The Core of Expository Preaching

the following message is made available by truth for life for more information visit us online at truthfortheworld.org one honored to be here this conference and testimony to this ministry and to this place which is not accidental as a focal point for our are thinking about ministry and expository preaching I'm going to be speaking about that this is a breakout session you don't look very broken out but as we are now breaking out together we're going to break out on the subject of expository preaching but in a particular way and I'm going to begin with the text and that of the book Nehemiah in Chapter eight to pass his no doubt familiar to you the passage which in many ways is the quintessential demonstration of biblical exposition Nehemiah chapter eight beginning in verse one and all the people gathered as one man into the square before the water gate and they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel so Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly both men and women and all who could understand what they heard on the first day of the seventh month and he read from it facing the square before the water gate from early morning until midday in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law and Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose and beside him stood mat Athiya Shima and Aniyah Uriah Hill kaya and masih I on his right hand and padilla Mishael malkia hashem hispana zechariah and mezu l'm on his left hand and ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people for he was above all the people and as he opened it all the people stood and Ezra blessed the Lord the Great God and all the people answered amen amen lifting up their hands and they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground also Joshua Ben I share abaya Jeannine ah Kubb shabath i hoed ayah Messiah our Isaiah Joseph odd anon Kolya the Levites helped the people to understand the law while the people remained in their places they read from the book from the law of God clearly and they gave the sense so that the people understood the reading years ago I was listening to someone try to explain the deficiencies and product information instructions those deficiencies brothers are many sometimes I wonder if they're not sadistically intentional sometimes they just ignore the obvious human capacity for stupidity my wife and I were expecting our first child that glorious moment we paced ourselves we paced ourselves and telling our parents that they're gonna be grandparents we paced ourselves in terms of making those purchases with a young rather impoverished couple mates when they're expecting their first child and so we had paced ourselves to that glorious week when he said at this point we will buy the crib and given my fatherly duty and as a husband I assembled that crib I assembled it gloriously and laborious ly it was complicated the instructions had not only been written by a sadist but by a sadist who did not know English as a first or second language and when completed I was so proud when it all of a sudden struck me that this was the family room when my little brothers were growing up their crib would collapse in order to move it from room to room but thank you to all the new safety regulations the clip cribs don't collapse anymore which meant I had to disassemble the entire crib and put it together I wanted to get to the instruction writer and say listen here's a little clue the very first instruction should be hey idiot assemble this where you intend it to be the person who was describing to me his own frustrations said that you know even on a shampoo bottle they need to be more careful the shampoo bottle says lather rinse repeat he said look there's some idiot they'd still be in the shower so it doesn't ever say stop you can get out dry off come back tomorrow and do the same thing lather rinse repeat but that's pretty much what we find right here in this passage in this demonstration of the exposition of the Bible what we have here is a preacher indeed we have a team of preachers and the first thing they do is to read the Bible they read the text and then they explained its meaning and then they went home after they had prayed that's what we do that's what preachers of God's Word do this is the picture of how we are to do it it's just as easy for us to remember as lather rinse and repeat it's read the text and explain the text and then study and come back and do it again i define expository preaching as that mode of preaching that takes as a central object to the reading and explanation of the biblical text in such a way that the text determines both the substance and the structure of the sermon that mode of preaching that takes as its aim the reading and explanation of the word of God in which to text then sets and establishes both the substance and the structure of the message but my purpose in speaking to you about expository preaching is not so much just to define it in order to give a primer on expository preaching I'm speaking to a group of expositors but rather as Alistair said in opening a conference this is not to to speak of those things we do not know but in the main to remind ourselves of those things we dare not forget so why does no I want to ask the question why expository preaching why what are the interesting things to notice how this conversation has changed in the of angelical world over the course of just the last generation or so because if you were to go back in evangelicalism as an ism and and you're to go back say just 30 or 40 years arguments for expositional preaching as the definitive mode of preaching would have been altogether unusual they would have been anecdotal that they would have appeared to many to have been arbitrary but here's one of the happy things about gospel christianity in this generation at least in terms of argument the argument has largely been one in terms of argument there now few persons I dare say who would argue against expository preaching as that which should define the preaching medicine or there are a few who would dare to argue against preachers understanding preaching to be primarily the exposition of the biblical text now we should not consider this to been fully clarified there are many people who honestly think themselves to be expositors who are not there many congregations who believe their pastor or preachers and expositor and they are not but nonetheless it still interesting that they at least think they ought to be whereas the generation or two ago they might not even thought they ought to be topical preaching rained in terms of the expectation in the evangelical world has proved that all you have to do is look at what remains of the preaching ministry of many who were the best-known creatures of the day in terms of evangelical churches and radio ministries and all the rest so that's a gain I'm happy to say as a not only as a pastor and a preacher but also as a seminary president that the vast majority of seminarians these days those who are actually showing up at seminary to train to be pastors they intend to be expositors that's a happy thing but but why exposition I mean how did the argument come to be one how did that happen well I suggest you just a few things very quickly for one thing other modes of preaching prove themselves to be useless and then we have to ask the question why evidence of that is found in the fact that most of those churches and most of those ministries that establish themselves on preaching that was not expositional preaching they disappeared there was no tenacity or lasting power to many of those ministries many who made the argument and they were making the argument against expositional preaching not necessarily against it on occasion but against the exposition is the norm many of those are largely forgotten those ministries in those churches even those denominations and the movements did not long survive so we could even say the pragmatic level expositional preaching has survived when other understandings of preaching has not but of course there's more to it than that our main concern is not the pragmatic consideration that's not irrelevant but that's not primary primary it's the question of what does the Bible itself reveal about preaching the reason why I turn to Nehemiah chapter 8 this is not isolated but it is quintessential I mean here you have Israel gathered as a man before the water gauge and as they are gathered they are gathered for the hearing of the word of God and the explanation of the word of God they gather together the men women and those who were of age to understand they gathered together and such a mass that it was if they were one man and there was a wooden platform built for the purpose not an accident that I'm standing on a wooden platform there's just something that indicates the importance of the task and also the necessity even of gaining the ability to speak to a congregation when is standing on a platform and that's what Ezra and his colleagues were doing and if colleagues are listed and to reminder to us by the way than in the priestly ministry of the Old Testament this is clear not only in Ezra and Nehemiah but elsewhere also there in Malachi for instance the Prophet there there was a teaching tasks to the priesthood there was a preaching tasks to the priesthood as well Malachi makes that very clear but you'll notice that they were standing together as her in his colleagues what they did was to open the book and then they read the text and they explained its meaning and all the people responded with all men they were humbled with their faces to the ground it comes down to faithfulness we understand that our commitment to expositional preaching is not a theoretical commitment it's not because we somehow we're intelligent and intuitive enough to follow a way through different modes of preaching until we finally establish that this one was superior to all the rest it's not just that in a pragmatic consideration the churches that have established themselves upon the expositional preaching of the word have endured when others have not and that they have endured so long as they were committed to expositional preaching it's also because apparently in the scripture this is what Scripture itself implies as a mode of preaching now one of the fun things in a breakout session is that you can chase a rabbit for a moment here's a rabbit I intend to chase you will notice that they read the text before they explained it are too many preachers these days fail to read the text they start talking about the text as if people already know what they're talking about but there's a problem with that that isn't limited merely to the fact that you can't count on the congregation not knowing the text of what you're speaking it is that the power is in the Word of God and the Word of God demands to be read when Paul wrote to Timothy in his preparatory stage of ministry said give yourself to prayer and do what to the public reading of scripture one of the deficits and the church today is there's not enough scripture read the many churches where the pride is in the exposition of the preacher but there's a deficit of Scripture even in those churches that define themselves self-consciously it's built upon a Ministry of exposition now when you look at the historic Protestant orders of worship you'll notice especially going back to the Reformation it's not just the text that is preached that is read but it is a good a good deal of material from Scripture a good many texts that are read in addition to the text that was preached in the course of the worship service traditionally a text to be read from the Old Testament and a text from the New Testament or not talking about a couple of verses and then of course the text to be preached though the text to be preached was read just as we see here in Nehemiah chapter 8 and then and only then was it explained now what we're chasing this rabbit for a moment let's chase it all the way it remind ourselves that our confidence is in the union of Scripture and the Holy Spirit such as the Holy Spirit applies Scripture to the hearts of believers and by the way uses Scripture to convict sinners of their sin and their need for a savior it is the Holy Spirit who blesses and is even united in the reading of Scripture in such a way that is not true of our preaching preaching is a secondary act to the reading of Scripture is the primary act too many of us hasten to the secondary acted out giving attention to the primary act we'll consider that rabbit chased I want to suggest you an altogether different reason implied in what I've already said as to why we should be committed to the exposition of Scripture it is because expository preaching is a survival mechanism for a church in a secular age in this age expository preaching turns out to be the only survival strategy we've got one way I thought about talking about these issues was to ask the question and I realize that the the grammarian in me doesn't like the way I have to phrase this but it's the only way properly in this context to get the point across what are we up against against which are we up does it work up against which are we you get the point this is when Winston Churchill said that is kind of nonsense up with which I will not put what are we up against we're up against the full onslaught of an increasingly secular age then we talk in those terms and we've talked in those terms for some years just about everyone knows to at least use the words the vocabulary related to secularization but I want us to think for a moment in terms of what we're actually facing and why it matters we are standing in one of the great turning points in human history and what's interesting is that American evangelicalism American American Christians we now find ourselves realizing that we are not the exception that we thought ourselves to be that America is not the exception that we thought that it was and even a sociologists and anthropologists and others believed that it was I have indeed just returned from along with some of my dear friends with a ligand Duncan and Mark Dever and David Platt we were over there to preach for eating even gallium Ines trancing even Gilliam 21 which it was partnered were together for the gospel for a conference for preachers and and gospel Christians in Hamburg just in recent days and before then we walked the steps of Luther we retraced his life and what a marvelous thing you can be and you can stand in the house in which he was born 1483 you can you can stand in the house where he died in 1546 you can walk in the house where he lived you can go into the cell in the Vark berg castle where he translated the New Testament while a captive is amazing all these places are still there at night we had dinner with some different pastors in Erfurt Erfurt itself is such an amazing place it's like a medieval city that just was preserved it was preserved by George S Patton he didn't mean to preserve it wasn't his intention at all as a matter of fact Erfurt was was scheduled for demolition by the 8th Air Force and the Air Force was flying with these giant bombers to destroy the the the word of the Royal Air Force and the Americans together was effort to ashes and they were just about to bomb Erfurt they were a matter of just minutes away the sound of the planes over Erfurt could be heard when George Patton quickly got to headquarters by radio and said don't bomb Erfurt I've got it and he did he captured it by land therefore it was not destroyed amazing place you can go in this you can walk you can go to the Augustinian monastery where Luther was a monk you can walk around the very trees where he had that experience with the thunderstorm in which he committed himself to become a monk it's just it's just amazing it's still there it wasn't turned to ashes and for that I'm thankful but let me tell you what it was turned to most of those Luther sites are in the East what was the ddr East Germany state enforced atheism for two generations a period from 1945 to 1989 the University of Chicago recently did a longitudinal study in terms of theistic belief society by society and we discovered that the residents of East Germany what used to be East Germany only 8% indicate that they even believe in a personal God only 8% in the homeland of Luther and the Reformation now by the way that 8% sounds low you have to realize how low that is that means that it is lower even than Japan which in many ways is definitionally the one of the most secular nations on earth East Germany the home of the Reformation there was no Reformation in Japan but it tells you how something has happened something happened in the course of a half a century that completely changed the the what the Sociology are called the possibilty structures of the in higher society most of Europe is not yet quite in terms of just 8 percent saying they even believe in a personal God but church-going is down to 2 to 3 percent and less than some places and it's not just continental Europe it's the United Kingdom as well for many years the decades had been assumed that America was an exception the United States of America was an exception because the vast majority of Christians of citizens in the United States still claim to be not only theists but they claim to be Christians of one sort or another but it turns out that this society is secularizing pretty much on schedule just in a different way Peter Drucker is one of the leading experts or the leading sociologist he's still writing in his tenth decade of life there's an ambition for you he's still writing in his 90s and what he's writing is worth writing he's lived long enough to invent a theory and to corrected and to correct it again at least he's had the humility to do so it was he who was one of the progenitors of the idea of secularization early in the 20th century the idea that that progress and technology and science and and all kinds of trajectories and trends in the 20th century would would would make belief in God recede and of course that's exactly what happened in continental Europe that's exactly what's happened in the United Kingdom not so much in the United States so Peter Berger came back and had to revive it saying well it's going to happen everywhere except we're not sure what to do with the United States but now they've come back to say and I think there's so much wisdom in this oh it is happening everywhere and it is happening in the United States but it's happening in the United States differently than it happened in Europe in Europe secularization took the form of people responding with antipathy to Christianity overtly denying theistic belief and declaring themselves to be secular in the United States Berger and others are now very insightful II demonstrate people still continue to say they're Christians but they've evacuated the term of all meaning and he says there's more than one way for secularism to win secularization takes place when at the end of the day the into the 20th century as a matter of fact in much of Europe the vast majority people say I don't believe in God I don't go to church there's no binding authority of Christianity or theism on me whatsoever in the United States secularization still moves forward with people who grin and tell pollsters they are Christians but what's also absent in their lives is any binding force of Christianity whatsoever Max Weber described the process of secularization as disenchantment he was just trying to speak of it in neutral terms a disenchantment is that you we once lived in an enchanted age an age in which you had to have supernatural explanations for life for birth for meaning for reality for morality you had to have enchanted supernatural explanations but in the modern age the experience is disenchantment it's just not necessary anymore well you can look at that and say well that's something we can actually trace we can see that happening we are living in an age that is increasingly disenchanted at the same time it's not quite so disenchanted as it would like to think for instance just take the category of guilt recently a major work has come out Wilma clays the author and he's demonstrating the fact that secular people think they've gotten over God but what they can't get over is guilt they can't really explain guilt during the 20th century they did their very best to explain it merely in psychotherapeutic terms Freud was of course classic in this and the idea was that you've got to deny guilt the idea in much of the 20th century the entire humanistic worldview was that if you're experiencing guilt then it's the imposition on you of a moral judgment that is oppressing you what you need to do is to deny guilt well a century later guess what you won't go away and it turns out that even very liberal very progressive very secular very Metropolitan people still continue to feel guilt now we have an explanation for that the secular worldview has no such explanation for that by the way our explanation for that begins in the imago dei what it means we made in God's image at least a part of what it means to be made God's image is that there is a moral capacity there is there are truths we cannot not know simply because we are made in the image of God and guilt is a part of that knowledge of course Christianity understands guilt in an entirely different term we we understand guilt as a gift we understand guilt as a gift in the sense that it demonstrates our incapacity to save ourselves it demonstrates the inadequacy of the modern idea of forgiving ourselves it points to our need for rescue it points to the necessity of what we would define as an alien righteousness we are living in an age that declares itself to be disenchanted and one of the things we need to note is that we're living in an age that is increasingly oppositional to Christianity a part of this great project that disenchantment means that if the supernatural is denied then supernatural Authority is what's essentially denied and that supernatural Authority is centred most especially in any limitations upon the autonomous self the modern human being the human being and what we now call late modernity he or she believes the individual to be absolutely autonomous and believes autonomy to be a can't see a divine right because they don't believe and this is a disenchanted world's it's not a Divine Right it's simply natures rights a biological right it's a human right by the way chasing another rabbit one of the problems in the modern worlds you get lots of people who are trying to speak on behalf of human right to have no idea why humans should have any right they don't I was just recently in Berlin just a few years ago in Berlin just in order to make this very clear just how liberal they were they put in a new exhibit at the Berlin Zoo it was an exhibit that called homo sapiens and they put human beings barely dressed in this in order to make clear the human beings are just another animal it got a lot of attention I had a reporter from a major newspaper call me and say well how would you respond to that I said it's not news is what you mean it's not news I said it'll be news if the Tigers put them in there and if the giraffes had written Homo sapiens on the sign if it is this is just stupidity this is a bunch of human beings who stuck themselves in a room it put Homo sapiens on front and took off their clothes and said look we're just an animal and called a press conference the biblical worldview tells us that we are not autonomous as a matter of fact to be a creature by definition it's not to be autonomous and and it also means that yes there are certain rights that come to us with certain Goods moral goods that come to us by virtue the fact we are the creatures of a holy and righteous God Christianity is the only worldview that can even support human rights and human dignity but the interesting thing is that the creature is not autonomous which means we are addressed and it means we are the creature who has spoken to other creatures who speaks and you have to realize that in the very heart of the modern rebellion against theism is a rebellion against Revelation the contemporary culture around us doesn't really worry as to whether or not God exists so long as he's silent I'm gonna be preaching about that tonight in Deuteronomy chapter 4 the issue is that there is an absolute opposition to Revelation the idea that God would speak implies that we are bound by what he speaks if there is a creature thus a creator the creator speaks to the creature then it's binding well that's where we are now why would expositional preach and be different now in terms of this urgency than any other time you saw for a couple of reasons it is because what we now declare from the Word of God is a word that is contrary to virtually everything that modern people will hear and that was not always the case and that is to say that if you go back a relatively short amount of time in human history at least in terms of moral judgment what the church would declare to be right what the church was declared to be wrong was pretty much what the society agreed was right and and what was wrong the basic distinction now between Scripture committed Christianity which is to say Christianity and and the world around us is that we actually believe that we are bound by the words of God and you have to realize just how stunning that is to people how shocking that is to people how obnoxious that is to people how untenable and unthinkable that is to people the question is how unthinkable is it to our people how many people in our churches just understand here's what's happening we're about to be bound by the Word of God and the Scriptures read when the Scriptures preached that's what happens we're living in a time in which the moral revolution the revolution and morality and sexuality taking place around this is not an accident it's coming on the back of the process of secularization the nation's that are most secular also tend to be the most sexually liberated to use their own definition of liberation which means most liberated from the constraints of what they saw as an oppressive morality the modern autonomous self says that the that any morality will do except any morality that binds my behavior interestingly in the last 10 years here in the United States we've seen an enormous jump and for most Americans is not ten years it's a matter of just a couple of years an enormous jump from people saying you have no right to tell me what to do to where we now here routinely you have no right to tell me who I am and along comes the Word of God who seems to insist on telling us both what to do and who we are so why in the world would expose Ettore preaching be a survival strategy for the church it is because our job is to teach and preach the Word of God in order that Christians will be conformed to the image of Christ and one of the things we have to recognize is that no one is going to help us in this no one you can't count on the society helping in any sense you can't count on the school's helping in any sense I think there should be an understatement the opposite of which you have already inferred it can't even count on parents to do this should be able to count on parents to do this and if we are preaching the word parents it should be instructed in the necessity of parents teaching their children hopefully you see evidence and thankfully you do but you can't count on the people to whom you're preaching being taught by their parents what in any previous generation of Christians would have been expected you can't count on anyone to do anything for us as a matter of fact we have to count on almost every other voice in the society being an oppositional voice whether it comes to academia and education or much less entertainment the cultural authorities and not only that is filtered down from the academic doctoral seminar to the playground where the voices are all the voices of autonomy an opposition to any imposition of any judgment about behavior or identity now it's bad enough with matters of sex and gender but here's the bigger problem what about the identity we define because scripture defines us so clearly as sinner in need of a savior I'm going to suggest you that expository preaching is the only survival strategy we've got because without it Christians simply will not be made they will not be conformed to the image of Christ they will not become disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ only by expository preaching and by that I mean reading a lot of Scripture and explaining a lot of Scripture only by the mechanism of biblical preaching our Christian is going to develop what is primary which is the knowledge requisite for Christian faithfulness but with that knowledge comes more than mere knowledge again because the Holy Spirit accompanies the word Calvin's definition of this is probably superior to anything outside of Scripture when he says remember that insofar as the preacher preaches the Word of God the Holy Spirit accompanies every word Luther put it this way in one of his MO combat sermons he said to his own student said remember that insofar as you preach the scripture the words of Scripture go where your voice can never go you recall what he said he said to his students your responsibility is to get the scripture and to the gospel from your lips to their ears no further can you go but the good news is that the sovereign Holy Spirit of God goes where you cannot go that otherwise unbreachable chasm between their ears and their hearts there the preacher cannot go but the Word of God goes unhindered sovereignly expository preaching is the only survival strategy we've got not that we haven't tried just about everything else evangelicalism as an ism is a collection of attempted moves to find some other way than the preaching of the word of God to get this done and the wreckage of that should be humiliation enough what we're left with is the preaching of the word of God and it turns out that the predicament in which we find ourselves is the same predicament the Christian should have understood in every generation and furthermore it's a predicament in which we find ourselves not by cultural accident in this strange period of late modernity but rather by the sovereignty of God who in his providence has us here by purpose in order to show his glory so that indeed if Christians if sinners do hear the gospel and cling to Christ and Christians do grow in grace then it's going to be clear effort that he has done this and that we ourselves and that the way he does this is to the reading and the explanation of his word and so lather rinse repeat get up on Sunday morning and the other opportunity have to preach read the text and explain its meaning pray the Lord will apply this word as he promises to our hearts go home rest and study and come back and do it again it's the only survival strategy we've got this message was brought to you from truth for life where the learning is for living to learn more about truth for life with Alistair beg visit us online at truthfortheworld.org

Channel: Alistair Begg

Views: 10,000

Rating: 4.8888888 out of 5

Keywords: Albert Mohler, Preaching, Expository Preaching, Pastoral Ministry, Basics Conference, Nehemiah

Id: qNgCOJvkBzQ

Length: 37min 5sec (2225 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2017