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.
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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.