Expositional and Exegetical: The Shepherd’s Church Distinctives (Part 6)
In this series, Pastor Kendall Lankford and Deacon Dan Hult elaborate on the distinctives of The Shepherd’s Church, so everyone who worships with us, visits us, or lands on our webpage will know who we are, how we are, what we are, why we are, and what they can expect.
Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth. But avoid worldly and empty chatter, for it will lead to further ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene. -2 Timothy 2:14-17a
Preaching is dangerous, leading D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones to say of it that “a man who feels that he is competent, and that he can do this easily, and so rushes to preach without any sense of fear or trembling, or any hesitation whatsoever, is a man who is proclaiming that he has never been 'called' to be a preacher”.[1] This is because preaching is the authoritative declaration of God’s Word to God’s people. In covenant renewal worship, we recognize that the minister is representing Jesus Christ Himself to the gathered saints, so when the minister preaches, he is explaining what the Spirit of Christ has inspired in His Word and applying that to the saints for the good of the whole church. Since the canon of Scripture is complete and therefore God does not speak through prophets anymore—a distinctive we will address in the future—preaching is the closest we get to prophecy in the modern day. The Old Testament prophet risked being executed for saying anything that God did not say (Deuteronomy 13:1-5, 18:20), so for preachers: “Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.” (James 3:1). In light of this, far too few preachers approach the pulpit with the appropriate level of fear and trembling at the seriousness of the task before them. At The Shepherd’s Church, we endeavor avoid that not only in preaching but in teaching and personal study as well, seen in our distinctives of being expositional and exegetical.
The Words of Eternal Life
As Pastor Kendall covered with regulated worship, far too many churches use the methods of the world: concerts, theatrics, flashy effects, and showmanship that actually dishonor God. This extends to preaching as well, where the “message” is not the authoritative declaration of what God has said but a motivational speech full of inspirational quotes and clever anecdotes. Such “preaching” is a violation of God’s clear command: “I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction” (2 Timothy 4:1-2). The preacher is to preach the Word of God, not personal stories, worldly philosophies, or vain musings. It is only preaching if it is authoritative and Scriptural, so most “preaching” in the American church is not preaching at all, and its speaker not a preacher at all but just another worldly orator whose speech cannot be called a sermon.
Additionally, this is a recipe for failure. By using worldly methods to give a worldly message, these churches are competing with the world’s best speakers: why would I go to my local church when I could get a much better speech from a TED talk? If I want clever anecdotes, personal stories, self-help, or other worldly philosophies, I can find millions of them with a few clicks. I don’t need to go to church for exciting music and an inspirational speech. Instead, I need to go to church to get what I cannot get anywhere else in the world. The business world understands this well: what makes a company unique makes them money. Great companies lean into what makes them unique and never lose focus on it. In his 2001 book Good to Great, Jim Collins called this the “hedgehog principle” and saw it in all of the great companies he studied. Churches that lose focus on their uniqueness and instead try to mimic the world will ultimately fail.
So what makes the church unique? Peter answered clearly: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68-69). This was after nominal disciples left Jesus in droves, even though they understood that Jesus was unlike anyone else. In addition to His miracles, He spoke with unparalleled authority (Mattew 7:29, Mark 1:22). But the novelty wore off when He gave the intentionally controversial statement: they had to consume His flesh and blood to have eternal life. Yet Peter and the rest of the Twelve recognized that no matter how hard the sayings of Jesus were, they were the words of eternal life that could be found nowhere else. The religious leaders and pagan philosophers may have had tradition and wisdom, but they had God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Since Christ has ascended, we actually have something even better than the physical presence of Jesus limited by human flesh: we have all of God’s Word to us in the complete canon of Scripture and the Holy Spirit to enable us to understand it.
And we need that understanding. We were created to live spiritually on every word of Scripture just as we were must live physically on a balanced diet of food (Deuteronomy 8:3, Matthew 4:4, Luke 4:4). Most of what passes for preaching in most churches is all but devoid of Scripture and therefore empty calories at best: it may be filling in the moment but does not actually sustain us. We need the protein of Scripture not just in our personal devotions but in every aspect of corporate worship. The worship service at The Shepherd’s Church is saturated with Scripture: it is read, heard, recited, and sung in every portion of the service. So naturally no balanced Scriptural diet would be complete without a sermon saturated with Scripture. Many Christians are spiritually famished in part because they are not being spiritually fed from the pulpit. A sermon that properly nourishes the saints explains a passage of Scripture, points the congregation to Christ from that passage, provides practical application, and thereby models to the congregation how to study and apply Scripture on their own:
Any true definition of preaching must say that that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people....He is there—and I want to emphasize this—to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds, he is there to influence people…He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. - D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers: 40th Anniversary Edition, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 2011: 64.
Expositional Preaching: Follow the Text
In order to feed the saints from the Word, the sermon must actually be from the Word. Therefore, the preaching at The Shepherd’s Church is expositional. Expositional (or expository) preaching is where the preacher exposes the meaning of a particular biblical text, to “discover and convey the precise meaning of the Word. Scripture determines what expositors preach because they unfold what it says. The meaning of the passage is the message of the sermon. The text governs the preacher”.[2] That means that our sermons are from particular passages of Scripture, normally moving sequentially through a book of the Bible. The opposite of this would be topical preaching, in which the sermon is not on a particular passage but a topic. There is a place for topical preaching, so occasionally we preach topically when the elders determines it is necessary for the health of the church. Even when we must preach topically, we do so from a passage of Scripture, grounding the entire discussion of a topic on a particular text. The text is always the foundation:
We are presenting the Bible and its message. That is why I am one of those who like to have a pulpit Bible. It should always be there and it should always be open, to emphasise the fact that the preacher is preaching out of it....We are always to give the impression, and it may be more important than anything we say, that what we are saying comes out of the Bible, and always comes out of it. - D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers: 40th Anniversary Edition, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 2011: 86.
For this reason, we have an open Bible at the front of the church. While the preacher may read the passage from typed notes or on an electronic device, the open Bible sitting next to the communion elements reminds everyone of its centrality in all of our preaching. Therefore, even our topical preaching is expositional. In the short history of our church, most of our preaching has been purely expository, going through Jude then John. Topical sermons have focused on the life of the local church and building a strong Christian culture. In all of these, exposition starts with the text itself properly interpreted. The structure, context, and meaning of the passage thus dictate the structure and content of the sermon: “The expository sermon uses the features and context of the text to explain what that portion of the Bible originally meant and what its significance is for us today”.[3] To ensure we preach the whole counsel of God’s Word, the vast majority of our preaching is consecutive expository preaching, meaning to preach successively through a book of the Bible. When a text has been preached—which sometimes takes multiple sermons—the next sermon’s text will be the next passage in the book. Preaching this way:
Keeps us from hijacking God’s agenda with our own agendas that often stress relevance, entertainment, and immediacy;
Makes it harder for us to abuse the Bible by reading it out of context;
dilutes the proclivity of the preacher to emphasize certain topics at the expense of others;
Keeps the content of the sermon fresh and surprising;
Makes for variety in the style of sermon as the preacher must address the topics that arise from the text;
Models proper Bible reading and interpretation for the ordinary Christian; and,
Helps us preach the whole Christ from the whole of Scripture.[4]
At The Shepherd’s Church, the law and communion homilies are also expositional. Since biblical counseling is the private ministry of the Word just as preaching is the public ministry of the Word, our counseling is expositional too. In counseling, less time is spent explaining the full meaning and context of a passage than on application, but it is vital to explain not only the context of the passage but also its place in the whole narrative of Scripture. Only when counselees understand the promises, commands, and wisdom of Scripture in their proper context can they apply them to their problems. And since biblical counseling is just a form of discipleship, the same applies to all of our discipling relationships. Thus, exposition is not only for the pulpit but for the entire church.
Exegetical: Find the Meaning in the Text
To be expositional, we must be able to rightly interpret Scripture, so we must be exegetical: “Exegesis is the practice of discovering the meaning of a text in its original cultural, historical, literary and theological contexts”.[5] It is to draw out of the text the meaning that is already in the text. The opposite of this is eisegesis, which is “imposing a preconceived or foreign meaning onto a text, even if that meaning could not have been originally intended at the time of its writing”.[6] A particularly egregious example of eisegesis is using “Lazarus, come out” (John 11:43) to support homosexuality, but more subtle examples are myriad. In what has been aptly called “narcigesis”, people often interpret passages individualistically to themselves rather than corporately to their original audience. The prevalence of Jeremiah 29:11 at graduations and Philippians 4:13 at sporting events is a prime example. Another common example is deviating from the text’s meaning as understood by the original audience in order to make it fit modern “science” and societal norms. This includes when Bible translators soften the language of certain terms to be more culturally acceptable today, like translating “blasphemed” (KJV, NKJV) in Titus 2:5 as the softer “reviled” (ESV) or “dishonored” (NASB). A common form of eisegesis whenever a clear reading of Scripture seems to contradict science—which we will discuss in the future—is to assume that what is clearly historical is merely metaphorical or figurative. So imposing a specific genre on a passage is a form of eisegesis:
The believer has to begin by affirming that the Bible transcends all genre considerations. Our human writings, like our human lives, are limited, partial, specialized, particular expressions of God’s life, which is unlimited….We can make the mistake of importing into the biblical literature ‘genres’ that are not really there, thereby distorting how we read the text. - James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days: A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, Moscow, ID: Canon Press: 1999: 31,34.
Finally, disregarding the universal commands of Scripture that make us uncomfortable by claiming they were only for the culture of the day—what I call the “cultural cop-out”—is eisegesis. All of these subordinate Scripture to ourselves rather than submitting ourselves to Scripture. Instead of intentionally or unintentionally bringing our own meaning to the text, we must find the meaning in the text following these rules:
Scripture interprets Scripture: The Bible contains over 63,000 cross-references, so many passages are interpreted by other passages, as in Romans 4 or throughout Hebrews. Since these interpretations were inspired by the Holy Spirit, we know that they are correct.
Context interprets Scripture: We must never read a verse in isolation but always in its context and never try to interpret it without understanding the historical, cultural, and linguistic context.
Intent interprets Scripture: Every passage has an author with an intended meaning—and that one meaning is the only correct meaning unless another passage of Scripture in its interpretation gives us another meaning. However, that meaning can be correctly applied in many different ways.
The clear interprets the obscure: The same Holy Spirit inspired every word of Scripture, so no passage will contradict any other. We must interpret difficult passages in light of clear passages. Many cults have started by disregarding this.
All of Scripture is about Christ: Even when the writers didn’t realize it, they were writing about Christ (Luke 24:44, 1 Peter 1:11), so while every passage only has one meaning, it always contributes somehow to the underlying theme of Christ. Therefore, good exegesis always looks for the connection to Christ.
In everything from public preaching to private study, this is how we must approach Scripture in order to rightly interpret it, and—once we have interpreted it—to apply it to our lives. We all must do this, not just pastors, church officers, or professional theologians: we must all be theologiansdespite the immense effort it will take. The Bible is the source of priceless gems beyond number, but those gems must be mined with difficulty. God hides the unsearchable riches of Christ from the wise and understanding but by the Holy Spirit reveals them to His children (Luke 10:21, 1 Corinthians 1:27). Many passages of Scripture are difficult to understand, which ignorant and unstable people twist to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:15-16). This is why exegesis is so important for every saint.
Fortunately, we have an abundance of tools to help us understand Scripture—more than many of the greatest scholars in church history! And it doesn’t take a massive theological library either. A good study Bible with cross references and notes providing historical context is one of the most powerful tools in a Christian’s arsenal. Concordances, bible dictionaries, and lexicons are also helpful, allowing you to examine the meaning of the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words as well as how they are used throughout Scripture. And since it is the job of the Holy Spirit to reveal the truths of Scripture (John 14:26), we must always approach the Scriptures praying for His help. Thus, proper exegesis is not only vital for every Christian but within our grasp.
At The Shepherd’s Church, we are serious about submitting ourselves entirely to Scripture, which requires us to be expositional and exegetical. This is vital since we exist to glorify God through the preaching, singing, hearing, and doing of His Word. So we will not ignore the meaning of the text by substitution our own. We will not forsake the authoritative declaration of God’s Word for a worldly lecture or motivational speech. We will properly interpret and declare the Word of God because it has never been more important: “The answer to the radical relativism of our culture and its accompanying uncertainties is the Bible’s claim of authority…we have nothing of importance, merit, or authority to say comparable to what God has said”.[7]
NOTES
[1] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers: 40th Anniversary Edition, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 2011: 119.
[2] Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group: 2018: 24-25.
[3] Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group: 2018: 23.
[4] Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, Geanies House, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications: 2009: 107–121.
[5] Daniel G. Reid et al., Dictionary of Christianity in America, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press: 1990.
[6] Stanley Grenz, David Guretzki, and Cherith Fee Nordling, Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press: 1999: 49.
[7] Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group: 2018: 23-24.
