Series Six: Expository Preaching

The goal of homiletics is to find the best way to present the content of a passage to an audience so that they can benefit from the truth the same way you have. It isn’t enough for a teacher to know what a passage means. You can diagram, outline the structure, and get the main point, but it isn’t effective unless you can articulate it so that others can clearly understand. This step in the process requires careful attention. Even if you are a gifted communicator, winging it doesn’t serve your people well. This does not mean that there is somehow special power in homiletics; the power is in the Word of God. However, in homiletics we want to do all we can to be clear and remove everything that hinders clarity.

Delivering Clear and Compelling Sermons

1. Introduction: set up the passage effectively for your audience.
   1. Purpose: transition people and help prepare them for serious reflection upon a passage of Scripture.
      1. People are coming from different backgrounds and experiences throughout the week.
      2. People need to be transitioned from what they were just doing and into your Bible lesson.
      3. As the teacher, you have spent hours in the passage—the audience hasn’t yet—so they must be brought along.
   2. Prequalification: understand the text and submit to it before you can craft the introduction.
      1. Study the text in depth.
      2. Think about the implications for your own heart (Ezra 7:10).
      3. Write down the answers to the questions you asked your own heart to use as content. For example:
         • What ways do I sin against this truth?
         • Why do I struggle with this truth?
         • What must I change in light of this truth?
         • What is the fruit of submitting to this truth in my life?
         • What idols could this expose?
         • What wrong thinking could be had about this passage?
   • “Your introduction will come off as plastic even if you are an amazing communicator if you aren’t applying the truth to your own life first.”
   3. Packaging: make the main point of the text gripping to people so that they want to hear what you are about to teach them from the Scriptures.
      1. Make the introduction compelling and bring a sense of urgency.
      2. Compel people to study. Help them see that they individually have a problem that this text will answer.
      3. Incorporate some of the following elements:
         • The problem that the text will solve
         • How the passage is personally working on your heart
         • Analogies
         • Illustrations from human history (not sensationalistic)
         • Penetrating questions
         • Specific changes that your audience needs to make
      4. Avoid introductions that don’t match the theme or driving force of the text.
2. Transition: move from the introduction into the body of the sermon.
   1. Proposition
      1. Make a propositional truth claim. (This is an assertion about the text.)
      2. Answer the question, “What is this text teaching?”
   2. Plan
      1. Give a plan (a structure, an outline) for how you are going to move through the content.
      2. Give the number of ways the biblical author presents the main truth of the passage, and how he does it (i.e., plural noun propositional statements: principles, contrasts, illustrations, practices, commands, etc.).
      3. Benefits of having an exegetically-derived outline
         • Protects you from being scattered
         • Keeps you in a cadence
         • Keeps you on task
         • Helps your listeners hear the main points and substructure as you repeat it
3. Message: have a method for working through a passage for the sake of clarity. Here is a good pattern to follow:
   1. Explain
      1. Give a principle from the text.
      2. Explain the principle.
   2. Argue
      1. Prove how the principle comes from the text (word study, syntactical study, solve/explain grammatical nuance).
      2. Reference how the principle points back to the main proposition of the sermon as a whole.
      3. Use other passages if needed to clarify your interpretation (i.e., “the analogy of Scripture”).
      4. This method ensures that the authority for what you say is the text itself.
   3. Illustrate
      1. Add cross-references to demonstrate the consistency of God’s Word on the point of the sermon or principle.
      2. Use topical analysis resources, but do not always assume that similar wording always has the same meaning in different texts. Matches must be specific, not similar.
   4. Implicate
      1. Put yourself in the shoes of the original hearer of the text. What perspectives would have been challenged?
      2. Be clear about whether your implications are explicit or implicit, inferred or illustrated.
      3. Overwhelm the hearts of the audience with the contrast of what they understood about God coming into the sermon, and what this passage is pulling them toward as they hear the sermon.
      4. Make it your goal to put truth into the minds of your hearers, and let it confront them.
      5. Confront the inner-life idolatries common to man through presenting the implications in the text.
      6. Explore your own heart in the study and how the Holy Spirit is illumining your mind, so you can open the floodgate of personal implications onto the audience.
      7. Preaching should not be just informational. Meaning without implications is fruitless. Preaching confronts the will.
   5. Summarize
      1. Tie the principle back to the overall main proposition of the text.
      2. Summarize implications. (This can be done either after each point or at the end of the message as a whole.)
      3. Preach your point again, uniting the principle one final time to the main point of the text, and repeat steps for remaining points.
      4. Drive home your proposition in order to keep people thinking.

Faithfully Exhorting the Will

One of the problems of preaching to the will of the audience is that unless you are called to preach in a pulpit context, there will be the tendency to not be forceful. This could be due to context or sheepishness about your own growth, which prevents you from teaching with authority.

1. The Bible should be the authority, not the teacher.
2. The teacher needs to proactively strive to live what he preaches, or else he is a hypocrite and should not teach (Jas 3:1).
3. Do not let anyone hearing your teaching disregard it (Titus 2:15).
4. Striving to live out convictions from the text in your own life proves your love for the audience being preached to.
5. Add stimulating questions that force people to contribute by thinking out loud, and subsequently shape the discussion.
6. Dialogue teaching is not about the dialogue from the discussion, which is a temptation. Be wary of allowing for these types of meetings. This is where having a plan and following through with the outline will focus the discussion on what the text actually says, the main point of the passage.