Well, it's been a while since my last post. For the past month, my life has been consumed with the task of doing a sermon series at my Church on Sunday mornings. Given that I am a layperson with a full-time job and other ministry responsibilities (and it was my wife's bday and Valentine's day), it was a busy month. I'll share a few thoughts on my experience on this blog, but here's at least one thought related to expositional preaching.
I've been very blessed to be able to work on the gift of preaching for quite some time. Even before our current pastor came to our Church, I had had some opportunities to proclaim the Word of God from the pulpit. One weekend, I was scheduled to preach. For some reason, I had chosen 1 Samuel 3 to be my text. It was the passage where Samuel is called by God to prophesy to Eli concerning God's punishment on Eli's household. A few weeks before I preached, I was certain that my sermon was going to be on God's Sovereignty in calling sinners for Himself (the sinner being Samuel). I told a friend, who told other people I was going to zealously declare the five points of Calvinism, and some of them dropped by to watch this display (I'm sure that's not the only reason they came). However, by the time I had written my sermon, I was convinced that was not the best way to handle the text. They were somewhat disappointed, though I'm pretty sure they were not "Calvinists". They just wanted to see a Calvinist do their strange Calvinist thing.
Anyways, my sermon ended up being about the kind of servants that God wants for Himself. You may perhaps think this equally missed the point of the text. I'm sure I'd do things differently if I were to preach that text today. Perhaps get into explaining how the priesthood and Samuel's reform fit into the story of Jesus. Nevertheless, the point is that a commitment to expositional preaching, however poorly executed, delivered me from a mob of synergists.
I continue to have this commitment. When you preach expositionally (in other words, the point of the text is the point of your sermon), you shift more and more authority from yourself and your opinions to the Word of God.
You can read others defend this conviction elsewhere (in far more convincing ways), but I do want to share my experience. I preached through Galatians and did it in five sermons. I simply would not have covered the topics I preached on if I was left to my own ideas and opinions. Going in, I was actually lamenting an over-emphasis on grace in contemporary Evangelicalism. I still think that is, to a certain extent, a problem. Yet Galatians bound me to its point: that having begun by the Spirit, we are not perfected by the flesh and if righteousness could come through the law, then Christ died for no purpose, and, on the basis of those truths, we should do good to all, especially those of the household of God. And as I tied myself to the text, I saw God speak through it to other areas of my life.
I've heard people comment on how strict and lifeless expositional preaching can be. But I see it as simply the best way to allow the Word of God to minister first to the preacher himself and then to others with as little interference as possible from the preacher and his own personal Theological hobby horses. That became more and more apparent as time went by. When I preach every two months, I usually end up gathering a few things I want to throw in when I get into the pulpit, no matter what the text is. A few weeks in, I had nothing left to talk about except the text in front of me*. That's probably how it should be.
*That's a bit of an exaggeration. I don't knowingly throw in things that aren't related to the text. And I do know more things about God and the Bible then I talked about. Not a whole lot more, but more nonetheless. Hopefully you get the general idea.
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