How we will apply Scripture to our present situation in order to be salt and light remains a hot topic in adult Sunday Schools but a great void in the homiletics literature. Once application was easy. Everyone knew the uniform that Evangelicals were supposed to wear: do not smoke or drink or chew; don't see bad movies; and, don't cuss when the preacher's around. Virtually any biblical text could be exegeted to add threads to this uniform of Evangelical/Fundamentalist identification. Of course, for reasons both good and bad, that uniform is now largely considered out of fashion. Survey after survey tells us that the life patterns of Evangelicals on matters as varied as marriage, entertainment, alcohol and drug use, abortion and charitable giving vary little from the secular culture. The individualism that we were inadvertently promoting by emphasizing faith as a path to personal fulfillment has come home to roost as mere paganism among our people.
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We know how to preach salvation by faith, but we have not yet determined how to replace false legalisms with true piety. Young and old are more schooled in popular culture than biblical thought — that is evident in not only in our congregants' lifestyles but in their shocking lack of Biblical knowledge. Yet, before we blame others for not applying the scriptures well, we must confess that even among conservative church leaders there is little consensus regarding such culture forming issues as economics, government, education, poverty and war. The cold wash of this culture's realities are making it startlingly evident that it was far easier to talk about the uniform than it is to fight the spiritual war of the soul in today's society.
We are beginning to think afresh about how exposition and application relate to these cultural battles for the soul. There is a healthy trickle of recent articles and books on how to do exegetically sound application.5 Still, much work remains to be done in order for expository preaching to move from merely creating weekly to-do lists based our own traditions and really identifying how biblical truth applies to life's struggles. I see new hope for preaching in this fledgling movement toward applying Scripture to contemporary life. The movement is indicative of a larger shift in the overall homiletical discussion. For the last thirty years our primary concern has been how we communicate. Now we are talking more and more about what we communicate — this has always been the preeminent question of every era when faithful preaching has flourished.
Concern for content is not only reinvigorating expository preaching, it is also driving us to reconsider what rules the content of our messages. Always the text rules in expository preaching. This is not a new focus. What is new or, at least, is being emphasized with greater vigor is the Word in the text. By this I do not mean the words of the text, but the divine Logos as he is made known in every properly interpreted passage of Scripture. Jesus is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Author and Finisher of our faith. He is the culminating message of Scripture, but the word about this Eternal Word is also woven throughout the Biblical text. Either by prediction, preparation, reflection or result the redemptive message of God's provision radiates throughout the Bible, and no portion of it can be properly expounded without disclosing its relationship to his redemptive nature and work.6