What are some reasons for the Spirit’s absence in our preaching?  A.J. Gordon, writing more than one hundred years ago, gave his assessment:

Our generation is rapidly losing its grip upon the supernatural; and as a consequence the pulpit is rapidly dropping to the level of the platform.  And this decline is due, more than anything else, to ignoring the Holy Spirit as the supreme inspirer of preaching.  We would rather see a great orator in the pulpit, forgetting that the least expounder of the Word, when filled with the Holy Spirit, is greater than he. (Gordon, 1985, 102).

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As evidence, one need only look back to the classic textbooks of a previous generation of homileticians to see Gordon is correct.  For example, I believe Broadus’ work On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons to be a classic text on preaching, yet upon reading the text you discover there is little substantive discussion on the Holy Spirit.  A generation of preachers were raised on Andrew Blackwood’s preaching texts in the 1940’s and 1950’s, yet there is little mention of the Spirit’s role in preaching in his books as well. The absence of the Spirit from these classic preaching texts and others reveals that most preaching books of the eras represented were more concerned with presentation, style, and the mechanics of preaching rather than the unseen theological dynamics of preaching represented by the Spirit’s ministry of the Word.

To be fair to Broadus, Blackwood, and others, the Spirit’s role in preaching was most likely implied or assumed; yet therein lies the problem for evangelicals.  Evangelicals teaching preaching in colleges and seminaries today cannot naively assume that students of preaching know what it means to be empowered by God’s Spirit; we cannot assume students know what it means to be led by the Spirit when selecting a text or when choosing an appropriate illustration.  When’s the last time we taught our churches about the Spirit’s illumination (not inspiration!) in the study of God’s word?  How does the Holy Spirit “open our eyes” that we may see the wonderful things in His word? (Psalm 119:18).  How does the Spirit move in the preacher’s prayer life to empower and direct his preaching?  How do we know when the Holy Spirit leads us to say something we had not planned on saying – or keeps us from saying what we had planned to say!  We will never understand these unseen yet critical components of preaching until we open up and overcome what James Forbes identifies as our “Holy Spirit-shyness.”

Only recently, with the publication of Jerry Vines and Jim Shaddix’s Power in the Pulpit (1999), as well as Stephen Olford’s book Anointed Expository Preaching (1998), have books on preaching included more than a passing reference to the work of the Holy Spirit in preaching.  Perhaps this is understandable, given the fact that evangelicals have been faithfully engaged in a battle defending the trustworthiness and accuracy of the Bible.  Hence, much of our writing on the subject of preaching, especially expository preaching, has centered around the text – how to study it in the original languages, how to diagram it, outline it, and apply it.  Without a doubt,  these are necessary and essential disciplines for the task of expository preaching, and expository preaching cannot happen without them.  But in so emphasizing the text have we unintentionally neglected the Spirit?  By constantly and sometimes exclusively hammering away at the needs of the text, have we inadvertently separated the powerful symbiotic relationship between Word and Spirit?  Is the way we approach, define, and even teach expository preaching producing exegetical scholars but not Spirit-filled preachers?  Can we not have both?