Expository Preaching

Simplicity and Clarity are Not the Same as Vapidity: Dig Deep in your Preaching

/ Richard Bargas / 2 Comments

“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15, ESV) 

I don’t have any doubt that we live in a time when people clamor for mindless entertainment, where it seems that the more outlandish and stupid, the better. How else will history be able to understand pop cultural trends like the current infatuation with “poop emojis”and YouTube videos of people eating Tide laundry detergent pods? 

However, as a pastor, I am troubled that the mindset that some people have had is that since this empty-mindedness is not going away, that people cannot handle the preaching of the Word of God with any depth. The argument usually is that people just don’t know their Bibles today, and so we must shorten the length of our sermons and simplify our messages—with some even saying that the church will need to abandon preaching altogether and instead should just have “talks.”

What is particularly dismaying is that theological liberalism often chooses to move away from the Bible, stating that Scripture cannot be accepted as it is given because it is intellectually untenable. A person could not believe in the Bible as it is presented in its grammatical, historical and literal setting andalso believe in science!

But that isn’t what we have all too often in Bible churches. Instead, there is a movement away from the Bible because even though we Bible-believing Christians can all affirm its truthfulness, we don’t want to dig too deep—it makes our heads hurt with all that history and geography and cultural stuff. And don’t get us started on theology! We have Bible churches that are often filled with people who prefer Bible-lite sermons that tell good stories and have lots of moralizing, but woe to the pastor who would dare to go deeper!

At least that is what a lot of pastors I have spoken to seem to think…

What I have found out is something quite different. Yes, many Christians are against boring sermons, and overly-long sermons. They sleep through sermons that have no point but are simply data-dumps and half-baked sermons that meander nowhere slowly. They leave churches where the pastor seems to want to talk about only his hobby horse doctrines or wants to flaunt his ability to use Greek grammar. Yes, it’s true, people don’t want  that.

But we seem to confuse simplicity with simplemindedness. We think that because they don’t want to hear a 45-minute sermon on the history of Tiglath-Pileser that they can’t stand real Bible preaching! So, in frustration, some pastors go back to vapid sermons. Stories, jokes, cutesy alliterations, we dress up like John the Baptist or the angel Gabriel. Why? Because we have not worked hard at going deep and wide. We have not prepared our biblical meal for everyone at the table to be able to digest the truth.

We can’t forget that people are at all sorts of different levels spiritually. Every church is like this. Some are unbelievers, some are babes in Christ, some are plateaued in their walk, some are maturing and others are going through a spiritual growth spurt. Don’t get frustrated by that man who wants you to go deeper every Sunday! Put a nugget or two in the sermon for him to chew on. Don’t scoff when that young couple ask the simplest questions—they are hungry! Feed them some application alongside your explanation of the text! Don’t chuckle at the hard-headed fellow who never seem to get it. Speak at his level and give him clear illustrations to cause that light to go on for him. We preach to real people, and so our sermons need to speak to real people!

My experience has shown that committed Christians don’t want shorter, watered down sermons. They don’t want a bunch of silly stories or jokes. They want the Bible! They want theology! They want to go deeper! And those “millennials” that so many people like taking jabs at, they thrive in churches where the Word of God is preached with conviction and depth.  

Our sermons can’t be empty. But they can’t be boring either. We need to present the meat of the Word in the most pleasing way we know how. We need to break it down for the young in Christ and give those who are more mature something to continue to work out in their own personal study. By doing this, we will raise the bar of our churches—they will all grow in depth and breadth of their knowledge of the Word and their learning will, Lord willing, blossom into changed lives. 

The Deepest Need in Preaching: A Majestic View of God

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“There are always two parts to true worship. There is seeing God and there is savoring God. You can’t separate these. You must see him to savor him. And if you don’t savor him when you see him, you insult him….The greatness and the glory of God are relevant. It does not matter if surveys turn up a list of perceived needs that does not include the supreme greatness of the sovereign God of grace. That is the deepest need. Our people are starving for God.”—John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching

Help for New Expositors – Don’t Photobomb Jesus

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photobombIsn’t it interesting that there are no physical descriptions in the Bible of what the Apostles or Jesus looked like. This is hard to believe in our self-driven culture where the Instagram selfie perfectly captures the ethos of our day.

There is one extra-biblical description of Apostle Paul found in The Acts of Thecla, where it says that Onesiphorus described Paul as “a man short in stature, with a bald head, bowed legs, in good condition, eyebrows that met, a fairly large nose, and full of grace. At times he seemed human, at other times he looked like an angel.”[1] It appears that Paul had a face for radio!

In our world, “image is everything” and yet, for those who stand before the world to proclaim the Word of God, we are simply called to be a faithful, unwavering voice of truth in a dry, wilderness of error and darkness (Mark 1:3; Amos 8:11).

When this is the case, we shouldn’t worry about being impressive or even whether anybody notices us. We shouldn’t be jockeying for prominence among the evangelical superstars or trying to be seen so we can move up the ladder of fame. This is exactly the opposite of what Jesus expects of his servants. Mark 10:42-45 shines brightly against the growing evil of popular Christianity and its longing for attention. It hurts to read Jesus’ words and think about how much modern evangelical Christianity ignores these words:

“And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10:42–44, ESV, emphasis mine)

It is when we open our mouths, when we speak the Word of God that people should be amazed–not at us, but at our great and awesome God. If we draw attention, let it be to our Lord and Savior. If we thunder and rail, let it be against sin as we call men to holiness. If we speak with great authority and power, let it be from the Scriptures alone and not ourselves. And when we leave a room where we have preached the mighty deeds of our God, and people stand back and say, “What a mighty God! O, how I want to know Him more!” may we be content to slide out of the room and rejoice that our God chose to use us, sinners saved by grace, to bring more people into His presence. SDG

[1] The Acts of Thecla 3. Translation by Bart D. Ehrman in Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114.


Help for New Expositors – Develop Patience in Your Hearers

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Lord willing I will step into the pulpit of my church this Sunday and I will continue my journey through the book of Acts. I will be in Acts 26 and as of last night, I’m not sure how far I will get into Paul’s defense before Agrippa. I have been saturating myself with the text, doing word studies, background, translation and all the good stuff that comes with Bible exposition done well.

As a part of my study, a small phrase in Acts 26:3 stuck out to me that is helpful to think about more, not only as we prepare to preach, but as we think about the overall ministry of preaching to our congregations. The phrase that Paul says is this, “Therefore I beg you to listen to me patiently” (ESV). There are a lot of reasons that Paul says this, and I can’t go into them here, but I do want to say this–expositors need to learn to develop patience in their listeners and we need to be such skillful expositors that people are willing to be patient when we preach.

You see, Paul was well aware how critical sound doctrine is, particularly in preaching the gospel. He is about to expound on the differences between traditional Judaism as practiced in his time and how they differed from the gospel message of Jesus Christ. To the Jews, Paul had committed sins worthy of death while Festus couldn’t figure out why everyone was so upset. It all sounded the same to him!

Agrippa was a Jew and he knew Judaism well (Acts 26:3), and yet Paul still begged for patience from him as he laid out this complicated doctrine of the gospel. Paul didn’t abandon sound doctrine, but he also didn’t abandon his listeners either!

Brother preachers, let me be candid for a minute. Sometimes people don’t reject sound expositional preaching because it is not informative, but because we have not done all our work to be clear and concise. The church is not a seminary and your pulpit is not a seminary lectern. We cannot dump raw meat on our congregations and expect them to digest our poorly assembled sermons. We can ask and expect patience, but we must deliver on feeding the sheep! They cannot digest raw exegetical data. Reject the false dichotomy that our preaching must be raw meat (unrefined doctrine) or baby food (little or no doctrine). We have been called by our Lord to dig deep, understand the text better than anyone else in our church, and then to assemble a sermon that imparts much of what we have learned in a way that does not choke them because it is too far over their heads or factual but unhelpful.

As you prepare, go deep but go patiently, walking with the weak and the babes. Recommend further reading and study for those that are more mature. Add in scholarly insights at appropriate places to entice deeper thinking, but return to the average maturity level of your congregation for most of your exposition. Let them up for air after a long explanation of a particular concept by showing them why this doctrine is so important to their lives and how it can be put into practice to the glory of God.

That is how you develop patience in your listeners. You are a shepherd. Lead them, don’t drag them or abandon them. Ask for their patience, but deliver the goods every time you make them work to understand. Reward thinking by showing the soaring heights of spiritual truth. Then the next time you open your Bibles, they will have grown a little more and able to keep a little faster pace with you.

Preachers Who Don’t Love People

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lloydjones“The trouble with some of us is that we love preaching, but we are not always careful to make sure that we love the people to whom we are actually preaching. If you lack this element of compassion for the people you will also lack the pathos which is a very vital element in all true preaching. Our Lord looked out upon the multitude and ‘saw them as sheep without a shepherd’, and was ‘filled with compassion’. And if you know nothing of this you should not be in a pulpit, for this is certain to come out in your preaching.”

-Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers