Preaching Every Kind of Text

Let the Text Set the Shape

Expository preaching does more than repeat what a passage says. It lets the passage decide how much Scripture to preach, where the main idea lies, and very often what shape the sermon takes. God did not give His Word in one form. He gave it as story, law, song, proverb, prophecy, Gospel, parable, letter, and vision, and a preacher who handles every text the same way will mishandle most of them.

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”2 TIMOTHY 3:16–17 · KJV

Paul says All scripture is inspired and is profitable. That includes the genealogy and the proverb as surely as the epistle. A preacher who only ever preaches from the letters of Paul, or only from the stories of David, starves his people of part of what God gave them. Paul could tell the Ephesian elders that he had not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God (Acts 20:27). Over the years of a ministry, the whole counsel of God means every kind of text.

How to read each genre belongs to interpretation, and Genre Matters in the Advanced Hermeneutics series covers it. This study takes the next step, from the study desk to the pulpit. For every kind of text the preacher asks three questions.

1. How much text is one preaching unit? A paragraph in an epistle may hold a whole sermon. A story usually needs the whole episode, and a psalm usually needs the whole psalm.
2. Where does this kind of text put its main idea? A letter states it. A story shows it, often through the narrator's comments. A poem sings it, often in a refrain.
3. What shape should the sermon take? When the text has a clear shape of its own (scenes, stanzas, a chain of reasons), the sermon should follow it rather than force the text into a borrowed outline.

Steven W. Smith makes this case at length in Recapturing the Voice of God. He groups the Bible's genres into three families: story (Old Testament narrative, law, the Gospels and Acts, and parables), poem (psalms, wisdom, and prophecy), and letter (the epistles and Revelation). His plea is that the sermon should take its shape from the text, instead of every passage being pressed into the same three points. The families are a useful handle, and the conviction behind them is the conviction of this whole series: the text drives the sermon.