I want someone who knows the difference between the duties of a chef and a gardener serving my meals! In the process of providing a healthy and appetizing repast, there is the need for pitchforks, dirt, and compost–but not on my dinner table! In the same way there is a substantial difference between the energy and labor involved in exegesis (digging the truth out of the Word) and the finesse, taste, and garnish associated with exposition (displaying the truth in an appetizing way).
We might describe exegesis as the discovery of truth from God’s Word, involving the careful, detailed examining of text, context, word meanings, flow of thought, symbolism, figures of speech, etc., with a view to uncovering, with the Spirit’s aid, the thoughts that flow from the heart of God.
Exposition, on the other hand, involves the display of what has been discovered in such an orderly, attractive, and effective way that it exposes what the text was intended originally to mean, what it has come to mean to the preacher, and what it ought to mean to the audience.
Both skills are essential if the people of God are going to be fed properly. Some speakers spend a great deal of time thinking about what they are going to say, but evidently little time on how they are going to say it. Like raw meat or potatoes just pulled from the ground, they have the nutrients we need but are hardly ready for consumption. Indigestible sermons give God’s people the wrong kind of heartburn.
There are others who, depending solely on some native “gift of gab,” spread before the saints a flowery dish of make-believe, dusting their spices on thin air and calling it nouvelle cuisine. From such, O Lord, deliver us.
The solution to both is found in the student-speaker feeding his own soul with the truth first. “Preach all your sermons over to yourself,” wrote F. B. Meyer. “Remember that your own heart must ever be your first congregation. Take for yourself, that you may know if it be digestible, some of the food which you are preparing for others.”
Perhaps the greatest preacher of the Church was the apostle Paul (although who of us would not have been delighted to hear Stephen before the Sanhedrin, or Peter at Pentecost, or Chrysostom the “golden-mouthed” before Eudoxia, or Luther before the Roman prelates?). Paul forcefully reminds us that our source is to be the written Word: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears…But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry” (2 Tim. 4:2-5).
But more, he tells us that our subject is to be the Living Word: “For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:5-7).
A good message should always have a target, the first being the stirring of our own hearts. God preserve us from passionless preaching! When we preach: the intellect should be exercised by the thoughtful exposition of its truth; the imagination may be activated to grasp after things unknown at present; the heart ought to be touched with the deeply stirring realities of the Word; the conscience should be addressed to be honest with God, like a miniature Judgment Seat; the will must be called to respond in obedience to God’s revelation; but it must be the Spirit witnessing with our spirits that produces divine results.
We hope you enjoy, and profit from, this issue on preaching. We have also provided a smorgasbord of sermons through the ages. Bon appetit!