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Paul is one of the Staff Editors at Matthias Media. He is married to Cathy and has three fantastic kids. He loves student ministry, reading, writing music and playing the saxophone, and is looking forward to meeting Jesus face to face.
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Mark, I reckon one of the blokes around who does what I think you are looking for - expound the text, but with passion and application - is Sinclair Ferguson.
I am really enjoying - or rather being taught and moved through - listening to his Six People You Meet En Route To Calvary series - apparently they were mid-week lunchtime Bible studies and so are quite concise.
I do listen to audio downloads on and off, and one of the traps I was falling in to was mainly listening to conference talks (Together for the Gospel, Desiring God, 9Marks interviews etc). I noticed that for some reason, these often end up being topical/doctrinal talks rather than the bread and butter systematic expository preaching that at least some of those guys do week by week in their home church. So I am trying to hear some of the latter as well.
Thanks for the post, Mark. One problem is that great expository preaching also skillfully weaves in great biblical, historical, systematic and pastoral theology into the sermon, without losing the expository thread.
I fear that those committed to expository preaching sometimes don’t see the role of weaving in the other theological disciplines into the expoisition. What do you think?
Thanks for your post Mark
You said:
‘We need a serious conversation about what preaching really is, why good sermons succeed and bad sermons fail.’
As a listener, I would like to suggest one very big problem has to do with a lack of understanding of the Word of God on the part of the preacher.
Once the word of God is understood, as it is intended to be, then the rest tends to fall into place to varying degrees over time.
A ‘great’ preacher will humbly submit to Christ, and so understand the scriptures (Christ) that he can explain them in such a way that everyone can respond in obedience of faith for the sake of the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Mark
This is an excellent post. One of consequences of the massive and relatively sudden rise of the ‘internet preacher’ is that our preaching heroes have changed. And the new heroes for all their strengths (and the strengths are considerable!) lack one essential ingredient (at least in the examples I have listened to): their sermons are rarely driven by the text.
What I mean is that they tend to preach their frameworks rather than the unique and often surprising message of this particular passage. As you point out, the invaluable legacy of Stott (mediated to us by Chappo, the Jensens, John Woodhouse et al, and further reinforced by Dick Lucas, David Jackman etc) was to preach THE PASSAGE, to make ITS message the message of the sermon.
Now to get that message across to the hearers, there’s more to be said and done than just tamely rehearsing the content of the passage. But the driver of the sermon has to be hard work the preacher has done in the text. That’s where we discover what we have to say!
TP
I would venture that many who attempt the preaching task but fall into one of the two errors you mention set out to be nothing else but biblical, profoundly theological and thoroughly engaging.
Why do they miss the target? My answer is ‘time’. To to a good job on the text and then do the work needed to apply it to the minds and hearts of the congregation is a big time commitment. So I think what then happens is that they choose: either spend the time on the text (and end up dry), or spend the time at the other end (engaging, with superficial content).
Perhaps an answer is to preach shorter sermons? It might be easier to do both in 10 minutes than both in 20-25. Or perhaps reduce all our other midweek commitments and distractions, like commenting on posts…opps, back to it!
Greetings Mark
Would Jesus, in his preaching, have reached the bar set by John Stott? Or was he guilty of “launching pad sermons”?
Advent Blessings
Bosco+
http://www.liturgy.co.nz
Hit the nail on the head.
Mike
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