What Is Expositional Preaching?
According to Mark Dever, "expositional preaching is the kind of preaching that, quite simply, exposes God's Word. It takes a particular passage of Scripture, explains that passage, and then applies the meaning of the passage to the life of the congregation. It's the kind of preaching most geared to get at what God says to his people, as well as to those who are not his people."
This is a helpful quote from Dever. Other popular types of preaching, which can be legitimate on occasion, are topical preaching and biographical preaching. Topical preaching is aimed at gathering one or more passages that address a particular topic. Biographical preaching takes the life of someone in the Bible as a model of exemplary faith and a display of God's relationship to his people.
The reason why the topical approach and biographical approach are not good options for the preaching life of a church is that often times passages are selected to support what the preacher already knows, and therefore the congregation only learns what the preacher already knows instead of being challenged by what God is actually saying. Often times the passage itself used in a topical way is actually speaking to something else and isn't the main point of the passage. When this happens, we might conclude that it isn't God speaking as much as the preacher is.
Let me outline a few requirements for expositional preaching to occur within the life of a church:
The Church Must Be Committed To Expositional Preaching
In order for expositional preaching to exist in a church it must be a commitment of the pastor and the congregation.one cannot exist without the other. Theoretically, the pastor cannot preach expositionally if the congregation has no appetite for it.
The Church Must Be Committed To Hearing From God
One of the difficulties with expositional preaching is that those who listen to it may not find their most pressing questions or needs quickly addressed. Often times this is the experience of those who read Scripture on some sort of reading plan: it seems irrelevant to the issues you might face. The same experience might characterize the preaching ministry. In order for expositional preaching to thrive in a church there must be a collective conviction that God does speak through his Word and he does so in his time and in his way. In other words, as long as God speaks then the hearers are getting what they need. Does the church believe that? That is the question.
Expositional Preaching Is The Fountainhead of True Growth
The church gather to worship God as he is revealed (or exposed) in Scripture. The church is not a club and it isn't needed t affirm all of the popular sensibilities of the day. If that were the case then church wouldn't be necessary and we could gain plenty of worldly wisdom from many alternate places.
Rather, the church must hear from God. Martin Luther began the reformation when he truly discovered what God was saying as opposed to what the Catholic church leaders were saying. Christianity is always about true reformation, ongoing reformation of the mind and heart of mankind en route to becoming more and more like Christ.
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