After Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in the towns of Galilee. (Matt. 11:1)

Give me the Bible and the Holy Ghost and I can go on preaching forever! (Charles Haddon Spurgeon)

In exegeting a passage, we get at what the inspired writer said; with the help of hermeneutics, we get at what the inspired writer meant. Up to this point we are within the province of the teacher who is, above all, concerned with a content to be understood. But now we move into the province of the preacher who is concerned, above all, with an object to be achieved.

While teaching and preaching are used virtually synonymously in the New Testament, there are differences. All good preaching will have a teaching component, and all good teaching will have a preaching component. But the pulpit is not a lectern. Preaching is application (bridging between the biblical word and the contemporary world). Indeed, application begins in the introduction of the sermon.

We turn to the packaging and processing of biblical meaning as encased in the narratives of Scripture for contemporary communication. Our objective is comprehension and application. The preacher is "bilingual" (to use Krister Stendahl's expression) in that the preacher must know the action of the ancient text and then how that action is reenacted in the present.

Bernard Manning's classic definition still stands: "Preaching is the manifestation of the incarnate Word, from the written Word, through the spoken word." As such, preaching is the lifeblood of the church, the fuel of worship, the agent for conversion (1 Peter 1:23ff.), the means of sanctification, the source of comfort and encouragement, and the impetus for service and ministry.

Thus when preaching is in decline, we're in big trouble. If preaching degenerates into an "unilluminating discussion of unreal problems in unintelligible language," as one writer put it, we can see the handwriting on the wall.

We are facing horrendous obstacles in the communication of God's message today. Ours has been characterized as "the age of indifference," when, as the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Center says, the average person in the United States knows less, cares less, and reads the newspaper less. The average person is less informed and less interested; and the younger persons are tuning out. The answer of some in the news industry is to soften and glitz up until there is no real news at all.

Historically, discourse has shaped people and events, as Garry Wills shows in his captivating bestseller Lincoln at Gettysburg. This astute historian demonstrates how Lincoln's 272 words in his famous address and their vernacular rhythms are the "words which remade America." Three minutes of the fruit from Lincoln's verbal workshop led the audience and posterity back to the Declaration of Independence, the nation's founding document. Able in distinguishing alternatives, using his typical grammatical inversion, alluding to Scripture, Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address shows us orality at its potent best.1 The sermon is likewise discourse that takes the written document and makes it an oral event. Or is the sermon done as a form?