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April 27 - May 3, 2020
God is not relying on the sufficiency of our craft or character to accomplish his purposes (2 Cor. 3:5). God certainly can use eloquence and desires lives befitting the sanctity of our subject matter, but his Spirit uses the Word itself to fulfill his saving and sanctifying purposes.
Scripture’s portrayal of its own potency challenges us always to remember that the Word preached, rather than the preaching of the Word, accomplishes heaven’s purposes.
God’s Word is powerful because he chooses to exercise his power through it and to be present in it.
The most dependable way of explaining what the Bible means is to select a biblical text prayerfully, divide it according to its significant thoughts and features, and then explain the nature and implications of each.
An expository sermon may be defined as a message whose structure and thought are derived from a biblical text, that covers the scope of the text, and that explains the features and context of the text in order to disclose the enduring principles for faithful thinking, living, and worship intended by the Spirit, who inspired the text.
Augustine simply summarized, “When the Bible speaks, God speaks.”
Public ministry true to God’s purposes requires devoted private prayer. We should not expect our words to acquaint others with the power of the Spirit if we have not met with him. Faithful preachers plead for God to work as well as for their own accuracy, integrity, and skill in proclaiming his Word.
Neglect of prayer signals serious deficiencies in a ministry even if other signs of success have not diminished. We must always remember that popular acclaim is not necessarily the same as spiritual effectiveness.
Phillips Brooks’s oft-cited observation that preaching is “truth poured through personality” reflects biblical principle as well as common sense. Our fathers taught, “Your actions speak so loudly I can’t hear what you say.”
With unblinking candor, John Wesley once explained to a struggling protégé why his ministry lacked power: “Your temper is uneven; you lack love for your neighbors. You grow angry too easily; your tongue is too sharp—thus, the people will not hear you.”10
Constructing a message so that all its features support a main idea requires discipline. Boiling out extraneous thoughts and crystallizing ideas so that the entire message functions as a unit have tested many a preacher. Some yield to the pressure and indiscriminately dispense their ideas using whatever sequence, emphasis, and structure most easily spring to mind.
Unity may seem binding at first, but it actually frees preachers from entrapment in the endless labyrinth of language and explanation possibilities. The priorities of unity allow preachers to consider prayerfully and in good conscience what not to say as well as what to say.
Once a preacher determines the importance of unity, the next question that arises is, How do I achieve it? The process is not complicated, but it can take hard work. The fruit of this labor, however, will save a preacher much additional labor and listeners much confusion.
You will have unity when you can demonstrate that the elements of the passage support the theme of your message and you can state that theme in a form simple enough to pass the “3 A.M. test.” The 3:00 A.M. test requires you to imagine a spouse, a roommate, or a parishioner waking you from a deep slumber with this simple question: “What’s the sermon about today, Preacher?” If you cannot give a crisp answer, the sermon is probably half-baked. Thoughts you cannot gather at 3:00 A.M. are not likely to be caught by others at 11:00 A.M.
It is too easy to preach on a doctrinal topic or an exegetical insight without considering the spiritual burden of the text for real people in the daily struggles of life. In doing so, preachers relieve themselves of having to deal with the messiness and pain of human existence. The greater intellectual and spiritual task is to discern the human concern that caused the Holy Spirit to inspire this aspect of Scripture so that God would be properly glorified by his people.
A sermon is not just a systematics lesson. Why did the biblical writer bring up the subject of justification at this point? What were the struggles, concerns, or frailties of the persons to whom the text was originally addressed? Were the people claiming salvation based on their accomplishments, were they doubting the sufficiency of grace, or were they afraid of God’s rejection because of some sin? We must determine the purpose (or burden) of a passage before we really know the subject of a sermon.
Preaching that is true to these purposes (1) focuses on the fallen condition that necessitated the writing of the passage and (2) uses the text’s features to explain how the Holy Spirit addresses that concern then and now. The Fallen Condition Focus (FCF) is the mutual human condition that contemporary believers share with those to or about whom the text was written that requires the grace of the passage for God’s people to glorify and enjoy him.
Ultimately, a sermon is about how a text says we are to respond biblically to the FCF as it is experienced in our lives—identifying the gracious means that God provides for us to deal with the human brokenness that deprives us of the full experience and expression of his glory.
The more specific the statement of the FCF early in the sermon, the more powerful and poignant the message will be. An FCF of “not being faithful to God” is not nearly as riveting as “How can I maintain my integrity when my boss has none?” A message directed to “the prayerless patterns of society” will not prick the conscience or ignite resolve nearly as effectively as a sermon on “why we struggle to pray when family stresses make prayer most necessary.” Generic statements of an FCF give the preacher little guidance for the organization of the sermon and the congregation little reason for
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Specific sins such as unforgiveness, lying, and racism are frequently the FCF of a passage, but a sin does not always have to be the FCF of a sermon. Grief, illness, longing for the Lord’s return, the need to know how to share the gospel, and the desire to be a better parent are not sins, but they are needs that our fallen condition imposes and that Scripture addresses. Just as greed, rebellion, lust, irresponsibility, poor stewardship, and pride are proper subjects of a sermon, so also are the difficulties of raising godly children, determining God’s will, and understanding one’s gifts. An
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If even the preacher cannot tell (or has not bothered to determine) how the sermon’s truths relate to life, then people not only are unlikely to make the connection but also will wonder why they bothered to listen.
The FCF marshals a sermon’s features toward a specific purpose and therefore helps a preacher see how to apply the information in the text.
Application that addresses an FCF clearly rooted in the textual situation necessarily directs people to the presence and power of the Savior as they seek to serve him.
Early statements of an FCF in a sermon may open the door to application in a number of ways. A preacher may open a spiritual or an emotional wound in order to provide biblical healing, identify a grief in order to offer God’s comfort, demonstrate a danger in order to warrant a scriptural command, or condemn a sin in order to offer cleansing to a sinner.
Expository preaching is not a captioned survey of a passage. By this I mean the typical: “1. Saul’s Contention, 2. Saul’s Conversion, 3. Saul’s Commission” (Acts 9:1–19). In my own circles I think I have heard more sermons of this type than any other. They sound very biblical because they are based on a passage of Scripture. But their basic failure is that they tend to be descriptive rather than pastoral. They lack a clear goal or practical application.
textual information (pre-sermon material) → addressing a textually rooted FCF + relevant textual application = sermon
An expository unit is a large or a small portion of Scripture from which a preacher can demonstrate a single spiritual truth with adequate supporting facts or concepts arising within the scope of the text.
At the same time, proponents of the church-growth movement in the United States often advocate eighteen- to twenty-minute sermons as a means of reaching unchurched ears in our rapidly paced culture.
For reasons both right and wrong, the churches I have attended as an adult tend to expect sermons to be twenty-five to thirty minutes long.
John R. W. Stott neatly sidesteps the issue of how long a sermon should be by saying, “Every sermon should ‘seem like twenty minutes,’ even if it is much longer.”7
There is always another verse that can be covered and another word that can be said, but ministers are best advised to select passages that allow them to quit before the congregation does.
Congregational concerns should also influence what pastors choose to preach. Preachers will be regarded as out of touch and/or insensitive if they press forward with their sermon programs while ignoring a community’s employment dilemma, the death of a pillar in the church, a local disaster, a building program, a young person’s decision to enter the mission field, moral issues that the young encounter, health concerns that the elderly face, or a host of similar matters of significance in the life of the church.
A folder set aside for each upcoming sermon acts as a magnet, drawing ideas from general reading and everyday experience. Flashes of insight, relevant quotations, newspaper clippings, exegetical discoveries, illustrations, and outlines can be dropped into the file over several weeks and will grant you vast resources for preparing a sermon the week it will be preached.
The longtime practice of limiting Sunday school lessons to twelve-week sessions says much about the need people have for change.
Too many references to “As we discovered last week . . .” or “Three weeks ago we saw that . . .” will make those who were present for the earlier messages sense failure if they cannot remember
A pastor who lives among the people will know those struggling with a harsh boss, a prodigal son, guilt, depression, an unsaved relative, intolerant in-laws, an impossible spouse, irresponsible ambitions, unrestrained passions, and many similar concerns.
Current events tend to get pastors in trouble when sermons begin to argue for specific political agendas, candidates, or programs.
Concentrating on the Bible’s “fine print” gave people the impression they could not read their Bibles without me.
We can help the people to whom we preach remain confident of the Bible’s authority by reminding them how rare such questions are when they do arise in the ordinary course of preaching. Bible-believing scholars question the textual validity of less than one word in a thousand in the best translations.
instinctively. A good study Bible with verse cross-references, book synopses, glossaries, concordances, explanatory notes, maps, Bible character summaries, charts, time lines, and other helps provides a succinct library of information in a preacher’s palm
The New American Standard Bible (NASB) sacrifices readability for a more strictly equivalent translation, which continues to make it satisfying to many serious Bible students. The newer English Standard Version (ESV) maintains much of the majesty of style of the older Revised Standard Version (RSV) but was edited by Bible-believing scholars who made the ESV translation one of the most insightful and dependable currently available.
concerns. It is not wise habitually to run to commentaries as the first step of sermon preparation, lest your thoughts start running in a groove carved by one not in touch with what you need to address.22 Commentaries are better used as a check than as a guide.23
Modern resurrections of the allegorical method regularly occur when preachers assume that the Holy Spirit will enable them to discern in a text something more than or different from what was meant by the biblical writer or what they can demonstrate that the divine Author makes evident within the canon of Scripture.
Using grammar and history to discern a text’s original meaning is called the grammatical-historical method.30 This method allows Scripture to speak for itself instead of having an interpreter apply meaning to a text.
The Protestant Reformers used the principle of the “analogy of faith” (sometimes identified as “the analogy of Scripture”) to guide their interpretations, and it should guide ours as well.31 This standard requires preachers to use Scripture alone as the basis for their exhortations. Nothing but what Scripture itself attests should be the focus of our preaching.
The reason “every heretic has his verse” is because Scripture can be twisted to say almost anything if interpreters ignore contexts.
Paul preached about marital relationships, child rearing, qualifications for church officers, stewardship, handling anger, on-the-job conduct, regard for government authorities, and many other practical concerns, and at the same time he wrote, “But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. . . . For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2). Somehow, though Paul addressed many issues of daily living, he believed he was always preaching about the person and work of Jesus. This must be the
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John A. Broadus, the father of modern expository preaching. In his classic On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, this master teacher and preacher concludes that in an expository sermon, “the application of the sermon is not merely an appendage to the discussion or a subordinate part of it, but is the main thing to be done.”
This is why explanation, illustration, and application should act as the proof, demonstration, and specification of the exhortation a preacher makes and the transformation God requires.
In a traditional expository message, each component of exposition occurs in each main point of the sermon because it makes no sense to explain something that can be neither demonstrated nor applied.19 There are, however, good reasons to make exceptions to this traditional expectation: Sometimes a preacher uses a series of explanations to build to an application or to veil implications for a later, more powerful impact.
