Sunday, October 9, 2011

Expository Preaching

While preparing my own "Expository Sermon", was recently much encouraged by the words of JI Packer from his collected writings: "Honouring the written Word of God".

While some see "expository preaching" as more of a method or about the length of the text, I agree with Packer when he sees it about the approach to the passage:

Expository preaching is the preaching of the man who knows Holy Scripture to be the living word of the living God, and who desires only that it should be free to speak its own message to sinful men and women; who therefore preaches from a text, and in preaching labours, as the Puritans would say, to “open” it, or, in Simeon’s phrase, to “bring out of the text what is there”; whose whole aim in preaching is to show his hearers what the text is saying to them about God and about themselves, and to lead them into what Barth called “the strange new world within the Bible” in order that there they may be met by Him Who is Lord of that world.
 See here for online link.

The article, namely "Expository Preaching: Charles Simeon and Ourselves" is great encouragement from this hero of yesteryear on our attitudes and practise of preaching.

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