Analyzing the Text

The Sermon Begins at the Desk

Every expository sermon is born at a desk long before it is preached from a pulpit. Before a preacher can stand up and say, “This is what God says,” he must sit down and find out what God said. That work is called analyzing the text: the patient, prayerful study of one passage until the preacher understands what its author meant and why it was written.

Jerry Vines and Jim Shaddix, whose Power in the Pulpit gives this series its plan, put this study at the head of the whole process of exposition. Their conviction is simple: a sermon can be no more faithful than the study behind it. A man who speaks for God owes his people the work of listening to God first.

The Bereans Checked the Preacher

“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.”ACTS 17:11 · KJV

Luke praised the Jews of Berea because they searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. The word behind searched describes careful examination, the kind a judge gives to evidence. Luke uses it of Pilate, who had examined him and found no fault in Jesus (Luke 23:14). The Bereans examined the Scriptures to test what an apostle preached. A faithful congregation will do the same with its pastor, and it should. That means the preacher must search the passage before they do. He should be able to show them, verse by verse, where everything he said came from.

What This Topic Covers

The Advanced Hermeneutics series teaches the principles of interpretation in depth, and this topic will not repeat them. See Foundations of Interpretation for exegesis itself. The question here is practical: what does a preacher actually do between Monday and Sunday to get from an open Bible to a passage he understands well enough to preach?

Vines has described his own study in three movements: investigation, which asks what the passage says; interpretation, which asks what it means; and application, which asks what it calls the preacher and his people to do. In Power in the Pulpit he and Shaddix press the same work through a series of questions: what the passage says, what it means, what its central idea is, and what its theological purpose is. This topic covers the first two. The next, Finding the Main Idea, takes up the third.