Expository Preaching In IFB Churches

I don't think anybody has given a hard definition of "expository preaching" yet, and nobody has mentioned textual preaching. A pudding's proof is in the tasting, not in a bystander's opinions of the recipe. If a preacher is getting the job done in the church, he's ahead of the pack regardless of what style his sermons are.

Many a youngun has graduated from college or grad school with a determination to be an expository preacher and has made congregations groan under the burden. "He could go down deeper, stay down longer, and come up drier than any preacher in the church's history." It's kinda like opera: done well, the singer sways thousands, but done by ordinary singers, it rivals the rack for torture.

I'm ordinary. Profoundly ordinary. Pathologically ordinary, in fact, and I'll bet you are, too. Ordinary preachers shouldn't undertake extraordinary homiletical feats. The wreckage is just too gorey.

 

Well said, Pipedude. :thumbs:

 

Expository Preaching

What is described here is called a Texas Springboard, you read a verse of scripture and use it as a lauching point to jump high in the air and end with a big splash. The problem is that from the verse to the splash is very little context or relationship building of the two.

I graduated from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, MO. and they teach exclusively expository preaching. And some of the young kids HATE it. Why? It requires work on the part of the pastor to stay true to the Word. In fact, every year, every male student that is of Jounior or Senior rank, is required to enter into a campus preaching competition in which you are only allowed to preach expositorily. I loved it.

I must say that on occassion, I will preach a topical sermon, but usually I preach expositorilly or some form of that style. I believe it is what we need the most.

 

I disagree. I grew up in a purely topical preaching environment. Topical preaching to me does not honor the text and leads to people preaching more of their own opinions and ideas over the principles of the text.

As as already been mentioned, preachers can pick and choose what they will or won't preach. I have a bible that I used when I was a youth in my home church. For several years I marked the texts and date when they were preached. You know what I found? The same texts were preached over and over and over while neglecting about 75% of God's Word. How is that honoring to the Lord and to His Word?

The important issue is to preach the entire counsel of God.

 

This is a false generalization.

I have sat through way more boring, dull and lifeless topical messages in my life than I have ever expository messages.

 

Me too...

This coming Sunday is Missions sunday for us, and I am preaching on Matthew 28:16-20...

It is topical, but yet verse by verse...

 

Sometimes, I preach an expository message that is also topical. IOW, I've been asked to repeat them at other places, on their own, because they contain a valid message.

However, even in those cases, I was a guest and was doing a standalone message. Preaching regularly, either go through a passage (we spent a month on one verse last year), or go consecutively. IOW, if you begin with Matthew 1:3 this week, but end in 1 Corinthians 1:9, pick up at 1 Corinthians 1:9 next week. The latter is more hit-or-miss than direct expositional preaching, but will cover more ground sequentially than topical messages will.

While I find it much easier to preach a topical message, I find it much more difficult to make a topical message fit a given time frame. IOW, if I have 45 minutes, I can do that much more easily expositionally than topically.

 

My wife and I recently moved and we have been visiting churches in NE Philadelphia. I have been pleasantly surprised in the last three weeks as I have heard expository sermons in three of three churches visited.

 

I know topical and epositors that wouldn't know a steak from a hamburger if it slapped 'em across the face There's good and bad in both camps.

 

Just for the record, that's not really expository preaching. That is subsequent topical preaching.

Expository preachign takes as the point of the sermon the point of the text. It answers two questions: What is this passage talking about? and What is this passage saying about what it is talking about?

Lloyd Jones was famous for that kind of topical preaching which is why he has six volumes on Ephesians. That is not exposition, really. It is topical.

And BTW, it is fine to do that, but let's not ignore what it is.

As a general rule, I find topical preaching harder because I am not creative, and because when I address a topic, I find it necessary to incorporate everything the Bible says about a topic, or at least attempt to. Most topical preaching is easy because it doesn't fully account for Scripture and because it is something already in the mind of the preacher. He is usually preaching his own mind rather than preaching the Scripture.

I think verse by verse exposition requires a lot of time, but is the right way to preach Scripture since that is how God gave it to us. He didn't give us a verse in Ephesians 4 and a verse in Rom 1 with a verse in Dan 6. He could have, but he didn't. So I don't think we should make a habit out of preaching that way.

 

I think you make a good point here. However, this can take place in any amount of time. Just because someone stretches a series of messages out over a considerable amount of time does not mean it is not expository preaching.

If what you are saying is true, at what point or length of time does it change from expository to subsequent topical?

 

I cannot speak from a preacher's or pastor's perspective because I am neither (nor have I ever have been).

I can only speak from the perspective of one who has had 41 years of Christian experience and having been a member of 5 different Baptist churches in 3 different states and on 2 different continents.

While I appreciated not only the personal ministries but also the varied preaching styles of all of those who have been my pastor, I can honestly say that of the 7 men who've been my pastor down through the years, I believed I learned more about what God's Word was really all about from the two pastors whose preaching style was primarily that of expository preaching.

I'm thankful that my current pastor is one of those two!

 

Back in the day, there was a preacher in Tennessee who always seemed to preach on baptism. He was good at preaching on baptism, but no matter what, the subject came back to baptism.

So, one year, there was a big convention, the other preachers got together and said amongst themselves, "How can we get pastor Smith to preach on something besides baptism?"

So, they came up with the idea that they (the ones coordinating the event) would assign passages to the different preachers. They assigned Pastor Smith Genesis 1:1.

He got up there, and said, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..."






"...and as we all know, the earth is three quarters covered with water, which brings us to our subject this morning: Baptism..."

 

I don't think its about time but about content. Expository preaching focuses on the point of the paragraph. Take the example of preaching two weeks on Romans 1:1. That is not even a thought or a paragraph. It is an introduction. It is fine to preach about Paul's apostleship or the point of the book of Romans, but that is not expository. That is topical. I think we can help here by asking the question, How much time is he spending in this text, versus surveying some other texts or bringing in other material.

I think we should bring in other material, but that is to support the exposition of the paragraph we are handling.

So bottom line, I don't konw what the time frame is. I had a friend who preached 1 John in 8 messages. I preached it in 36 I think. They were both expository series.

 

Thanks for clarifying that Larry, I would agree.

 

From Mark Dever's Nine Marks:

"Expositional preaching is not simply producing a verbal commentary on some passage of Scripture. Rather, expositional preaching is that preaching which takes for the point of a sermon the point of a particular passage of Scripture. That's it. The preacher opens the Word and unfolds it for the people of God...

"Expositional preaching is preaching in service to the Word... The OT prophets and NT apostles were given not a personal commission to go and speak, but a particular message to deliver. Likewise, Christian preachers today have authority to speak from God only so long as they speak His message and unfold His words. As loquacious as some preachers may be, preachers are not commanded simply to go and preach. They are commanded specfically to go and preach the Word."