Preaching

Communicating Faith in an Age of Scepticism

Timothy Keller

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781444702187
• eBook ISBN: 9781444702941
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'It is an unexpected delight to read a book on preaching that makes you want to preach. Tim Keller has given us such a book... Here is an extremely readable book founded on sound scholarship... buy it. This is the most practical and inspirational book on preaching that I have read for years!' - The Methodist Recorder 'In Preaching, Keller has made an invaluable contribution to the homiletic task. I would recommend that this book be placed in the hand of the preaching veteran and novice, and should be found in the homiletic section of all theological colleges.' - Christianity magazine New York pastor and acclaimed author Timothy Keller is widely known and respected for his compelling preaching, described by The New York Times as what has 'helped turn Dr Keller... into the pastor many call Manhattan's leading evangelist'. In this book he shares his wisdom on communicating the Christian faith from the pulpit as well as from the coffee shop. Most Christians - including pastors - struggle to talk about their faith in a way that applies the power of the Christian gospel to change people's lives. Timothy Keller is known for his insightful, down-to-earth sermons and talks that help people understand themselves, encounter Jesus and apply the Bible to their lives. In this accessible guide for pastors and laypeople alike, Keller helps readers learn to present the Christian message of grace in a more engaging, passionate and compassionate way.

Serving the Word

ONE

PREACHING THE WORD

If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God.

—1 Peter 4:11

The unfolding of your words gives light.

—Psalm 119:130

God’s Word and Human Skill

In the first Protestant preaching manual, The Art of Prophesying (1592), William Perkins wrote, “The Word of God alone is to be preached, in its perfection and inner consistency.”¹ This may seem to many today to be an obvious point. Of course a Christian preacher or teacher should be communicating the Bible, they say. In Perkins’s cultural moment, however, this was not obvious. For many preachers of his day, “[God’s] grace was not irresistible. It needed to be supported by eloquence. … The faithful needed the miraculous power of preaching to buttress the Scripture.”²

Preaching in England at that time had become filled with verbal pyrotechnics, thick with ornate language, classical allusions and quotations, poetic images, and soaring rhetoric. Of course, preachers were still beginning with Bible passages—but very little time was given to actually unfolding the texts. They seemed to think the Bible needed a lot of help. A baseline confidence in the power and authority of the Scripture itself had been lost.

William Perkins and his contemporaries reacted against “the cultivated oratory” of their time. They believed that the main aim in preaching had been lost: that we let the Bible itself speak, so it can pour forth its own power. The early part of Perkins’s brief volume spends substantial time establishing that the Bible is God’s perfect, pure, and eternal wisdom and that it has the power to convict the conscience and penetrate the heart.³ Perkins knew that communicators’ beliefs about the character of the Bible had a major effect on how they actually handled it. Do we, as communicators of the Bible, truly know that it carries God’s own authority and power? If we do, we will be more focused on unfolding its insights than on using it merely to support our own. “The preaching of the Word is the testimony of God and the profession of the knowledge of Christ, not of human skill,” argues Perkins. He quickly adds, however, “but this does not mean that pulpits will be marked by a lack of knowledge and education. … The minister may, and in fact must, privately make free use of the general arts and of philosophy as well as employ a wide variety of reading while he is preparing his sermon.” These things should “not [be] ostentatiously paraded” before the congregation.⁴

Perkins means that the purpose of preaching is not to present the results of your empirical investigation or philosophical reasoning or scholarly research. Nor is it to sense an insight or burden—one that you believe has been put on your heart by God—and then hunt for a biblical text that gives you an occasion for telling people what you want to tell them anyway. The purpose of preaching is to preach the Scripture with its own insights, directives, and teachings. Along the way, as Perkins says, we can and must use all the “arts” to help our hearers understand the biblical author’s meaning. All of this is done in subservience to the first great task of preaching: to preach God’s Word, and to let listeners sense its very authority.

Expository and Topical Preaching

What is the best way to do that?

Hughes Oliphant Old has written a magisterial seven-volume series on the history of preaching.⁵ Old looks at Christian preaching in every century and in every branch of the church—Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, and Pentecostal—and, by the end of the survey, at churches on virtually every continent. The scope and variety of his research are breathtaking. In his introduction to the series he names five basic types of sermons that he discerns over the centuries, which he calls expository, evangelistic, catechetical, festal, and prophetic.

He defines expository preaching as “the systematic explanation of Scripture done on a week-by-week … basis at the regular meeting of the congregation.”⁶ The other four types of preaching may at first glance seem quite different from one another, but in one key respect they are the same. Unlike exposition, these other four forms of preaching are not necessarily organized around a single passage of Scripture. That is because the main purpose of each is not the unfolding of the ideas within a single biblical text but rather the communication of a biblical idea from a number of texts. Old calls this broad approach “thematic” or “topical” preaching. The topical sermon may have any one of several aims. It may be to convey truth to nonbelievers (evangelistic preaching) or to instruct believers in a particular aspect of their church’s confession and theology (catechetical preaching). Festal preaching helps listeners celebrate observances in the church year such as Christmas, Easter, or Pentecost, while prophetic preaching speaks to a particular historical or cultural moment.

There are, then, in the end, two basic forms of preaching: expository and topical. Throughout the centuries both have been widely used—and, as Old demonstrates, they must both be used. For example, in the book of Acts Paul did Bible exposition in a synagogue but employed topical oratory, using no Scripture at all, in the public square of Mars Hill. His points were all truths taken from the Bible, but the method of presentation was more like classical oratory in which he set forth theses and made arguments in their favor. In Paul’s judgment, it was not appropriate to offer a careful Bible exposition to an audience who not only disbelieved in the Bible but also were profoundly ignorant of even its most basic assumptions. Evangelistic occasions are, then, one place where more topical Christian messages may be appropriate.

There are other occasions when the basic message you want to share is a biblical one, but it may not be possible to say enough of what the Bible has to say on your subject from one passage alone. Imagine you want to teach college students what the Bible says about the Trinity—that God is one and three. There is virtually no single biblical text that would enable you to expound this profoundly biblical doctrine. Instead you will need to quote and cite several texts to support the teaching. In expository preaching, by contrast, your job is to go wherever the single text takes you. The points of the message emerge as the text is explained, as its meaning is drawn out.

It is also worth noting that the two types of preaching are not mutually exclusive, and absolutely pure forms of either are rare. They are actually overlapping categories or two poles on a spectrum. Even the most careful verse-by-verse exposition will usually refer to other places in the Bible that treat the same topic. For example, if the Holy Spirit appears in your text, you may need to explain that the Holy Spirit is an equal divine person with the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is a “he,” not an “it.” It is likely that in your text there is nothing said directly about the personality of the Holy Spirit, but unless you give a brief topical overview of the biblical doctrine of the Spirit, the message of your passage will be misunderstood. So all expository preaching is partially topical. Then again, any topical sermon that is faithful to the Scripture will have to consist of several “mini expositions” of various texts. That is, passages of Scripture used to fill in the topic must be explained within their own context.

Expository preaching grounds the message in the text so that all the sermon’s points are points in the text, and it majors in the text’s major ideas. It aligns the interpretation of the text with the doctrinal truths of the rest of the Bible (being sensitive to systematic theology). And it always situates the passage within the Bible’s narrative, showing how Christ is the final fulfillment of the text’s theme (being sensitive to biblical theology).

The Case for (Usually) Doing Expository Preaching

Just as throughout church history both kinds of preaching have been necessary, so Christian teachers and preachers today need to see both as legitimate forms they can skillfully use. Nevertheless, I would say that expository preaching should provide the main diet of preaching for a Christian community. Why? I can think of at least six reasons, though I will dwell on the first one at greater length.

Expository preaching is the best method for displaying and conveying your conviction that the whole Bible is true. This approach testifies that you believe every part of the Bible to be God’s Word, not just particular themes and not just the parts you feel comfortable agreeing with. A full confidence and rich grasp of the authority and inspiration of the Bible is absolutely crucial for a sustained, life-changing ministry of Bible teaching and preaching. When you have settled that, a sustained expository approach over time—in which you take care to draw out the meaning of each text, to ground all your assertions in the text, and to move through large chunks of the Bible systematically—will best pass your confidence in the Scripture along to your listeners.

It is not enough for you to just have a general respect for the Bible that you may have inherited from your upbringing. As a preacher or teacher you will come upon many difficulties in the Bible; and inevitably the biblical authors say things that not only contradict the spirit of the age but also your own convictions and intuitions. Unless your understanding of the Bible—and your confidence in its inspiration and authority—are deep and comprehensive, you will not be able to do the hard work necessary to understand and present it convincingly. Your lack of conviction will also show up in your public teaching, blunting its impact. Instead of proclaiming, warning, and inviting, you will be sharing, musing, and conjecturing.

Of course, there is also a danger that a preacher of the gospel of grace will be overbearing and unnecessarily dogmatic at places where faithful believers differ. We will address that issue later. Here I want to stress the danger of making the opposite mistake. It is no more effective to be apologetic and unassertive than to be too confrontational and harsh. The balance is important. As Timothy Ward writes, “[If] the preacher exercises too much power he can be fought. If he is too weak he can be ignored.”⁷

One way to develop an appropriate confidence in the Scripture is by seeing what the Bible says about itself. Start with a thorough study and analysis of Psalm 119, and distill all it says about the character of the Scripture and its role and use in our lives. Then there are several volumes and essays about the authority of the Scripture that are crucial for you to read carefully and know well, if your communication is going to bear fruit.⁸ It is important to know not only in general that the Bible is true but also that in the Bible God’s words are identical to his actions. When he says, “Let there be light,” there is light (Genesis 1:3). When God renames someone, it automatically remakes him (Genesis 17:5). The Bible does not say that God speaks and then proceeds to act, that he names and then proceeds to shape—but that God’s speaking and acting are the same thing. His word is his action, his divine power.⁹

So how do we hear God’s active Word today if we are not prophets or apostles who actually sat at Jesus’ feet? God’s words in the mouths of the prophets (Jeremiah 1: 9–10), written down, are still God’s words to us when we read them today (Jeremiah 36:1–32). Ward says that it is crucial for the preacher to recognize this. “God’s ongoing dynamic action through the Spirit” is “supremely related to the language and meanings of Scripture.”¹⁰ In other words, as we unfold the meaning of the language of Scripture, God becomes powerfully active in our lives. The Bible is not merely information, not even just completely true information. It is “alive and active” (Hebrews 4:12)—God’s power in verbal form. It is only as we understand the meaning of the words that God names us and shapes us and recreates us.

If you, the Christian communicator, know and believe this doctrine of the Bible, it will have a profound influence on how you preach. If you believe only that the Spirit may, in some general way, attend to the preaching of the Bible under some circumstances, then you are likely to undermine its power and authority as you preach by overemphasizing your own experiences or by locating the authority in your church’s tradition and beliefs rather than in the Bible itself. Or you may use the Bible as a set of assorted wise remedies for contemporary social and personal problems. If, however, you believe that the preaching of the Word is one of the main channels for God’s action in the world, then with great care and confidence you will uncover the meaning of the text, fully expecting that God’s Spirit will act in listeners’ lives.¹¹

Therefore famous verses about God’s Word being “like fire … and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces” (Jeremiah 23:29) are not mere rhetoric. I have seen hundreds of specific cases in which the Bible itself contained a power to penetrate people’s spiritual indifference and defenses in a way that went far beyond my powers of public speaking. A handful of times I have even had conversations with angry people who were sure that one of their friends had told me about them and that I had singled them out in the sermon. I was able to swear honestly that I had had no idea at all about their issue—that it was the Bible itself exercising its power to lay bare the “secrets of their hearts” (1 Corinthians 14:25). I don’t enjoy angry listeners, but I must say I love those conversations.

So the primary reason we should normally do expository preaching is that it expresses and unleashes our belief in the whole Bible as God’s authoritative, living, and active Word.

The other reasons to make expository preaching a church’s main diet are more practical but no less important. One is that a careful expository sermon makes it easier for the hearers to recognize that the authority rests not in the speaker’s opinions or reasoning but in God, in his revelation through the text itself. This is unclear in sermons that touch lightly on Scripture and spend most of the time in stories, lengthy arguments, or thoughtful musings. The listener might easily wiggle out from under the uncomfortable message by thinking, Well, that’s just your interpretation. Clear and solid exposition, however, takes pains to show what the passage means—and better attests that what is being said is not the product of the speaker’s views or prejudices but has come from this authoritative text.

Expository preaching enables God to set the agenda for your Christian community. Exposition is something of an adventure for the preacher. You set out into a book or a passage intent on submitting to its authority yourself and following where it may lead. Of course, you still have to choose which books and passages of the Bible to preach, and any experienced student of the Bible will know basically what is within particular parts of the Bible. However, expository preaching means you can’t completely predetermine what your people will be hearing over the next few weeks or months. As the texts are open, questions and answers emerge that no one might have seen coming. We tend to think of the Bible as a book of answers to our questions, and it is that. However, if we really let the text speak, we may find that God will show us that we are not even asking the right questions.

Modern people, for example, may come to the Bible looking for answers to the question “How do I build up my self-esteem and feel better about myself?” Yet in the biblical passages on sin and repentance, they will discover that the more basic human problem is too high a view of ourselves. We are blind to the depths of our own self-centeredness and overconfident that we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Three Levels of the Ministry of the Word
• Prologue: What Is Good Preaching?
• Part One: Serving the Word
• Part Two: Reaching the People
• Part Three: In Demonstration of the Spirit and of Power
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Writing an Expository Message
• Notes