Expository Quotes

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

When most Christians think apologetics training, they think philosophy, logic, and debate. However, the key tools for training the expository apologist are creeds, confessions and catechisms.

Expository preaching consists in the explanation and application of a passage of Scripture. Without explanation it is not expository; without application it is not preaching."32

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness.

Holiness does not consist in mystic speculations, enthusiastic fervours, or uncommanded austerities; it consists in thinking as God thinks, and willing as God wills.

Christ's death is the Christian's life. Christ's cross is the Christian's title to heaven. Christ "lifted up" and put to shame on Calvary is the ladder by which Christians "enter into the holiest," and are at length landed in glory.

A good expository paper will benefit far more people than most research papers. A good text is worth a thousand of the usual trifles that appear in research journals.

Topical preaching, polemical preaching, historical preaching, and other forms of sermonic output have, one supposes, their rightful and opportune uses. But expository preaching—the prayerful expounding of the Word of God is preaching that is preaching—pulpit effort par excellence.

The expository preacher is not one who 'shares his studies' with others, he is an ambassador and a messenger authoritatively delivering the Word of God to men.

We can never hear too much about Jesus Christ.

how true it is that the rulers of this world are seldom friendly to the cause of God.

Pride is the oldest and commonest of sins. Humility is the rarest and most beautiful of graces.

The love of Christ to sinners is the very essence and marrow of the Gospel.

The key to preaching, then, is to make the message of the text obvious. Help people to see it and feel it. Help people to understand the text. Paul is talking about what I would call ‘expository preaching’, in which the message of the text is the message of the sermon.

Be clear! Be clear! Be clear!” Clarity does not come easily. When we train to be expositors, we probably spend three or four years in seminary. While that training prepares us to be theologians, it sometimes gets in our way as communicators. Theological jargon, abstract thinking, or scholars’ questions become part of the intellectual baggage that hinders preachers from speaking clearly to ordinary men and women.

October 16, 2009 Avengers Paintball, Inc. 1778 Industrial Blvd. Lakeville, MN 55044 Esteemed Avengers, This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources. Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store. Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards, Jason T. Fitger Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”)

This is what you do now to give your day topography—scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

people need to be reminded as much as they need to be informed.

The purpose behind each individual sermon is to secure some moral action. We need to know what that action is.

Expository preaching is the best method for displaying and conveying your conviction that the whole Bible is true.

There’s another trouble with meaning. We’ve been taught to believe it comes near the end. As if the job of all those sentences were to ferry us along to the place where meaning is enacted—to “the point,” Just before the conclusion, Which restates “the point.” This is especially true in the school model of writing. Remember the papers you wrote? Trying to save that one good idea till the very end? Hoping to create the illusion that it followed logically from the previous paragraphs? You were stalling until you had ten pages. Much of what’s taught under the name of expository writing could be called “The Anxiety of Sequence.” Its premise is this: To get where you’re going, you have to begin in just the right place And take the proper path, Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude. This is like not knowing where to begin a journey Until you decide where you want it to end. Begin in the wrong place, make the wrong turn, And there’s no getting where you want to go. Why not begin where you already are?

A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.

Evangelism, instead of being a normal part of careful and regular expository preaching, with the twin effect on the consciences of the unconverted and on the growth in grace of Christians, becomes a special, dramatic activity. This leads to an orientation of church life away from Scripture, and as scriptural and non-scriptural duties become confused, the main duties which God requires of Christians and ministers are overshadowed.

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form

No other style of preaching can so completely guarantee immunity from an indulgence in special crochets and fads. The Bible is an exceedingly broad book in its treatment of life and, he who successfully preaches through, even one small section of it, will find a variety of subjects and principles and lessons--so great a variety that if he is fair with all he will be saved from the error of over-emphasis and of neglecting certain broad tracts of truth.

There is something else to remember: each point should be a declarative sentence, not a question. Questions do not show relationships because they are not ideas. The points in your outline should answer questions, not raise them.

It is desperately essential in this hour that preachers recover a soaring vision of the supremacy of God. Life-changing, history-altering preaching will come only when pastors reclaim a high view of God's blazing holiness and are overshadowed by His absolute sovereignty. Towering thoughts of God's transcendent glory must captivate preachers' souls.

One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious.

THERE HAS BEEN A SILENT DIVORCE IN THE CHURCH, SPEAKING generally, between the Word and the Spirit. When there is a divorce, sometimes the children stay with the mother, sometimes with the father. In this divorce you have those on the Word side and those on the Spirit side. What is the difference? Those on the Word side stress earnestly contending for the faith once delivered to the saints, expository preaching, sound theology, rediscovering the doctrines of the Reformation—justification by faith, sovereignty of God. Until we get back to the Word, the honor of God’s name will not be restored. What is wrong with this emphasis? Nothing. It is exactly right, in my opinion. Those on the Spirit side stress getting back to the Book of Acts, signs, wonders, and miracles, gifts of the Holy Spirit—with places being shaken at prayer meetings, get in Peter’s shadow and you are healed, lie to the Holy Spirit and you are struck dead. Until we recover the power of the Spirit, the honor of God’s name will not be restored. What is wrong with this emphasis? Nothing. It is exactly right, in my opinion. The problem is, neither will learn from the other. But if these two would come together, the simultaneous combination would mean spontaneous combustion. And if Smith Wigglesworth’s prophecy got it right, the world will be turned upside down again.

There are not different disciplinary buckets. Instead, each one is the end product of all the biological influences that came before it and will influence all the factors that follow it. Thus, it is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all. No buckets. A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.

knowing what we believe and why we believe it, and being able to communicate that belief to a curious world in a winsome manner.

Success in the pulpit can be the force that leads a preacher from prayerful dependence on the Spirit.

Our preaching should reflect the uniqueness of our personalities, but our lives should

A preacher may proclaim the grace of God with glorious orthodoxy, but if his life contradicts his doctrine he will disgrace the gospel of Christ (1 Tim 3:7).

In this age of darkness, we who are saints are said to be shining as luminaries which shine in the night.

The purpose behind all doctrine is to secure moral action.

Restatement is like marching in place. It does not have forward movement, but it is part of the parade. It is saying the same thing in different words.

John Calvin said he constantly “studied to be simple.

One thief was saved that no sinner might despair, but only one, that no sinner might presume.

What God has to say to man is infinitely more important than what man has to say to God.

I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal.

Every sermon should have a theme, and that theme should be the theme of the portion of Scripture on which it is based.

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.

But I would urge that the expository method (understood as that which explains extended passages of Scripture in course) be restored to that equal place which it held in the primitive and Reformed Churches; for, first, this is obviously the only natural and efficient way to do that which is the sole legitimate end of preaching, convey the whole message of God to the people.

o step into the pulpit is to enter onto holy ground. To stand behind an open Bible demands no trifling with sacred things. To be a spokesman for God requires utmost concern and care in handling and proclaiming the Word. Rightly does Scripture warn, "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness" (James 3:1).

This means if you want to receive God’s blessing, you do not need to go looking for some dramatic new experience. The place to be is your local church, where the word is proclaimed and the sacraments are administered. You simply need to read your Bible, listen to expository preaching week by week, and participate in the Lord’s Supper. This is where God’s grace to us in Christ is found.

Our hearts are weak. Our sins are many. We need a Redeemer who is able to save to the uttermost and deliver from the wrath to come. We have such a Redeemer in Jesus Christ. He is the Mighty God (Isaiah 9:6).

Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside, you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

First, what is the vision of God in this particular text? Second, where precisely do I find that in the passage? (The vision of God is always in the specific words and the life situation of the writer or the readers.) Third, what is the function of this vision of God? What implications for belief or behavior did the author draw from the image?

If it really was true that all would sooner or later reach heaven, and hell sooner or later be emptied of inhabitants, it never could be said that it would have been "good for a man not to have been born." Hell itself would lose its terrors, if it had an end. Hell itself would be endurable, if after millions of ages there was a HOPE of freedom and of heaven.

Lack of relevant knowledge [uninformed author] makes it impossible to solve certain problems or support certain conclusions. Erroneous suppositions [misinformed author], however, lead to wrong conclusions and untenable solutions. Taken together, these two points charge an author with defects in his premises. He needs more knowledge than he possesses. His evidences and reasons are not good enough in quantity or quality. (P. 156)

This famine in pulpits across the nation reveals a loss of confidence in God’s Word to perform its sacred work. While evangelicals affirm the inerrancy of Scripture, many have apparently abandoned their belief in its sufficiency to save and to sanctify. Rather than expounding the Word with growing vigor, many are turning to lesser strategies in an effort to resurrect dead ministries. But with each newly added novelty, the straightforward expounding of the Bible is being relegated to a secondary role, further starving the church. Doing God’s work God’s way requires an unwavering commitment to feeding people God’s Word through relentless biblical preaching and teaching.

There are few things, it may be feared, in which Christians come so far short of Christ's example, as they do in the matter of prayer. Our Master's strong crying and tears--His continuing all night in prayer to God--His frequent withdrawal to private places, to hold close communion with the Father, are things more talked of and admired than imitated. We live in an age of hurry, bustle, and so-called activity. Men are tempted continually to cut short their private devotions, and abridge their prayers. When this is the case, we need not wonder that the Church of Christ does little in proportion to its machinery. The Church must learn to copy its Head more closely. Its members must be more in their closets. "We have little," because little is asked. (James 4:2.)            

None knows better than the devil, that "to divide is to conquer.

Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself… and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: "Well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.

I pray for them – I pray not for the world.

If afflictions drive us nearer to Christ, the Bible, and prayer, then they are positive blessings. We may not think so now. But we shall think so when we wake up in the eternal world.

The new scriptures did not form a coherent body of doctrinal exposition; they propounded different and even apparently contradictory teachings. Moreover, many individual sūtras are clearly composite works, compiled over many centuries, such that the final text is formed from layers of material of different ages, and sometimes with different outlooks, so that even individual sūtras do not necessarily present a unitary, coherent teaching. The result of this was that several expository traditions arose to try to explain the teaching of the new texts, the more cohesive of these forming distinct schools.

what miserable creatures great men are when they have no high principles within them and no faith in the reality of a God above them.

As a consequence, not only are the main ideas of a passage referenced in the sermon, but the ways those ideas are developed and supported by the biblical author also guide the thought of pastor and people.

In grace as well as in providence, Christ works still. He is ever taking away sin.

Conscience is a most important part of our inward man and plays a most prominent part in our spiritual history. It cannot save us. It never yet led any one to Christ. It is blind and liable to be misled. It is lame and powerless and cannot guide us to heaven. Yet conscience is not to be despised. It is the minister’s best friend, when he stands up to rebuke sin from the pulpit. It is the mother’s best friend, when she tries to restrain her children from evil and quicken them to good. It is the teacher’s best friend, when he presses home on boys and girls their moral duties. Happy is he who never stifles his conscience but strives to keep it tender! Still happier is he who prays to have it enlightened by the Holy Spirit and sprinkled with Christ’s blood.

True biblical and expository preaching is aimed at more than informing the mind. It also seeks, through the Spirit of God, to sway the emotions, to direct the will, and to produce in the hearer spiritual change in keeping with Scripture. Everyone not only needs to hear systematic biblical exposition, verse by verse and paragraph by paragraph but also needs to have biblical truth forcefully applied by expository preachers to every aspect of our daily lives.

The general point illustrated by this example is that the distinction between moral and prudential motivations, judgments, or arguments can often be useful, but it is neither sharp nor absolute. In the rest of this chapter we will examine moral arguments for praising simple living, and in the following chapter we will consider prudential reasons for doing so. The distinction between moral and prudential reasons for praising simple living here serves as an initial classification made for expository purposes. Most arguments clearly fall on one side or the other. But it is to be expected that, on analysis, they will be found to spill over onto the other ground.2 Most of the moral arguments in support of simple living connect it to individual virtue. The basic idea underlying the arguments discussed here is that living in a certain way helps people cultivate certain desirable qualities (virtues) and makes it less likely that they will develop undesirable qualities (vices). This emphasis on lifestyle and character is characteristic of the philosophical tradition known as virtue ethics. Instead of seeing morality as a set of general rules that it is right to obey and wrong to break—a view that until recently dominated much modern moral philosophy—virtue ethics emphasizes the way that moral behavior flows naturally from a virtuous disposition just as, to use one of Jesus’s metaphors, a sound tree reliably bears good fruit. It thus naturally pays attention to the everyday practices and habits that shape and reflect a person’s moral character.

If we aim in what we do to display God’s glory, we worship.

Peace is Christ’s distinctive gift – not money, not worldly ease, not temporal prosperity. These are at best very questionable possessions

Christ is far more willing to give than the world is to receive.

Christ has all power and is able to save to the uttermost, because Christ is divine.

Sound views of doctrine and knowledge of controversy will avail us nothing at last, if we have known nothing of love.

God must begin the work of grace in a man’s heart, or else a man will never be saved. Christ must first choose us and call us by His Spirit, or else we shall never choose Christ.

Salvation is of the Lord” (Jonah 2:9).

They believed in Him when they saw Him as a little infant on Mary’s knee and worshiped Him as a king. This was the crowning point of their faith. They saw no miracles to convince them. They heard no teaching to persuade them. They beheld no signs of divinity and greatness to overawe them. They saw nothing but a newborn infant, helpless and weak, and needing a mother’s care like any one of us. And yet when they saw that infant, they believed that they saw the divine Savior of the world. They fell to the ground and worshiped Him.

We need to be warned that it is no light matter whether we repent or not. We need to be reminded that there is a hell as well as a heaven, and an everlasting punishment for the wicked as well as everlasting life for the godly. We are fearfully apt to forget this. We talk of the love and mercy of God, and we do not remember sufficiently His justness and holiness. Let us be very careful on this point. It is no real kindness to keep back the terrors of the Lord. It is good for us all to be taught that it is possible to be lost forever, and that all unconverted people are hanging over the brink of the pit.

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones spoke of true repentance this way: Repentance means that you realize that you are a guilty, vile sinner in the presence of God, that you deserve the wrath and punishment of God, that you are hell-bound. It means that you begin to realize that this thing called sin is in you, that you long to get rid of it, and that you turn your back on it in every shape and form. You renounce the world whatever the cost, the world in its mind and outlook as well as its practice, and you deny yourself, and take up the cross and go after Christ. Your nearest and dearest, and the whole world, may call you a fool, or say you have religious mania. You may have to suffer financially, but it makes no difference. That is repentance.

The poorest Englishman who understands his Bible knows more about religion than the wisest philosophers of Greece and Rome.

So briefly let’s review the story of Jezebel of old.7

Expository preaching is empowered preaching that rightfully submits the shape and emphasis of the sermon to the shape and emphasis of a biblical text. In that way, it brings out of the text what the Holy Spirit put there…and does not put into the text what the preacher thinks might be there.

With respect to little CHILDREN, we find our Lord instructing us in these verses, both by word and deed, both by precept and example. "Little children were brought to him, that he should lay his hands on them and pray." They were evidently tender infants, too young to receive instruction, but not too young to receive benefit by prayer. The disciples seem to have thought them beneath their Master's notice, and rebuked those that brought them. But this drew forth a solemn declaration

It is worth observing, before we move on, that a counterpart of what Nehemiah saw to be needed in Jerusalem in the mid-fifth century B.C. is just as badly needed in the modern West. Parents no longer teach their children the Bible at home; preaching in the church is often topical and superficial rather than expository and theological, and Sunday school teaching is often very rudimentary as far as the Bible is concerned; and the public educational system, the media, and the press, both popular and academic, all treat Christianity as a dead letter, only surviving as a hobby for persons of an unusual type. So there is not the least encouragement in our culture to become biblically literate, and the net result is a generation frighteningly and pathetically ignorant of the Word of God. No significant movement towards God can be expected while this remains so.

Let us not fail to ask ourselves, as we leave this passage, whether we have risen with Christ and been made partakers spiritually of His resurrection. This, after all, is the one thing needful. To know the facts of Christianity with the head and to be able to argue for them with the tongue will not save our souls. We must yield ourselves to God as those alive from the dead (Romans 6:13). We must be raised from the death of sin and walk in newness of life. This and this only is saving Christianity.

Though my approach throughout the book will be positive and expository, it is worth noting from the outset that I intend to challenge this dominant paradigm in each of its main constituent parts. In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘more spiritual’ view; (3) that the earliest Christians believed, not in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his ‘going to heaven’ in some kind of special capacity, and that they came to use ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty tomb or of ‘seeing’ the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such ‘seeings’ of Jesus as may have taken place are best understood in terms of Paul’s conversion experience, which itself is to be explained as a ‘religious’ experience, internal to the subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus’ body (opinions differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not ‘resuscitated’, and was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.11 Of course, different elements in this package are stressed differently by different scholars; but the picture will be familiar to anyone who has even dabbled in the subject, or who has listened to a few mainstream Easter sermons, or indeed funeral sermons, in recent decades.

1 THESSALONIANS 2:3–8 AND 11–12 For the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you. On the contrary, we speak as men approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts. You know we never used flattery, nor did we put on a mask to cover up greed—God is our witness. We were not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else. As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you, but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children,

To compare Mark Twain’s early verse to his late is a bit like comparing a clown to a tragedian. In their unpretentious areas, many of the early poems are quite successful. The serious poems are less spontaneous, but their lack of gusto is offset by the increase in emotional and intellectual content. They show also that Mark Twain had improved in poetic imagination, sensitivity, and discipline. His good ear and his originality were qualities he had from the start; but it took time for him to cultivate expository power, verbal felicity, and — above all — a genuine respect for poetry as a vehicle of serious expression.

Through bifocal preaching, those who hear come to understand and experience what the eternal God has to say to them today.

When we face real people with eternal souls balanced between heaven and hell, the nobility of preaching both awes us and makes us more aware of our inadequacies (cf. 1 Cor. 2:3).

We know our skills are insufficient for an activity with such vast consequences. We recognize that our hearts are too lacking in purity to lead others to holiness. Honest evaluation inevitably causes us to conclude that we do not have sufficient eloquence, wisdom, or character to be capable of turning others from spiritual death to eternal life.

Ultimately, preaching accomplishes its spiritual purposes not because of the skills or the wisdom of a preacher but because of the power of the Scripture proclaimed (1 Cor. 2:4–5).

Paul preaches without shame in his delivery skills because he trusts that the Spirit of God will use the Word the apostle proclaims to shatter the hardness of the human heart in ways no stage technique or philosophical construct can rival.

Knowledge, not improved and well employed, will only increase our condemnation at the last day.

To the men and women who keep a sacred appointment on Sunday morning. Bewildered by seductive voices, nursing wounds life has inflicted upon them, anxious about matters that do not matter. Yet they come to listen for a clear word from God that speaks to their condition. And to those who minister to them now and those who will do so in the future.

While the letters in the New Testament make a fundamental contribution to Christian theology, they constitute only one of many literary forms found in the Bible.

As you can see, the homiletical idea is simply the biblical truth applied to life.

No man is better for knowing that God so loved the world of men that He gave His only begotten Son to die for their redemption. In hell there are millions who know that. Theological truth is useless until it is obeyed.

We owe to the Scripture the same reverence which we owe to God because it has proceeded from Him alone, and has nothing of man mixed with it."14 This was the unshakable foundation of Calvin's preaching-the authority of divinely inspired Scripture. He firmly believed that when the Bible speaks, God speaks.

Because a sermon is simply an overflow of a preacher's life, the man of God must prepare his heart well. A sermon rises no higher than a preacher's soul before God.

Biblical preaching moves from exegetical commentary and doctrinal exposition to life instruction. Such preaching exhorts as well as expounds because it recognizes that Scripture’s own goal is not merely to share information about God but to conform his people to the likeness of Jesus Christ. Preaching without application may serve the mind, but preaching with application results in service to Christ. Application makes Jesus the source and the objective of a sermon’s exhortation as well as the focus of its explanation.

The 3:00 A.M. test requires you to imagine a spouse, a roommate, or a parishioner waking you from a deep slumber with this simple question: “What’s the sermon about today, Preacher?” If you cannot give a crisp answer, the sermon is probably half-baked. Thoughts you cannot gather at 3:00 A.M. are not likely to be caught by others at 11:00 A.M.

Seminarians often stumble in their early preaching attempts when they try to load everything they are learning into a single sermon. More experienced preachers recognize that they have this week, and the next, and the next to communicate God’s truths.