A few weeks ago I had the honor of preaching via video to a congregation in India. The congregants are not allowed to gather, so the meeting was held on an online conference platform. The pastor introduced me, then invited various members to sing, read Scripture, and pray. Something really special happened after I preached. In about a minute’s time, the pastor gave the congregation an overview of the sermon. Point by point, Scripture passage by passage. It was like he had my notes in front of him. I was blessed by the whole service, but this really impressed me. What a great practice! Over the years, I’ve had people come by the exit of the church, shake my hand, and say, “great sermon.” Some have complemented the sermon and given a one-sentence take-away that shocked me because it had nothing to do with anything I thought I had said (synopses like that keep me up at night fretting over my preaching). But this Indian brother had paid so close attention that he was able to shepherd his congregation into a quick reminder of all that was said. Oh, if we would all take notes and put careful attention onto the sermon like that!
One thing I try to
do when preaching or teaching is to follow the scriptural text exactly. I don’t
want there to be confusion about the sermon’s source, and I want the listener
to be able to put his or her finger on the text as I’m preaching and follow
along word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase. By the Lord’s help, the goal is to keep
my from “chasing rabbits” or using the text to promote something important to
me.
Here’s the thing:
there’s a way to do this that completely misses the intent of the
divinely-inspired author. I’ll use a passage from 1 Peter to illustrate what I have
in mind:
“Blessed be the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Who according
to His great mercy
has caused us to
be born again to a living hope
through
the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
to obtain an inheritance which
is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away,
reserved in heaven
for you,
who are protected
by the power of God through faith
for a
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:3-5).
It is not
expositional preaching/teaching if you strip the text down to a list of “important”
words and go down the list talking about each in a way divorced from the flow
and purpose of Peter’s words. To put it another way, I cannot create from this text
a list of words I want to talk about:
1. Blessed
2. Father
3. Lord Jesus
Christ
4. mercy
5. born again
6. living hope
7. resurrection
8. inheritance
9. heaven
10. power of God
11. salvation
I cannot take this
list, go thematically down it speaking about each word separately, and consider
this an expositional sermon/study.
God the Holy Spirit
inspired Peter to give us many more words than the eleven picked out of those
three verses. There are conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns. There are adverbs
and adjectives. These “little” words matter so much because we learn how the “big”
words fit together to give us the divine-intended meaning. I love doctrine and
a good systematic theology, but if we’re so full of that stuff we can’t hear
the flow of meaning in these words as they were given to us, then we’ve got a
problem.
And I’m not even
talking about getting into the Greek or anything too complicated. With a reasonably
literal English translation, our first responsibility is simply to try to
understand what the author’s purpose was in this three-verse sentence.
The passage is
only peripherally about Jesus or us as believers. Who is it about? It’s about
the “Father.” He is pronounced “blessed” (it’s an adjective, not a command to “bless”
Him) because of what He’s done in securing salvation for us through Jesus
Christ.
What has He done? Answering
that is the point, with every phrase going back and pointing to the Father and
explaining that this is why He is “blessed,” worthy of our praise and
adoration.
Exposition is not
word-study. It can involve that, but the word-study must never stand alone, separate
from the purpose of the text. It needs to widen the view to phrases. There must
be consideration of conjunctions and prepositional phrases. The longer I preach
and teach, the more and more I pay attention to those “little words” as much as
I do to the theologically loaded ideas.
Just as my dear
Indian brother listened carefully to what I said and was able to repeat it back
in short form with clarity and accuracy, we need to be able to read, preach,
and teach the Bible in the same way. Preaching is proclamation – not proclamation
of how much I can tell you about a list of words taken from the text, but a declaration
of what the Spirit-inspired author is saying. “The preaching of the Word of God
is the Word of God” (2nd Helvetic Confession of 1536, Article 1). At least,
that’s the goal.
Don’t just focus
on the words alone. See how those words fit together to produce the meaning.
May we be diligent to preach the exact text, and may the beautiful Church respond
with an equal diligence to follow us through the Spirit-given flow of His Word.
