The Goal

After the cruelty and selfishness of a thirty-seven-year-old man had forced his wife and children from his home, he called in desperation wanting my aid in getting them to return. I said I would try to help if he would agree to get counseling for his problems. He agreed and came to the church office several days later. He brought a Bible with him.

I could not help but notice how strange it was to see this abusive man with a Bible under his arm. I had seen him many times before. He even attended our church occasionally, but I had never seen him with a Bible. Yet here in the darkest hour of his life, he thought he would find wisdom and aid in a book written thousands of years ago. No doubt his thinking was colored with a desire to impress me, and he undoubtedly had little actual knowledge about how to discern what the Bible would actually require of him. Still, as do all expository preachers, I shared the man's instinctive faith that the Bible could address the deepest needs of his life.

Expository preachers and the people who sit before them each week are convinced that the Scriptures can be mined to extract God's wisdom and power for daily living. Poor preaching may cast some occasional doubt, but preaching that truly reveals what the Bible means has kept this conviction alive for a hundred generations. Our goal as expository preachers is to keep this faith alive by demonstrating week after week what the Word of God says about the daily concerns we and our listeners face.

This goal reminds us that most people do not want or need a lecture about Bible facts. They want and need a sermon that demonstrates how the information in the Bible applies to their lives. Expository preaching does not merely obligate preachers to explain what the Bible says; it obligates them to explain what the Bible means in the lives of people today.1 Application is as necessary for sound exposition as is explication. In fact, the real meaning of a text remains hidden until we discern how its truths should govern our lives.2 This means that full exposition cannot be limited to a presentation of biblical information. The preacher should frame every explanatory detail of the sermon so its impact on the lives of listeners is evident.

Such a perspective on the true nature of exposition challenges the notion some have of expository preaching. So much of the criticism expository preaching receives results from the assumption of some preachers that a sermon's primary goal is to expose listeners to information about the Bible. Sermons that mainly disseminate information seem out of touch, irrelevant, and even uncaring. Sermons that organize textual information and address immediate concerns also express congregational sensitivity while remaining fully biblical.

If we were to think of the object of a sermon as a large stone to be moved, we would recognize that some think of an expository sermon as using all its resources and features as leverage to move information into the mind of the listener.