To be brutally honest, over the years my concern has been directed more toward avoiding charismatic excesses than it has been toward rightfully acknowledging the sovereign Spirit as he presents Himself on the pages of His own scriptures.  Consequently, the majority of my efforts in pneumatology have been devoted to establishing what the Spirit does not do, almost to the complete exclusion of establishing the magnificence of His person and the indispensability of His ministry in a positive way. (Azurdia, 1998, 32-33).

Azurdia is right.  I can remember sitting in one of my seminary classes, watching a video of the Toronto blessing, and being instructed by the professor that this was not an “authentic work of the Spirit.”  He established what the Spirit did not do, but left us wondering what a genuine movement of the Spirit actually looked like.  I believe many evangelical preachers are in the same predicament today:  they have been taught a reactionary theology of what the Spirit does not do, and as a result struggle to articulate, much less experience, the Spirit’s power in preaching.  

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For example, preaching textbook after preaching textbook calls for the crucial involvement of the Holy Spirit in preaching, yet none give a comprehensive Spirit-driven methodology of expository preaching that tells the preacher how to fully involve the Holy Spirit in his preaching ministry.  Further, the fruit of evangelical publishing and scholarship over the last two decades demonstrates that evangelicals are better at telling what the Spirit does not do in preaching as opposed to what the Spirit must do if powerful preaching is to take place.  Even in our own preaching, we tend to avoid the third member of the trinity, as the great expositor James Montgomery Boice once confessed:

For example, I had been in the ministry for about seven years when my morning preaching through Philippians, the Sermon on the Mount, and John eventually brought me to the discourses of John 14-16, in which the work of the Holy Spirit is described. Strange to say I had never done any serious preaching on the Holy Spirit before that time. (Boice, 1986, 96)  (Italics added).

I believe evangelicals must overcome their fear of being labeled charismatic, pentecostal, experiential, or even mystical and begin to talk about the Holy Spirit’s dynamics in preaching.    Evangelicals by and large have failed to connect the discipline of homiletics with the doctrines of pneumatology, and as a result find themselves “Surprised by the Spirit” when the Spirit does move!  My prayer is that this article will serve as a catalyst for evangelicals to establish a positive theology of preaching which makes clear the integral role of the Holy Spirit as the driving dynamic governing the entire discipline we call homiletics.  My belief is that the dynamics of the Spirit must complement the mechanics of exposition if Spirit-empowered expository preaching is ever going to take place.