I love the Bible, it is the inspired word of God and is the source of truth and the final authority for Christians. As a result preaching should be expository, which simply means that it should set forth, or explain the Bible. More specifically, exposition of a Bible passage means to clearly explain what the original author of that passage was writing about.<\/p>\n
The reason this is so key is that when you are explaining the original intent of the author, you are explaining the truth. Whereas if you dont work at a passage and figure out what the authors intent was when it was written, then what you are explaining when you preach is simply your own personal thoughts and ideas. The obvious problem then is that you may not be speaking truth, whether this is your intentionor not, but this is not the biggest problem. The real issue is that even if you are saying stuff that is completely true, if you arent drawing that truth out of the passage, then you are teaching people that the Bible is not your final authority, and that what it says is not really important!<\/p>\n
This is the point where you object because topical preaching is often good and wholly appropriate (especially in response to something specific in the life of the Church, perhaps a death in the family, or some city-wide event). And of course I believe that too! How I have defined expository should not restrict the form of a sermon, and certainly allows for topical preaching. It does however make a truly topical sermon much more difficult, because you bring the topic to the text instead of drawing the topic from the text, so picking your passage and working hard at the original intent becomes more difficult, but certainly not impossible.<\/p>\n
Peter Mead has been very helpful to me in forming this idea of expository preaching, and anyone interested in preaching would do well to check out his blog biblicalpreaching.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love the Bible, it is the inspired word of God and is the source of truth and the final authority for Christians. As a result preaching should be expository, which simply means that it should set forth, or explain … Continue reading