Many
of us have been greatly blessed by The Purpose Driven Life campaigns
in our congregations. We need a purpose driven pastorate also. For if God has
called you to preach, He has not called you to be a rush chairman, a religious
store manager, or even a really great storyteller. Yet, there are many who will
tell us that expository preaching is not enough. Peterson says, "Propagandists
are abroad in the land lying to us about what congregations are and can be.
They are lying for money. They want to make us discontent with what we are doing
so we will buy a solution from them that they promise will restore virility
to our impotent congregations. The profit-taking among those who market these
[programs] indicates pastoral gullibility in these matters is endless."6
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Let
us not be gullible. Expository preaching fulfills God's purpose for our lives
as preachers. He has called you to preach the Word, and you will never be happy
until you go to that Word, live in that Word, exegete the meaning of that Word,
dive like a Pacific native to the bottom of the ocean for the rich pearls of
that Word, and then come back up from your time in the deep-blue of God's presence,
string those pearls together in a sermon, and put them on the neck of your people.
Only
a preaching method, a preaching approach, that is radically Word-centered, Christ-centered,
Gospel-saturated, and uncompromisingly faith to the text will give you joy.
For you were made to preach.
5.
Expository Preaching is the Power of the Pastorate because it is Eschatologically
Useful.
Now
when I say eschatologically useful, I am saying that expository preaching brings
our people into contact with ultimate realities. In personal eschatology, expository
preaching prepares our people to not only live but to die. Oh, if we could hear
the stories of faithful preachers, seated right here today, who have shared
those sweet and sacred moments of vigil with a family when a loved one is going
home. You know that the power for your ministry at that time is in the exposition
of the Word. An elder in our church who recently went home to be with the Lord
said, "I have been waiting for this. I am ready to go home." This
attitude comes from expository preaching.
Expository
preaching also is eschatalogically useful in that it brings our people to see
God's ultimate cosmic realities. I would say that faithful exposition of the
Word would probably distance our preaching from some of the excessive, isogetical
propositions that we sometimes hear at certain prophecy seminars that lead to
theological speculation and seem to draw cosmic curiosity seekers. But faithful
exposition, say of 1 Corinthians 15 or Ephesians 1, leads our people to see
that God is a teleological God, that this world is going somewhere, and that
we who are God's children are destined for something greater than ourselves.
