"On Preaching and Listening" is the last in a five-part conversation with David Platt, one of the best-known young preachers among evangelicals and pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama.
Preaching: If we were to come to a typical weekend service at Brook Hills to hear you preach, give us a sense of what that would be like. I know you're an expositor, so you have a strong emphasis on the biblical text; but tell me what one of your sermons typically would be like.
Platt: I hope that it would be clear from start to finish. When I get up to preach, the Word is primary; the Word is driving this picture. I don't say this to be cliché or trite, but I have nothing to bring to the table as the pastor before this people apart from His Word. My entire credibility, any authority I have to speak before them, is based on being tied to His Word. So I hope that if you were to come to Brook Hills, you would hear a Word-saturated sermon.
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We would dive into the text, almost always one particular text. We'll go all over the place to understand what this one text is saying as we look at this particular text in the context of biblical theology. I hope you would see the text as primary. I hope the sermon would lead you to love and enjoy more greatly the supremacy of Christ. This year I'm preaching on different texts each week that we have read through in the week prior, just to see how everything in redemptive history is pointing us to the greatness of Christ.
You'd be there a little while. The sermon would last about 55 minutes or an hour. I give our folks notes they can fill in as they walk through the text. My prayer is that in preaching they would not just see the wonder of the Word but would learn to study the Word in the nature of how I preach it.
I don't use a ton of illustrations. I don't feel like I have time sometimes. I probably could do a better job of this to be honest. I think it would be pretty heavy on explanation; and I think once we do end up at an explanation, it provides the platform for pointed application. So I want to do illustration and argumentation along the way that is going to help support that, but I want explanation to be primary.
Preaching: Do you primarily preach in series?
Platt: I do. This year is a little different because we're walking through Scripture, so I'm preaching on different texts every week from where we've been reading this year; but even then, we've divided into different series based on different epics, so to speak, and redemptive history. Before that, I preached through James, Ruth, etc. I've done a good bit on addressing some issues in the church that I thought pastorally needed to be addressed.
We've walked through more topical series but with textual sermons. I preached a series on worship, but we were in one text each week. Each week we'd spend time in one text, look at what this text is saying, then how it forms my understanding of worship. So it wouldn't be as much of a topical sermon as much as it would be a topical series with textual sermons.
