definition in detail, and then justify it. That’ll be the why.

Let me begin then with a preliminary definition of preaching. In my judgment, preaching and its definition should not begin with word studies. Kēryssō, kērygma, euangelizomai. That sort of thing. It seems to me that preaching should be defined functionally and theologically. What it is doing and, in particular, what it is doing in the theological arena, what it is doing from the perspective of God, which matters cannot be defined by mere word studies.

Word studies play their part, as we’ll see in a moment, but I do not think that you can come to a sophisticated, mature, biblically faithful grasp of preaching by simply doing a word study. Moreover, a definition of preaching should not be institutional or sociological, not in the first place. It should rather be defined in terms of what is essentially being done and why rather than of where it is done or when it is done or among whom it is done.

Here’s the preliminary definition. This is not at all original with me. It’s bringing bits and pieces together that you can find in Phillips Brooks and that you can find in Packer and that you can find in Haddon Robinson and so on. It’s merely my way of putting the pieces together. Some of you may actually recall where some of these phrases were read elsewhere. Preaching, then, is verbal, oral communication of which at least the following things are true:

First, its content is God’s gracious and special self-disclosure, his revelation. For evangelicals, that means its content is the Bible even as its focus is Jesus Christ. Secondly, it is biblical truth mediated through human personality. Some of you will smell Phillips Brooks there. That’s exactly right.

Thirdly, its immediate purpose is to inform, persuade, appeal, invite a response, encourage, rebuke, instruct in righteousness. More generally put, to elicit an appropriate human response to the God whose revelation is its content. Fourthly, its ultimate goal is the glory of God and the calling forth and edification of the church, and lastly, it has an inescapable, heraldic element. If anything I have said in that definition is unclear, be of good cheer, I’m about to explain the definition. You worry about a definition that you have to define, don’t you? I thought it might be worthwhile putting these things down in summary form and then unpacking them a wee bit.

1. This definition of preaching implicitly defines the nature of the preacher’s authority.

Authority is integral to the notion of what preaching is, but that authority is bound up in the final degree with revelation itself. At the end of the day, the ultimate authority is not the authority of the preacher but the authority of what is preached. Namely, God’s revelation.

2. It is not mere expository lecturing.

I know that preaching and teaching can overlap a great deal. It may well be that the same thing that is called preaching could also justifiably be called, in most context, teaching, though it is much less clear that that which is called teaching could also be called preaching, for reasons we’ll see in a moment.

Moreover, I insist in the strongest possible terms that the larger category of the ministry of the Word includes preaching. You must not restrict the ministry of the Word only to preaching. There is a ministry of the Word that goes on when you’re counseling people using the Bible, when you’re in small groups, when you’re in evangelistic Bible studies.

In some sense, all Christians should be involved in the ministry of the Word in their families and in their own devotions and as they’re rearing their children and as they’re sharing their faith with their neighbors. The ministry of the Word is a very comprehensive category. In that context, you can have people who explain what texts say faithfully.

They may be doing expository lecturing, expository teaching, but in preaching there is an immediate aim to elicit an appropriate human response. You are not merely neutrally explaining. Sometimes in the exposition of Scripture, a Peter O’Brien comes along and is carefully explaining what a text means in Romans or Hebrews or something and the Word itself powerfully speaks to you on its own terms without any effort on the part of Peter perhaps to apply it immediately to your life.

Well and good. That is as it should be, but if you are a preacher of that Word, you aim so to teach it that you are compelling by God’s grace a response, a response in contrition, a response in praise, a response in adoration and obedience and so forth. You are eliciting, self-consciously, intentionally, an appropriate human response. God has not given his Word simply as a piece of aesthetic revelation to be admired. As we handle it aright, then we have to think through what God has given it for.

3. It is through human personality.

Phillips Brooks’ famous quotation is, “Truth through personality.” Murray M’Cheyne used to say, “A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hands of a holy God.” This must not be misunderstood. You don’t want to get into the position where you’re in danger of suggesting that somehow the truth is less than the truth or people can’t be converted if you have a minister articulating the truth while he’s sleeping with his secretary.

I could tell you some pretty horrendous stories of people who have articulated the truth very ably and seen many people converted when their own life was a moral wreck and ended up out of the ministry. You don’t want to think of this in a sort of one-for-one, tit-for-tat arrangement. “How holy am I this week? That will dictate how powerful this sermon is this week. I’ve had a very holy week. This is going to be a very powerful sermon!” It’s not mechanistic like that.

On the other hand, Paul can write to Timothy and insist that people should watch his progress. He says, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Let all see your progress.” In other words, people in your congregation should see your progress in both doctrine and life. They should see it in the maturation of your doctrinal balance and competence and depth and in your life’s conformity to it so that with time there is an increase in authority through the mediating personality.

Thus, even when somebody’s life is falling apart and the truth is being articulated, it may be that a particular sermon is still used, but let me tell you quite frankly, it is only a matter of time until that whole authority collapses, crumbles, reduces to ashes. The truth still is there but the power and the unction are gone. On the long haul, the truth will out regarding who the minister is. God is not deceived.

That also means that there is something of the creativity of God’s image-bearer in this business of preaching. It’s not just a piece of verbal tape recording. Somebody constructs a sermon, you download it from the Net, you put it through a voice synthesizer, turn on the switch on Sunday morning, and the text is exactly the same as everybody else who’s using the same text and similar voice synthesizer. That’s not quite preaching.

The truth may be being articulated, but in fact in biblical terms, it’s truth mediated through human personality. It is supposed to have been thought over, prayed over, absorbed. Not long ago, I was involved in a rather painful episode. I won’t tell you about how it came to pass, but the long and the short of it was the minister of the North American church in question was caught out preaching what were, in effect, entirely plagiarized sermons.

Nowadays, there are sermon websites where you can download finished texts on just about anything. I won’t tell you what they are, but they’re there. You can plug in and put in a reference and a chapter and they’ll give you a whole sermon, often preached by somebody famous, well-known. In fact, they keep telling you that this is just to give you ideas, but what is going on is this stuff is merely being swiped. It’s being done all over the world.

In this particular instance, I happened to have been in the church. Just the previous week, an organization had sent me a CD full of sermons, scores and scores and scores of sermons. The reason they had sent it to me was because some of mine were on there from some conference or other.

I don’t listen to a whole lot of CDs of sermons, as I don’t have time, but I got this thing and I said, “I wonder what’s on this.” I put it in, pressed in the code, and sort of scanned the topics and titles just to see what was there. I listened to a few minutes of this or that, and then I put it on the shelf.

That very next Sunday, I heard this chap with his sermon and I thought, “I’ve heard that somewhere. I think I know where.” I went back that Sunday afternoon, put in the CD, and up popped the title and the text. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, illustration after illustration … including personal ones.

Well, what I did was I got the next three or four tapes of this bloke on Sunday morning and then did some quick scans on the Internet. I found three out of the four of them in a few minutes. Probably if I worked a little harder I could’ve found the other one, too. I then went to confront him.

From his point of view, his defense was, “Well, we all borrow from one another. We all learn from one another.” He started off as if it was no big deal. “Everybody’s doing it. You study commentaries. I study sermons. It’s all the same thing, isn’t it?” It was compounded by the fact that this chap was a lawyer before he was a pastor, so he should’ve known better, especially since his sermons then were also being recorded and being sold. That’s not only immoral; it’s illegal.

My biggest concern with this bloke was not, strictly speaking, the immorality or the illegality of the concrete act. That was bad, but it was not my deepest concern. My deepest concern is that the ministry of the Word is understood in a particular way in the New Testament. The pastor/elder/overseer is not paid for services rendered. There are some things we do you could never pay me enough for.

Some funerals I’ve taken, you can keep your million bucks. I’m not interested. There are some things I do as a minister of the gospel, you couldn’t pay me enough for. Rather, the Christian elder/pastor/overseer is supported by God’s people so as to be free to serve in the ministry of the Word and prayer. That’s the way it works.

In being free to serve in the ministry of the Word and prayer, that means that part of the ministry of the Word and prayer is the study of the Word so as to be able to give out. It’s not merely that you scan some stuff that other people have already prepared and then you’re the voice that reads it. If all you need is readers … well, get somebody with a more pleasing voice. Any idiot can read text with a little bit of training.

But the ministry of the Word is supposed to involve hours of diligent study, meditation prayerfulness across weeks and months and years so that it is enriching you and transforming you and conforming you and your mind and your understanding to the Word of God so that in the advice that you give, in the teaching you give, in the preaching you give, in the moral exhortation you give, in the marriage counseling you do, all of it is emerging out of the overflow of this Word working in you richly.

That’s what it’s supposed to be. In other words, he was taking money in his salary under false pretenses. He was being paid to be a minister of the Word, and instead he was taking the pay as if all he was being asked to do was to be a reader. He was robbing the flock of God. Not merely in the superficial sense of plagiarism, although that’s bad enough, but in the sense that he himself was not growing in life and doctrine. That’s what at issue in this third matter. It is truth through human personality.

4. This definition presupposes a certain simplicity about the task, which rather refreshingly helps us maintain our focus.

However complex this business of preaching is, at one level it’s pretty simple. It’s teaching the Word of God in a certain way. The first book published in English on preaching, to my knowledge, is William Perkins’ The Art of Prophesying.

It has been published recently in a condensed form in simplified, updated English, but the original at one point says this when it’s trying to define preaching. Perkins writes, “It is to collect the church and to accomplish the number of the elect and to drive wolves away from the foals of the Lord.” In it he says there are four great principles. Here they are.

A) To read the text distinctly from canonical Scripture.

B) To give it sense and understanding according to Scripture itself.

(That’s the old Reformed principle of comparing Scripture with Scripture.)

C) To collect a few and profitable points of doctrine out of the natural sense.

D) To apply, if you have the gift, the doctrine to the life and manner of men in a simple and plain speech.

There’s a sense in which that’s refreshingly simple, isn’t it? I know somewhere along the line somebody will throw in the word hermeneutics. Then we have to reflect on the different literary genres of Scripture and wrestle with the relationship between biblical and systematic theology and meditate on the fact that the biblical writers used vocabulary in distinctive ways and on and on and on. At the end of the day, the job is pretty simple. Basically, explain the Bible.

5. There is this unavoidable heraldic element.

It’s at this point that the words used in the New Testament are interesting. The kēryx in New Testament times was a herald, an announcer. In a day before newsprint and news broadcast, the herald announced events. The verb angelizomai has to do again with announcing. Euangelizomai is announcing good stuff.

In other words, it’s not merely dispassionately discussing. There is a heraldic element. This derives from the fact that God himself is disclosing it and confronting men and women with announcement. Thus there is a proclaiming, declaiming, announcing function in preaching. It can easily be distorted to sound like a peculiar rhetorical style.

I’m not talking about a peculiar rhetorical style. The nature of announcement in different cultures can vary exceedingly. That there is an announcing element, a heraldic element, a proclamation element is not unimportant. We’ll come back to this in a few moments. It is bound up with our function as ambassadors.

We represent the position of a king. In this alien territory, we announce what the position of the great king is. We are to be faithful to that position, but we’re not merely talking about it or contemplating it or meditating upon it. We are heralding it. Let me extend just a wee bit further to a preliminary defense of preaching before we think about expository preaching.

Many I’m sure will remember Anthony Trollope’s the Reverend Obadiah Slope, whose sermons were blissfully to be forgotten. In that context, some concluded that preaching was a monstrous monologue by a moron to mutes. There is a vast range of literature today that insists preaching is essentially an inefficient form of communication.

You’ve seen all these sociological studies: You remember 10 percent of what you hear. You remember 30 percent of what you hear and see. You remember 70 percent of what you hear and see and do. So we go for the hearing only, 10 percent. Stupid beyond words, it is argued. Out of date. Let’s have more films. Then you’d at least hear and see. Hear and see and do.


Let’s have some hands-on discussion and fill out some forms and maybe take it out on the streets somehow so that somehow the whole thing is remembered just because it’s now impregnated with the act of doing, which authorizes it in our memory in ways otherwise unavailable. So it is argued. A preliminary defense of preaching.

1. The most basic act of revelation that God himself takes in Scripture, save for the incarnation, is his speech.

In the garden after the fall, God does not disclose himself to rebellious Adam and Eve in a fantastic display of light, but his voice penetrates their darkness. “Adam, where are you?”

Even his self-disclosure in great redemptive acts and signs, the burning bush, Mount Sinai, the cross and resurrection, never take the place of his revealing, explanatory Word and, in every case, would have been patient of astonishingly diverse and mutually contradictory interpretation were it not for an explanatory word. Again and again and again the prophets say, “The Word of the Lord came to me, saying …”

2. The Scriptures themselves, especially under the new covenant, reserve a special place for preaching.

I’m going to give you a series of references. I don’t have time to read them all. Most, I’m sure, will remember what they are simply as I give you the reference and numbers. These are texts which it seems to me we should on occasion write out, memorize, refresh ourselves with, and think through.

Matthew 10:6–7; Mark 3:14; Mark 13:10; Luke 24:45–49; Acts 5:42, 6:2–4, and 10:42; Romans 10:14–17. You will remember the passage, “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”

First Corinthians 1:17–24 and 2:1–5. “God is determined by the foolishness of the thing preached.” The construction means that it’s not the foolishness of preaching, as if it’s merely the act, but the foolishness of the thing preached to save men and women. But it’s interestingly the foolishness of the thing preached not merely the foolishness of the thing discussed, but the foolishness of the thing heralded.

First Corinthians 9:16; Philippians 1:12–18. And read Peter O’Brien’s commentary on those verses. Second Corinthians 2:16–17; 2 Corinthians 5. A great atonement passage that climaxes with the ambassador. First Thessalonians 2:13. Doubtless you recall the passage. “We also thank God continually because, when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the Word of God, which is at work in you who believe.” Second Timothy 4:2–5; Titus 1:3; and many more.

3. In the Gospels, Jesus Christ sets out to teach and to preach.

When you look at the intentional clauses, the purpose clauses, as Jesus goes somewhere or sets out to do something or visits another city, it is astonishingly rare to find a text saying that he went out somewhere to heal. He went out constantly to preach and teach.

He goes somewhere to announce the kingdom. Then while he is there, all who are brought to him he heals and drives out demons and so forth. Interestingly enough, the intentional clauses, almost all of them are bound up with teaching and preaching.

4. Preaching, precisely because it is in monologue form, has several decided advantages even if it has dangers.

Contrast preaching for a moment with a good discussion group. There is a sense in which really good preaching compared with a really good discussion group can go for the mind and heart in a way that a discussion group finds it very difficult to do.

In the give and take of a discussion group, you are in the domain of Marshall McLuhan calls cool communication. “ ‘On the one hand …’ ‘On the other hand …’ Small joke. Ha-ha-ha. ‘What do you think, Ann?’ ” and so on. It’s hard, in that kind of context, to paint a glorious picture of the throne room of God.

Even in terms of intensity through human personality, here you can start piling up reasons to believe, piling up the threats of God, piling up the evidences of the grace of God in the gospel. There is a place in monologue for certain kinds of communication that you cannot get in any other form.

How then shall we respond to educational theorists who say, “No impression without expression?” Sometimes they use caricature. They take a bad model from the preaching side and an excellent model from some other side. Insofar as what they say is true, there are several things that can be done.

Some churches, for example, make sure that home Bible studies, discussion groups, and the like are themselves extensions of what is going on in the pulpit on Sunday morning so that there is a tie-in of inductive Bible study and the like to the actual central teaching/preaching ministry of the assembled congregation.

Moreover, preaching itself can include what is often called dialogical preaching. You find it in the New Testament, as in the Old. Think of Malachi. God, through Malachi, addresses the people. “ ‘You have robbed me.’ But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ ‘In my tithes and offerings.’ ”

Thus you are acting out in the monologue what is in fact a dialogue. You’re doing it in such a way that people are being sucked right into the sermon. They’re being drawn in. They’re not just listening passively; they’re being drawn in. There is a great deal of prophetic preaching like that. That is what the Greek diatribe is about too.

Paul does that too with his rhetorical questions. “But some will say …” Then he throws out an objection. Or, “As some have accused us unjustly of doing, let sin abound that grace may more greatly abound whose damnation is just.” You set up a whole scene and then destroyed a party in the argument. See then Romans 3:1–6 and Romans 3:27–31.

In any case, it is always important to remember that the heraldic ministry of the Word of God is not all the ministry of the Word. It is part of it. It includes small groups and Q&A sessions and responses and the like. Many is the time in university missions where after two or three sessions I’ll run a Grill a Christian session where all people do is ask questions as offensively and in attack mode as possible.

5. Preaching brings God down to men and women. It mediates Jesus Christ to human beings.

If God so commonly has disclosed himself in times past through his Word, then there is a profound sense in which as we re-present the Word we are re-presenting God. Preaching is not so much explanation of what has been given, though it is that.

It is also (I will overstate it) re-revelation. As God has disclosed himself in his initial address of certain words, as those words are addressed again to a new generation of men and women, there is re-revelation. There is authority in Scripture itself for thinking these ways. Think through how Paul reasons his way through the justification of Abraham in Romans 4 and comes again to repeat the quotation from Genesis 15:6 and he asks the question, “Were these things written just for him or for you?”

In other words, the revelatory Word did not have to do only with Abraham. It has to do with later generations of readers. This is a revelatory word that comes back again and again and again. There is a profound sense in which every time you get up to preach the Word of God you must think, “I am not merely explaining text. By the authority of God, I am revealing God to human beings.”

That adds a whole dimension to the way you think of your preaching and teaching. No wonder Paul can say in Old English, “I magnify mine office.” Some of those old phrases still trip off the tongue rather well, don’t they? In other words, God has ordained that men and women be saved through the foolishness of the Word preached.

He has ordained that his truth, his Word be the sanctifying agent of his people. On the night that he is betrayed, Jesus prays, “Sanctify them through your truth: your Word is truth.” (John 17:17) Moreover, as has often been demonstrated, not least in some fine articles by John Woodhouse, there is in Scripture a collocation between Word and Spirit, between God’s self-disclosure in his Word and his own presence mediated by his Spirit.

There is a danger here in observing this point, precisely because many of us are so suspicious of some charismatic excesses, we hear of this collocation and thus reduce ourselves to Word. But there is a way of teaching the Word with a certain kind of cold exegetical faithfulness in which we nevertheless justify ourselves that we are full of the Spirit of God because there is this collocation in Scripture and, somehow, know no unction.

After all, there are still these commands, “Be filled with the Spirit.” I’m not suggesting now, “Be filled with the Spirit” in some sense divorced from the Word. That’s the error on the other side. I’m not suggesting that. But after we’ve gotten rid of the error on that side, let’s be aware that there’s an error on this side too, and the result is that we sound like dead tape recorders. We may put it more powerfully yet, I think.

In one of his essays in the volume edited by Logan, Packer says, “There is personal experience.” He writes, “Christianity on earth, as in heaven, is (I echo 1 John 1:3) fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. The preaching of God’s Word in the power of God’s Spirit is the activity that (I echo Isaiah 64:1 and John 14:21–23) brings the Father and the Son down from heaven to dwell with men. I know this, for I have experienced it.”

Have you not sometimes sat under the ministry of the Word and been bored to tears and known that the whole episode was, from all measurable perspectives, a formal waste of time? Have you not sat under the ministry of the Word when heaven has come down? If you have not known that or seen it, stay out of the ministry.

Your vision of preaching is too small, for the ministry of the Word is the means of God’s re-revelation. It produces sometimes a tremendous emotional impact but a moral change and a redirection. It calls forth to life something that was only dead. It is Ezekiel 37. It is John 3. It calls us to adoration in worship. It calls us to contrition. It calls us to faith. It calls us to corporate worship.

In other words, expository preaching itself must never be reduced merely to a set of mechanistic principles in which we are exegetically faithful and biblically-theologically faithful, but we do not envisage the task as aiming at the immediate level for the eliciting of an appropriate human response to God’s gracious self-disclosure in Word. We do not expect, somehow, God to disclose himself in power. That’s not right. It is a dangerous reductionism.


Now I come to expository preaching. I am assuming the definition of preaching already given.

1. It is preaching subject matter that emerges directly and demonstrably from a passage or passages of Scripture.

(Those two “D” words are important.) This business of what expository preaching is, in fact, finds different people defining it in different ways. Some people define expository preaching as all preaching that is faithful to Scripture. In some larger sense, I suppose that’s true.

You could arrange a topical sermon, for example, that is faithful in absolutely everything that is said. The difficulty is that all that is said must emerge directly and demonstrably from Scripture so that if a preacher takes two texts or three texts and in every case teaches the truth in those texts, it is still expository preaching.

If on the other hand, the topic has been generated by one of the passages and then it goes merrily off in all directions and says all kinds of things that may even be biblically true but are not directly and demonstrably emerging from the text that you’re handling, it is no longer expository ministry. Even if everything that is said is true.

2. It is not simply running commentary on the text.

Precisely because of the definition of preaching that we’ve already given. There is a message to it, a burden to it with an immediate goal as well as an ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the glory of God and the calling forth and edification of the church. The immediate goal is this eliciting by God’s grace of human response as God re-reveals himself by his Word afresh to a new generation.

3. It is not necessarily preaching through a book or large parts of a book, although that’s the most common form of it.

For it is possible to choose sequences of passages that are not themselves conjoint, that are not themselves tied one to the other, where in every case the sermon itself is expository.

So that in the book that was mentioned earlier on Paul’s prayers, then each of the chapters works through one of Paul’s prayers and is expository, but the choice of passage was topically driven. Elsewhere I have preached through visions of God and pulled in Exodus 19, Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1, and Revelation 4. In each case, they’re handled expositorily, but nevertheless the choice of passage has been topically generated. That still is expository preaching.

I go every summer to a church in Toronto, Knox Presbyterian Church, which has for about 40 years now run what they call Summer Fellowship. Toronto is a beautiful city and is only about 100 miles away from a wonderful district of lakes and summer retreats and all of this. As a result, many people just empty out in the summer. They’re not there. Churches reduce their activities, their outreach, and their meetings, and mid-week prayer meetings get cancelled. Nothing starts again until September.

Knox has gone the other way. What it does is on Wednesday night it runs Summer Fellowship. What they do is they bring in expositors from around Canada and the US, they fly them in, and they have an expository series and some corporate singing and praise and so forth with a little meal before and some Bible studies that fling off.

They advertise all through the area, a radius of maybe 50 or 60 miles, and they say, “If your church is shut down and you want to be fed by the Word of God, then come to Knox Fellowship.” The whole heritage has been expository for 40 or 50 years. But how they organize this has varied a great deal.

Sometimes it’s been a series of passages that are in sequence. The exposition of the Farewell Discourse or something. Sometimes it’s a series of passages that are generated by some other constraint, some other topical arrangement. One summer, for example, they had a whole series on the Apostles’ Creed.

That does not mean that we were expounding the phrases of the Apostles’ Creed, quite, as if we weren’t using our Bibles. I had the bit, “I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” That was my bit. I could choose whatever passage I wanted. I then chose John, chapter 5, verses 16–30, which is one of the most penetrating discussions of the nature of Jesus’ sonship in all of Holy Scripture.

Others chose different passages. So that at the end of the day, all of the phrases and clauses of the Apostles’ Creed by the end of the summer had been covered, but in each case covered by the exposition of some crucial passage or passages from the Bible itself. It still is expository preaching.

4. The length of the passage is exceedingly variable.

Ask Lloyd-Jones. I have a friend who expounded Romans 1–8 in seven sermons of an evangelistic sort at a British university. Lloyd-Jones took eight years to cover the same turf. I’ve listened to those tapes. I wasn’t there. In fact, they were superb.

Obviously, you don’t examine every third participle from the right or meditate at length on every fourth genitive absolute from the left or anything of that order. Nevertheless, in terms of capturing the flow of these chapters, amongst biblically illiterate students, in a way that was genuinely faithful, the material was superb.

You can do Job in one or four or six or eight. You should not do it in four years. I have done Hebrews in one, simply because Hebrews does have a pretty sustained argument. The argument, in brief, is, “Jesus is better.” In fact, the little word better, or in the Greek, kreittōn, shows up again and again and again.

In chapter 1, he’s better than the angels. In chapter 3, he’s better than Moses. At the end of chapter 4, he’s better than Joshua. In chapter 5, he’s better than Aaron. He’s better all the way along. His sacrifice is better. His blood is better. His tabernacle is better. His covenant is better. Jesus is better.

When I was a student at McGill University, I lived for three of my years in Molson Hall. There were three identical halls (McConnell, Gardner, and Molson) at the top of the mountain. There were others elsewhere, of course, but there were these three. I was in Molson.

There was a certain kind of competition amongst these halls all the time as to which one was better. So when we had a blood drive, which hall had the highest percentage of participants? At Christmas every year, which one decorated best? This was quite a long time ago. People don’t do things like this so much anymore.

On that particular Christmas, McConnell got going and Gardner got going, and Molson, somehow we missed the ship. We hadn’t done a thing. Then some of the more enterprising amongst us, who shall remain nameless, went down the hill to the front of the Montreal Neurological Institute, which is one of the finest neurological institutes in the world, which had just trucked in a four-story Christmas tree to be erected outside.

They truck it in from the Laurentian Mountains. All the branches are tied up with ropes. They get it up on the stand and cut the ropes. We managed.… It was transported up the hill. It was backed into the lounge at Molson Hall. Then we managed to bend the tip up into the stairwell. We got it all the way up and the top of the tip hit to the sixth floor. (It was a seven-floor building.)

The front of the stairwell was all glass, so everybody could see it, too, from the outside. Then we cut the ropes. We then looped a huge banner (these were my pagan days) across the front that said, “Molson is better.” You have to understand that Molson is a famous Canadian beer whose slogan at that time was, “Molson is better.” We had this draped across the front.

It was not exactly a Christmas-y thing to do, but that’s what we did. Then two days later, Gardner put up a sign saying, “Gardner is best.” At the level of mere syntax, they trumped us. At the level of style, they were second-class. Don’t you understand? Jesus is better. The idea is, no matter what you compare him with, he’s better. He’s better.

You get enough betters over every domain, and Jesus is best. But the style, the style. Jesus is better. Thus, you can teach Hebrews very compellingly in one. On the other hand, I’ve taken 30 hours to go through Hebrews, as well. The issue is faithfulness to the exposition of what the text actually says, not the speed with which you cover the material.

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 intercanonical connections that inexorably move to Jesus Christ.

In other words, in the text itself where you hit the inner-canonical strands that run through Scripture they give you an excuse, a sanction, a warrant for running along those inner-canonical strands so that you see how the whole Bible is put together and surface and triumph in Christ himself.

6. In many instances, expository preaching can be usefully combined with other forms of preaching within the one sermon.

This is very important. In my view, it is largely neglected. In other words, you may be committed to expounding this one particular text at hand, but that may provide you with an opportunity to reflect on larger theological dimensions of something or other, which you would only get by looking at a whole lot of texts.

So long as you don’t pretend in the form of your presentation that what you are doing all emerges from the text at hand, so long as you make it clear that what you are doing is bringing in larger collateral material, then you are rightly simultaneously introducing people to historical theology, to systematic theology, to larger philosophical and moral matters that are of some importance.

For example, two or three weeks ago, I was in Eastern Europe at a large convention for Central and Eastern European leaders who are learning to think biblically, theologically, and expositorily. Many of these people have emerged out of a frame of reference in which they have not had access to a lot of books.

Up to now, many of their currencies have not been convertible. They haven’t been well-trained. Many of them under Marxism were not permitted to get higher education. The bishop of the Lutheran church of Estonia was there. He had been interrogated 600 times by the KGB. He couldn’t remember how many times with torture. These were very interesting people.

Within that context, in one of my expositions I expounded John 1:1–18, which deals in summary with the incarnation. As part of that exposition, then I took a small diversion into church history and the patristic period and the Seven Ecumenical Council to show how this text writes out various christological heresies.

Not only Arianism, which we all know through Jehovah’s Witnesses, but also Nestorianism, Apollinarianism, Eutychianism. Those things may not bother all of us. They are of more concern in parts of orthodoxy. In any case, they provide a depth dimension to the fact that Christians have been arguing about these things, finding various ways to deny what the Bible says, and the very fact that you can say what the Bible is saying truly about Christ and cast that over against what is not being said helps to sharpen up what is being said.

It is sometimes in the denial of the error that you begin to see the positive articulation of the truth. It is teaching some church history. It is teaching some systematic theology. It is teaching a bit more precision, even though strictly speaking, I am now going a wee bit beyond what John had in mind when he wrote 1:1–18.

I wasn’t pretending that all of church history was encapsulated, christologically speaking, in John 1:14. I was trying to show that by understanding the text fairly, the text itself begins to shape how we think about certain doctrines more precisely and thoughtfully. You do that for passage after passage after passage and you’re teaching people how to move from exegesis to biblical and systematic theology. That is an important thing to do.

Thus, in many instances, expository preaching can be usefully combined with other forms within one sermon. One of the ways of doing this is taking the first quarter of your sermon to give a kind of mini topical sermon. To lay out the topic a wee bit as it is in Scripture in order to set up for the actual contribution that this text makes to the topic.

On Sunday morning, I was at Castle Hill Baptist Church and tried there to expound John 20:24–31, doubting Thomas. I took the first 10 to 12 minutes to explain the highly diverse forms of doubt that you find in life and in Scripture. Not all doubt is generated by the same sort of thing, is it?

Some doubt is generated merely by the exigencies of growing up and finding out how much of what you believe belongs to your parents and how much is yours as you confront the larger world. It’s part of maturation. Some of it is generated by too little sleep. Some of it is generated by a false worldview.

Some of it is generated not by a worldview decision at all but by countless small, moral decisions that leave you estranged from the gospel until you have no moral fiber left and have every urgent reason for rejecting the truth. I listed seven or eight different means. Then said, “What kind of doubt do we have here?”

The Bible does address all those kinds of doubt at one place or another, but they’re not all here. Just because we’re talking about doubting Thomas this does not mean that every form of doubt is addressed here. There are certain forms here that are extraordinarily important. They are bound up with Jesus historically rising from the dead. They’re bound up with the Christian gospel.

How does this text address us? What have I done here? Nothing very profound. I’ve merely acknowledged that as I’ve preached this text, I am not pretending that it handles all forms of doubt. I’m giving enough of a survey to people so that they can see that I am aware that what they’re going through may not be exactly the same. It’s not a merely formulaic approach.

I am nevertheless handling that text responsibly and giving some hints of where I might go in other cases. That is really a form of mini topical sermon within a broader frame. So long as the burden of your message emerges from the text or texts at hand, it still is expository preaching. Why, then, establish expository preaching as primary? Not quite exclusive, but at least primary. I have a friend who says, “I have no objection if maybe once a year you preach a topical sermon, provided you immediately repent.” I’m not quite that severe, but pretty close.

I’ve been doing university missions for 25 years, and always I expound the Scripture in those missions. People don’t bring their Bibles, of course, so you print up the text in advance and leave a copy in each seat or you give it to them as they come in or it’s in their folder or whatever. You want people eventually to come to grips with what the Bible says. To do that, you have to use the Bible.


So.… Why establish expository preaching as primary?

1. It is the method least likely to stray too far from revelation, from Scripture.

2. Properly done, and especially if the selections of Scripture you choose to expound are reasonably extensive, expository preaching teaches people how to read their Bibles.

This one cannot be emphasized enough. Show me a congregation that has been fed on 10 years of thoughtful expository preaching and I will show you a congregation that knows how to read its Bible.

Otherwise, there will always be a higher percentage of Christians in the local assembly who have a kind of proof-texting approach. “A verse a day keeps the Devil away.” Or, “The Spirit was talking to me this morning, and I think the text is saying this.”

3. Expository preaching gives confidence to the preacher and authorizes the sermon.

In other words, the more faithful and demonstrably your sermon is reflecting Scripture, then when somebody challenges you at the door (“I hated what you said this morning; that’s disgusting, and I don’t believe that at all”) you smile sweetly and you say, “Are you disagreeing with me or with Paul? Do you dislike it because I said it or because God said it?”

It sort of changes who’s on the defensive, doesn’t it? I’m not being mean. I’m merely saying that at the end of the day, the authority of Scripture is really important. That also means that when you’re preaching, you must not simply be faithful in explaining what the text says. That’s part of expository preaching.

Don’t forget I said directly and demonstrably authorizing what you say from Scripture. You must not only explain it, but ideally you must say, “Do you see that in verse 3?” That’s why you want people to have their Bibles with them or use pew Bibles or print the text on an overhead or put it in the bulletin.

Do something, but get the text up before people’s eyes. Every significant point that you make, make sure that they see that it is demonstrably derived from Scripture. That’s what authorizes the sermon. It’s what enables you at the door to say, “Are you arguing with me or with God Almighty?” It gives confidence to the preacher and, rightly done, authorizes the sermon.

4. If truly applied, as all true preaching is, it meets the need for relevance without letting the clamor for relevance dictate the message.

What I am presupposing is that the nature of application is in part showing how something, which will initially seem quite alien to many of our hearers, does in fact apply. You’re crossing worldviews here.

If you’re dealing with secularists or you’re dealing with philosophical naturalists or you’re dealing with hedonists or whatever, at some point you’ve got to explain what the text says in such a way that it sings and stings, that it wounds and heals, that it bites … still being faithful to Scripture. I’m not suggesting that you be so clever that you leave the Scripture behind.

It is true to say that Scripture is relevant, but it may not be perceived to be relevant, but expository preaching, rightly done, meets the need for relevance precisely because it is relevant and you have shown it to be relevant without letting the clamor for relevance dictate the message. Because if you let the clamor for relevance dictate the message, you will choose relevance on the basis of today’s current agendas and then hunt for texts that might speak to this somehow. Then you are a little farther removed from the burden of what texts say.

5. It not only enables but compels preachers to deal with tough questions.

It enables them in that if you’re a pastor of a small church with 30 people and only two people in it are divorced and somewhere along the line you want to treat divorce and you’re afraid that those two people will think that you’re picking on them, then if your exposition is part of a sequence on 1 Corinthians and you hit chapter 7 or on Matthew, and you hit chapter 5 or chapter 19, then of course the text enables you to treat things simply because you’re following the text.

Nobody can say now you have a secret agenda to score points on these two. Looked at from another perspective, the text likewise compels you do to it. Because you might be so gentle and sensitive and you might be such a sweetie that at the end of the day you’re not at all sure you want to do anything that’s going to upset the apple cart.

Then expository preaching not only enables you to do it when you want to do it, it compels you to do it when you don’t. Because you can’t come to chapter 19 after expounding Matthew 16 and 17 and 18 and say, “Whoops! I don’t want this one! We’ll skip to chapter 20 this week.” You’ve just blown it. It’s not going to happen. In this sense, the text is compelling you to be faithful to Scripture.

Thus, you may start ducking things like judgment or you may start ducking predestination or you may start ducking homosexuality or you may start ducking whatever. If you start teaching the whole counsel of God, you can’t duck very long. It shows up sooner or later. Thus, the text not only enables us but forces us to deal with the tough questions.

6. Expository preaching enables the preacher most systematically to expound the whole counsel of God.

When I was in regular pastoral ministry, I used to take an index of a couple of theologies every six months or so and just scan the entire index to see what topics I had not come anywhere near. That helped me in my reflection on what books I should start tackling next or where I should go from here.

Had I said nothing about the Holy Spirit for three years? Had I said nothing about.… Oh I make appropriate allusions now and then, tip my hat in the Spirit’s direction but not expound anything from John 14–16, not expound any of the great passages in Paul or whatever. I just hadn’t touched them.

Not handle anything to do with judgment or not handle anything to do with certain ethical questions or whatever. Not handle any of the Psalms. So to scan what parts of the Bible you have and haven’t covered is one thing. To scan also what topics you have or haven’t covered is another.

Provided you do this sort of thing, systematically setting out to expound the whole counsel of God will involve you in broad, sweeping commitment to handle all of the biblical text. That itself means that you will be desiring to preach from more than half verses. If you go in your expository preaching at the rate of speed that most expositors used a half generation or so ago, by the time you are 75 and approaching your dotage, after 50 years of ministry, you will have ended up actually expounding about 10 percent of the Bible.

In that exposition, no doubt you have been very faithful. No doubt you have incorporated many other parts of the Bible in Bible stories and illustrations and all that sort of thing. Fair enough. You might, somewhere along the line, have actually covered the general sweep of the biblical content, but you’ve actually taught your people about 10 percent of the Bible.

Especially in this day and generation when most congregations don’t have the stability of 50 years, when people are on the move between three and a half and five years, it seems to me that it ought to be part of our strategy to teach larger chunks. In this, we will in fact be returning to the practice of the Reformers.

In the last 15 years of Calvin’s life he expounded Genesis, Deuteronomy, Judges, some of the Psalms, Job, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, the Major and Minor Prophets, all of the Gospels as a harmony, Acts, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles. Not bad.

Matthew Henry, whose commentary is known amongst us, held the pastorate in Chester from 1687–1712. He preached the Old Testament in the morning, the New Testament in the evening, and the Psalms on Wednesday night. That was his style. I’m not suggesting you adopt that style. Nevertheless, in the course of his ministry there he preached through the whole Bible twice and the Psalms five times.

His big commentary is really a reflection, a summary, of what he was doing in the pulpit. Some of us will come to our dotage not knowing anymore about Zechariah and Ezekiel than we know now, which isn’t much.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.