“The ultimate healing of the world’s hurt is not to be effected by legislation but by the redeeming grace of God, and the proclamation of that redeeming grace is the highest work to which any man can be called.” – Congregational minister, J.D. Jones[1]
As we said last week, expository preaching is essential to building individuals and families that love the Bible and know how to handle it correctly. Expository preaching, however, has great benefits for the preacher as well. As one who speaks at churches often, below is a list I crafted as a reminder to myself. If you’re not a pastor, consider sharing it with your pastor as an encouragement.
If you are a pastor, here are ten benefits of expository preaching:[2]
- It sets limits on what content should be primary in the sermon. Pastors are guardians of “the sacred deposit of truth.”
- It demands integrity. We take seriously the literary genre of a particular text and make use of the historical grammatical method. We can’t make a passage say anything that we want.
- It identifies pitfalls. Stott names these as “forgetfulness and disloyalty.” On these he says: “The forgetful expositor loses sight of his text by going off on a tangent and following his own fancy. The disloyal expositor appears to remain with his text, but strains and stretches it into something quite different from its original and natural meaning.”[3]
- It gives us confidence to preach. We are expounding God’s Word with integrity and honesty. We’re not called to preach ourselves. On any given week, we may feel one way or another. We may be happy or unhappy, pleased with our progress or unpleased. If we focus too much on our feelings, however, the act of preaching God’s holy word to his people—of doing it proper justice—can feel overwhelming. Often I’ve felt like the last person on the planet that should be up there. When I was a full-time pastor of a local church for six years, the regimen of preparing every week often felt like an intense struggle to pull my soul up by the bootstraps to a place I didn’t live! Notice all the times I italicized “feel” or “feelings” in the last several sentences. Disciplined expository preaching confronts us with an important truth: Preaching is not about us—our feelings and experiences; it’s about Christ and getting at the heart of the text for that given Sunday.
- We preach texts that we would never preach or those we would avoid. We all have our hobby horses and expository preaching helps us to learn, as one preacher said, to “kill our darlings.”
- We don’t have to fret over which text to preach next week. For many pastors, sermon preparation can go late into Saturday evening or very early Sunday morning. Immersing ourselves in a book of the Bible—which goes with the territory of expository preaching—makes it more likely that we’ll start early and chip away at our preparation throughout the week.
- It aides our growth as a theologian. We start to see themes. Particularly, with what is called the historical redemptive method, we begin to see, not just the red letters, but the redemptive thread throughout all of Scripture. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, our hearts begin to burn within us as we see Christ even throughout the Old Testament (Luke 24:32).
- It avoids the accusation that we are preaching at people. Without the discipline of expository preaching, this is almost unavoidable.
- People learn. Believers who come Sunday after Sunday need and want to hear from God. They’ll be greatly encouraged if you put the time in with a sermon that is “thoughtfully prepared and lovingly presented.” Again, this takes time and brings up the practical question “how long should sermon preparation be?” Stott says this is a hard question because, in a sense, there are many things throughout our lives that go into particular sermons. When pressed, however, he says ten to twelve hours and notes that “Bonhoffer says twelve hours on a sermon is a good general rule.”[4]
- We get surprised and find eternal strength and hope to pass on to others. Michael W. Smith’s live version of “Ancient Words” gets at this well. Scripture is full of treasures that we will be discovering for a lifetime. This is true especially if we declare “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27)—something we are much more likely to do if we commit to a habit of preaching through books of the Bible. To aid in getting the best commentaries available, I use the latest editions of Old Testament Commentary Survey by Tremper Longman III and New Testament Commentary Survey by D.A. Carson. These are available through Baker Academic.
Whether you’re a pastor or not, I hope you’ve found this brief introduction and overview of expository preaching helpful. Again, if you feel the benefits above would be encouraging or a good reminder, consider sharing them with your pastor or church leadership. And, if you’re currently not part of a church that has convictions in these areas, I pray this aides you in finding one.
[1] John Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 40.
[2] I’ve adapted and expanded this outline from Stott’s book above and a class on “Fruitful Preaching” by Kent Hughes.
[3] Op.cit., 130.
[4] Ibid., 259.