Expository Preaching Clarified-

For years I have been a leading advocate that the only "real" preaching is "expository" preaching--meaning a preacher should work systematically through books of the Bible verse-by-verse. The reason? Every word of the Bible is God's Word, and the preacher is commissioned to "preach the Word" (2 Tim 4:2), so preaching verse by verse is, by definition, the way to do it. To do so ensures that he would be fulfilling Paul's charge to Timothy, however, I've recently been challenged. Here, I do not wish to address the question of whether "verse by verse" exposition is the best way of preaching the Word, however, I wish to challenge the idea that preaching that way ensures that the "Word has been preached" as Paul meant it.

You see, the mission of preachers-teachers was most clearly stated by Jesus when he commissioned His disciples to "preach the Gospel." The Gospel is the point of the Bible, and thus, the point of preaching. In fact, when Paul exhorts Timothy to "preach the Word," he did not have in mind all the verses of the 66 books of the Bible when he said "the Word." All 66 books had not even been written yet! Precisely, "the Word" for Paul meant "the kerygma" or the message of the Gospel (Cf. 1 Cor 15:2-4).

Again, this is not to dispute that verse by verse teaching is certainly not a way, perhaps the best way, to accomplish that. It simply means that having "preached verse by verse" through a passage does not mean that, by definition, a preacher has necessarily preached "the Word," i.e. "the Gospel."

Could expository preaching not necessarily be Gospel-centered preaching? How could a person preach verse-by verse and not preach the point of the Bible? Very easily. It's happened numerous times! There are two qualities often found in expository preaching that disqualify it from being Gospel-centered preaching.

1) Moralism: Many "expository" sermons simply do not deal with the idols of the heart or the functional Saviors which control behavior. They do not point people back to the Gospel and the power of God as the only solution. I have heard a number of meticulous expository sermons which left me with examples to emulate ("Be like Moses and trust God and don't lash out in anger") but never pointed me to the Rock from which the healing water flowed and to which all the stories of the Old Testament were to point us (1 Cor 10; 2 Tim 3:14). The Gospel is not only the "ABC's" of Christianity, but the "A-Z" of Christianity. The Gospel is not the diving board that launches us into the pool of Christian living, but the water itself. As Charles Spurgeon said, in any topic you preach you must plow a trough back to the cross from which the power to heal and change really flows. I have heard far too many expository sermons that failed on just this point.

2) Me-centered: Much expository preaching treats the Biblical stories as if they are all about us. Their main point is to tell me how I should be able to see myself in so-and-so biblical character's life and thus see what God wants to do in my life... or look at so-and-so's behavior and see what I am supposed to do. But Jesus said in John 5:38-39 that the whole Bible was really about Him, not us. That means if I'm told the main point of a passage is about my life, I have been misled and missed the main point. Bible passages are not intended, primarily, to fill in some missing piece in the story of my life, but to show me that I must rewrite my story in terms of God's story. The Bible was not primarily intended to explain to me what I should do for God, but to point me to what God has done and is doing for me in Christ.

For example, in most of the bazillion sermons we've heard on David and Goliath, the application went something like, "And see, you too have giants in your life. And, through the power of God, you can knock them down like David did!" Sounds familiar?

But what if the main point about David was not about how we are to defeat giants like David did? What if we emphasized, instead, that David was a young Jew, hated by his brothers, who went out and defeated a giant who had completely immobilized Israel, and through his victory all of Israel was saved, even though they didn’t lift a finger to help David! All Israel all shared in his victory. In this way, David was pointing us to Jesus. And because Jesus, the "greater David," has conquered the "giant" of my separation from God, I don’t worry about other giants.
It is then that we could move properly to the application to defeating the giants in my life, for no longer does my own funcational salvation depend on defeating a certain giant like a difficulty at work or a sickness I have.

Or how about Joseph? Think about the sermons you've heard on Joseph, what did they usually sound like? Often, I heard it like this: "Hold on, you may be in prison now, but if you trust God and avoid Potiphar's wife, God will make you something analogous to the prime minister of Egypt." Again, sound familiar?

But what if instead of seeing ourselves as Joseph, we saw that the main point of the Joseph story was to point us to Jesus? Just as Joseph was a man hated and unjustly betrayed by his own brothers, but who rose from the prison to rule the world and saved them and the whole world in the process, so was Jesus. And now, because Jesus, the "greater Joseph," has been victorious to save me from the real destruction of being separated from God, I am victorious in Him even if I die in prison!

Even with postmodernism, which primarily suffers from the loss of a "metanarrative" or an overarching Story that explains all of life and ties it together. When each story of the Bible is preached as if it was simply an example for us to emulate, we reduce the Bible to a collection of stories to be used as tools in perfecting the great story about us, therefore, further leading us to simply fit these individual Bible stories into our idolatrous, false, me-centered story.

As rebels against God, people have lost the centrality of God in the universe and replaced it with the centrality of themselves. It is the preaching of the Gospel which reverses that. It is only when people are taught to trade-in their self-centered story for the story of God that we can be confident that the "Word has been preached." Preaching the Gospel means to teach people to put Jesus back in the center of the universe where He belongs and to trust what He has done and can do on our behalf.

So preachers, by all means, preach expositionally, but may I humbly suggest that what you should be exposing from the Bible is the Gospel! Three great sources that may assist in putting Jesus in the center of every verse is Graeme Goldsworthy's According to Plan; David Powlison's Seeing with New Eyes and a talk by Tim Keller entitled "Preaching the Gospel."