Proclaimer Blog
It can still be expository preaching if….
…it’s not a sermon on in a series on a Bible book. It makes good and wise sense for a decent amount of a church’s preaching to consist of consecutive expository sermons through Bible books, whether whole or parts. Cornhill Director Christopher Ash has set some of these reasons out in his excellent booklet Listen Up. I think it also follows simply from the nature of verbal revelation as God has given it to us. The Holy Spirit inspired and has preserved for us not a set of unrelated theological and exhortatory bullet-points, but full literary pieces. Preaching that aims to be faithful to Scripture must reflect the form as well as the content, and consecutive exposition is a good way of doing that.
However… good tool, bad master. We are not first of all educationalists delivering programmes of instruction; we are first of all shepherds with a flock whom the Lord has entrusted to us, so we might shepherd them and feed them (you can see I was in 1 Peter 5 yesterday). So did three people in a church of seventy souls die in the last month? Their pastor might well scrap his planned series for a week to preach 1 Thess 4.13-18. Of course if he’s doing this kind of every other week, the agenda is probably being set by him, not the Word. But let’s not run away from that cliff-edge only to fall off the other side.
Every pastor will also decide how much of his planned preaching ministry ought to be consecutive, and how much not. Of course, even the topical and doctrinal sermons must at heart be expository: that is, the main point of the sermon must be the main point of one passage, or a couple. Expository preaching: not a detailed set of methods, but a deep conviction that preaching must be first and last Scripture-driven.