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May 9 - May 9, 2024
First, contemporary preaching suffers from a loss of confidence in the power of the word.
The audacious claim of Christian preaching is that the faithful declaration of the Word of God, spoken through the preacher’s voice, is even more powerful than anything music or image can deliver.
Second, contemporary preaching suffers from an infatuation with technology.
As God made clear, even in the Ten Commandments, He has chosen to be heard and not seen. The use of visual technologies threatens to confuse this basic fact of biblical faith.
Third, contemporary preaching suffers from embarrassment before the biblical text.
Fourth, contemporary preaching suffers from an emptying of biblical content.
Fifth, contemporary preaching suffers from a focus on felt needs.
Sixth, contemporary preaching suffers from an absence of gospel.
As Charles Spurgeon expressed this so eloquently, preach the Word, place it in its canonical context, and “make a bee-line to the cross.”
Scripture makes clear that worship is something we do, not just something we attend. It is not merely an issue for the pastor and other ministers, nor for the musicians and those who plan the service. Worship is an issue for the entire congregation, for worship is something we do together. It is our corporate and common responsibility to worship God as He desires.
Right worship begins with a vision of the one true and living God.
Worship is the people of God gathering together to confess His worthiness, His “worth-ship.”
True worship begins with a vision of the God of the Bible—a vision of the one true and living God.
True worship always proclaims the gospel, the good news of what God has done in Jesus Christ. It proclaims the work of Christ, and it centers in the cross.
Reformers were convinced that the heart of true biblical worship was the preaching of the Word of God.
The heart of Christian worship is the authentic preaching of the Word of God.
If we as pastors are truly serious about giving our people a true vision of God, showing them their own sinfulness, proclaiming to them the gospel of Jesus Christ, and encouraging them to obedient service in response to that gospel, then we will devote our lives to preaching the Word. That is our task and our calling—to confront our congregations with nothing less than the living and active Word of God, and to pray that the Holy Spirit will thereby open eyes, convict consciences, and apply that Word to human hearts.
All Christian preaching springs from the truth that God has spoken in word and deed, and that He has chosen human vessels to bear witness to Himself and His gospel. We speak because we cannot be silent. We speak because God has spoken.
Seek Him always. But go beyond seeking Him; expect Him. Do you expect anything to happen when you get up to preach in a pulpit? Or do you just say to yourself, “Well, I have prepared my address, I am going to give them this address; some of them will appreciate it and some will not"? Are you expecting it to be the turning point in someone’s life … ? That is what preaching is meant to do….Seek this power, expect this power, yearn for this power; and when the power comes, yield to Him.
To preach “in the Spirit” is to preach with the acknowledgment that the human instrument has no control over the message—and no control over the Word as it is set loose within the congregation. The Spirit, as John declared, testifies, “because the Spirit is the truth” (1 John 5:6).
The ultimate purpose of the sermon is to glorify God and to reveal a glimpse of His glory to His creation. That God would choose such a means to express His own glory is beyond our understanding; it is rooted in the mystery of the will and wisdom of God.
I believe that the only form of authentic Christian preaching is expository preaching.
Let’s be clear. According to the Bible, exposition is preaching. And preaching is exposition.
Many evangelicals are seduced by the proponents of topical and narrative preaching.
What we mean is, very simply, reading the text and explaining it—reproving, rebuking, exhorting, and patiently teaching directly from the text of Scripture. If you are not doing that, then you are not preaching.
The heart and soul of expository preaching—of any true Christian preaching—is reading the Word of God and then explaining it to the people so that they understand it.
Before the decline in expository preaching, there was the abandonment of the conviction that the Word of God comes as a matter of life and death.
First, expository preaching is that mode of Christian preaching that takes as its central purpose the presentation and application of the text of the Bible.
Second, all other issues and concerns are subordinated to the central task of presenting the biblical text.
Third, the text of Scripture has the right to establish both the substance and the structure of the sermon.
Fourth, the preacher must make clear how the Word of God establishes the identity and worldview of the church as the people of God.
The preached Word, applied to the heart by the Holy Spirit, is the essential instrumentality through which God shapes His people. As the Reformers remind us, it is through preaching that Christ is present among His people.
Expository preaching both requires and eventually cultivates an attitude of reverence on the part of the congregation.
Lacking reverence for the Word of God, many congregations are caught in a frantic quest for significance in worship.
The preacher’s authority lies not in profession, not in position, and not in personality. It lies in the Word of God alone.
we preach Christ in three ways. As Paul says in Colossians 1:28, we proclaim Christ, we warn people, and we teach people—all to the end of bringing Christians to maturity in Christ Jesus.
in order to display for God’s people the entire picture of God’s plan for them, what is needed is the ability to paint the entire picture—in all its colors, all its hues, and all its shades. This means we ought to preach Christ from both the Old and the New Testaments, recognizing that, by the analogy of faith, every text in the entire Scripture points to Jesus Christ. It
The Bible’s storyline consists of at least four great movements that are absolutely necessary: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Without these four movements, we cannot understand ourselves as human beings or our place in God’s work. With them, we can understand the entire sweep of Scripture’s story.
Our ambition—our obsession as preachers—should be nothing less than to preach so that the congregation sees the big story of the gospel, the grand narrative of the gospel, through every text we preach.
In fact, there is no dimension of the pastor’s calling that is not deeply, inherently, and inescapably theological. There is no problem the pastor will encounter in counseling that is not specifically theological in character. There is no major question in ministry that does not come with deep theological dimensions and the need for careful theological application. The task of leading, feeding, and guiding the congregation is as theological as any other conceivable vocation.
The pastor who is no theologian is no pastor.
The Christian tradition understands truth as established by God and known to us through the self-revelation of God in Scripture. Truth is eternal, fixed, and universal, and our responsibility is to order our minds in accordance with God’s revealed truth and then to bear witness to this truth. We serve a Savior who identified Himself as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (see John 14:6) and called for belief.
Ivan in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov was right—if God is dead, everything is permissible.
I will go so far as to assert that if you are at peace with the world, you have abdicated your calling.
We preach, not because we have come to the conclusion that preaching is the most rational or most effective means of reaching the lost, but because God has commanded it—and because He has promised to take that which the world would say is foolishness, and use it to save sinners.
