I had an interesting conversation this morning with someone about topical preaching. We had been listening to a talk at a pastor’s convention on race and ethnicity (a very good one, as it happens) which had gone all over the Bible. “A good sermon?” he asked. “A good talk” I replied – in fact, very good. But not a sermon, I don’t think, because (1) of the context (a conference not a church) and (2) because it not exposition. There was no control.
That’s the thing about good preaching. The Bible is in control. I do preach topical sermons, and in these sermons I do use other Bible passages, but I try always to have one passage as an anchor so there is constraint and the constraint comes from God’s word. People need to see that this is not me speaking, but God. And the danger with trawling references is that just because you include something, doesn’t mean there isn’t other stuff you should have put in too. It can work, but it’s a difficult thing.
Take one passage, however, and suddenly the sermon changes. You have a divinely inspired constraint which, I believe, God blesses. Don’t get me wrong – there’s a place for those other kind of talks in church (and one of modern problems is that we’ve eliminated all the traditional spots where they might have happened, a bug bear of mine). But the sermon should be constrained by the text and that is expositional preaching. Topical preaching should be a subset of it.
Of course, that means you won’t always be able to say everything you want to say about a subject: the passage in question might not be as comprehensive as it would be if you had inspired the Scriptures. But isn’t that rather the point?