The Word of God is the place where the pastor may stand. Indeed, our very existence, our calling, our vocation only have meaning through this Word. I recently read J.C. Ryle's wonderful Warning to the Churches,3 in which the old Bishop of Liverpool warned his diocesan ministers of the perils they faced. The book left me amazed at his prophetic gifts and understanding of the times. I do not have such gifts, I am sure. But I do want to raise a danger related to the matter before us.

We live in an ever increasing iconoclastic culture that demands image and entertainment to communicate, that tells the preacher that short sound bytes are more persuasive than exposition of a text, that narrative is of more importance than the exposition of a text, that postmodern man cannot endure direct teaching, but needs to make the homeletical turns for himself. I say that this is a danger to the preaching of the Word, to evangelism, and to discipleship. And in the midst of such an age, we would all do well to remember that God called for Israel to do something that the heathen did not do, to think about Him in His Word, not in image. The late Neil Postman, a non-practicing Jew, saw this clearly. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography, thus, became blasphemy, so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves, who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered, might profit by reflecting on the Mosaic injunction.

The Word, my beloved brothers in the ministry, is the God-given place where we may stand, where we may reason, where we may dialogue with man. Indeed, we have been forbidden to go elsewhere. As a pastor, the reason that I want to focus on expository preaching — that is, proclaiming the inerrant and infallible Word of the living God as it is written, as it has been transmitted to me by God through the church, passing muster with the intent of the author, with conviction in my own life, and with love for those before me — is because expository preaching fixes itself, by its best definition, onto God's Word, divinely wrought and divinely authorized. This has powerful implications for my ministry that I want to explore further.

The only way for me to stand in the company of pulpit giants is to stand with this Word from another world. The truth is, if they are truly giants in the church, if they are linked from Spurgeon, to Ryle, to M'Cheyne, to Whitefield, to Bunyan, to Luther, to Calvin, to Wycliffe, to Augustine, to Paul, to Jesus and the prophets, then they are men of this one Book, and that is all they have to say. This leads me to a second reason that we must cling to expository preaching in order to find our place in the accredited college of godly preachers.