I have had the unique privilege of teaching biblical exposition over the past two decades. My teaching grows naturally out of my regular, weekly handling of the text of the Bible. The natural and right place to begin such instruction on preaching is with the subject of Logos, the Word of God. Though the how-to's of expository preaching are important, I do not generally go into these with a great deal of detail at first. I much prefer to begin with the beliefs and understandings that are indispensable to the task, and in fact demand it -- the prolegomenon to biblical exposition.

When this approach is adopted, the foundation point will always be a wholehearted belief in the authority of God's Word. Full confidence in its inerrancy, sufficiency, and potency is indispensable to a commitment to biblical exposition. To my knowledge no one does regular expository preaching who does not hold to this high view of scripture -- that it is God's inerrant Word.

But this alone is not enough. Exposition will not happen if one does not also view the scriptures as adequate and sufficient for all of life, appropriating Moses' view that the Bible is "not just idle words for you -- they are your life" (Deut. 32:47). The preacher must accept the Lord's injunction that God's Word is his very food -- "every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4).

But even this is not enough. No one will give his life to biblical exposition who does not believe in scripture's potency -- that it can cut through the hard, white bone and running marrow of any soul and work salvation and that "the Word of God is living and active. Sharper than any two edged sword ...." The unsheathed Word can do anything! But we must truly believe it -- not believe that we believe it -- but believe it!

Second, the expositor must understand and hold to the inseparability of the Spirit and the Word, that they are like breath and speech to each other. This means that you must hold the conviction that when the Word is authentically ministered, the Spirit ministers. The Word and Spirit do not have separate ministries but are one.

Third, the expositor understands and rests his ministry on the fact that apostolic preaching was expositional. Paul's instructions to Timothy ("Devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to preaching, and to teaching," 1 Tim. 4:13) was lived out in the early church's public readings from the Old Testament and the apostolic writings followed by exposition -- paraklesis and didaskalia. "It was taken for granted at the beginning that Christian preaching was exposition, that is, that all Christian instruction and exhortation be drawn out of the passage that had been read."1 Therefore, any kind of preaching in the church, other than exposition, is an aberration.

Fourth, the expositor understands and glories in the knowledge that the preaching that brought about the Reformation and the Protestant tradition was biblical exposition. Both Luther and Calvin bear monumental evidence of this. Calvin saw parallels between the sea of blood that launched the Old Covenant, when Aaron doused the Word of the Old Covenant with the blood of sacrifices, and Jesus proclaiming the New Covenant in His blood. Calvin said that one ought to regard the New Covenant scriptures as if written in Christ's blood. Indeed, this is the way Calvin treated the scriptures of both Covenants, as witnessed by his incredible sequential exposition of one book after another.