Excerpts from an article at Mark Dever's IX Marks Ministries.
"God's Word has something to say about what we preach and how we preach it. What you'll find on the following pages is a brief Biblical rationale for the primacy of expositional preaching in the local church. But that's not all. You'll also find some practical resources to encourage and facilitate the continuing development and increasing fruitfulness of your own expositional ministry...
The content of expositional preaching is the true word of God. An exposition of Scripture simply seeks to uncover, explain, and apply the divinely intended meaning of the text...
The goali of expositional preaching is for the people of God to hear and heed the Word of God. In this sense,expositional preachers are modern day prophets, serving merely as conduits through which the Word of God may flow into the people of God in order to do the work of God in them...
Expositional preaching is the only kind of preaching that, by definition, ensures that the agenda of the sermon is determined by the agenda of the text.
Therefore, a long-term commitment to expositional preaching is the most helpful way for a preacher to discipline himself to remain faithful to God’s Word over a lifetime of ministry...
Preaching is prophetic because it conveys God's Word to God's people. Exposition best handles the prophetic nature of preaching because the expositional sermon is unique for taking the point of the passage as the point of the message. It is therefore the best way to remain faithful to the content and intent of God's Word in any given text....
God's Word is the conduit of God's power that accomplishes God's purpose. The power is not in the preacher himself, his stories, his illustrations, or his technique. The power is in God's Word - the message preached.
This means that if the Christian preacher is to preach with real Spiritual power, he must discern what God has said in His Word, and then be faithful to say it. In other words, the point of the text should be the point of the sermon...
Benefits for the Congregation
The congregation is released from slavery to the preacher's hobbyhorse texts and topics..." (For complete article click here.)
My wife and I are very thankful for the exegetical expository based ministry we have the privilage of sitting under at our current church. Being under such a ministry has caused us to realize how far our former church had wandered from the discipline of exegetical expository preaching. The above article does an excellent job of setting forth the Biblical basis for and the benefits of expository preaching. I highly recommend you read the full article.
Sola Scriptura!
~ The Billy Goat ~
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