Expositional preaching gives life and health to the church. It shapes, forms, and reforms the church, and it reveals the character of God. Participants will learn to understand their joyful responsibility in sitting under a pastor’s teaching, and pastors will be encouraged to preach expositionally from the Bible.
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“True spirituality consists in hearing, believing, and obeying God’s Word. That is why God’s Word is the source of the church’s life and health, and why pastors should preach expositionally.” (Page 16)
“Fundamentally, this means that both pastors and congregations must be committed to expositional preaching. 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. A commitment to expositional preaching is a commitment to hear God’s Word.” (Page 9)
“Yet make no mistake: it is finally the congregation’s responsibility to ensure that this is true of its preachers. Jesus assumes that congregations have the final responsibility for what happens in a church in Matthew 18 as does Paul in Galatians 1. A church, therefore, must never give a person spiritual oversight over the body who does not show a practical commitment to hearing and teaching God’s Word. When it does, it hampers its growth, ensuring that it won’t mature beyond the level of the pastor. The church will slowly be conformed to the image of the pastor rather than to the image of God.” (Page 11)
“God’s people need to hear from God. Therefore, good preaching is preaching that places its highest priority on faithfully communicating God’s Word.” (Page 25)
“As others have observed, expositional preaching is not so much about how a preacher says what he says but about how a preacher decides what to say. Is Scripture determining our content or is something else?” (Page 10)