The Text Sets the Agenda
Expository preaching is preaching that explains what a passage of Scripture means and presses that meaning on the people who hear it. The text supplies the sermon's subject, its main idea, its shape, and its application. The preacher's work is to say what God has said, as clearly as he can, and to call his hearers to believe it and obey it.
Preaching that draws the meaning out of a passage of Scripture, builds the sermon around that passage's main idea and its own divisions, and applies that meaning to the hearers, so that the message of the sermon is the message of the text.
Laying Open the Text
The word expository comes from the Latin exponere, to set something out where it can be seen. To expound a passage is to lay open what is already there. Luke uses the word of Paul in Rome, who expounded and testified the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the law of Moses, and out of the prophets (Acts 28:23). The Greek verb there means to set out or set forth. Paul did not bring a message and look for a text to hang it on. He set the Scriptures out before his hearers and showed them Christ.
Jerry Vines and Jim Shaddix, whose book Power in the Pulpit gives this series its plan, use the same picture. They describe exposition as laying the text open so that the meaning the Holy Spirit intended is brought to bear on the lives of listeners today. That is the whole task in one sentence: find what the Spirit meant, and bring it home.
Expository preaching is not first a style. It is not defined by long sermons, verse-by-verse commentary, or Greek words in the pulpit. It is a conviction that God's Word, rightly explained and applied, is what God's people most need. Styles vary from preacher to preacher. The conviction does not.
Some sermons quote a great deal of Scripture and are still not expository, because the preacher's outline came first and the verses were recruited to support it. Other sermons stay in one short passage for forty minutes and still miss the point, because the preacher made comments on every phrase without ever saying what the passage as a whole is saying. Expository preaching avoids both errors. It stays with the text, and it says what the text says.
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For Deeper Study
- Power in the Pulpit: How to Prepare and Deliver Expository SermonsAmazon Jerry Vines and Jim ShaddixThe plan this series follows, from two Southern Baptist preachers: preparation, process, and presentation (Moody, 1999; revised 2017).
- A Practical Guide to Sermon PreparationAmazon Jerry VinesVines's shorter, earlier guide (Moody, 1985), later folded into Power in the Pulpit.
- Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository MessagesAmazon Haddon W. RobinsonThe classic case for building each sermon on the passage's main idea; Robinson was a broadly evangelical teacher of preaching.
- Toward an Exegetical Theology: Biblical Exegesis for Preaching and TeachingAmazon Walter C. Kaiser Jr.How careful exegesis becomes a sermon, from an evangelical Old Testament scholar.
- Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth CenturyAmazon John StottThe preacher as a bridge between the biblical text and today's hearers, from an Anglican.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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Why We Preach the Word
We preach the Word because it is God-breathed and sufficient, because God speaks when it is rightly explained, because the Spirit works through it rather than through human eloquence, and because faith comes by hearing it.
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