William Sangster, the twentieth-century Methodist preacher, began a volume on preaching with these words: “Preaching is in the shadows. The world does not believe in it.”1 Today the situation is graver still. Despite its recovery in some pockets of the global church in recent decades, strong, healthy preaching largely remains in the shadows—but now it seems many churches do not believe in it.
Expository preaching is marked by doctrinal clarity, a sense of gravity, and convincing argumentation. It uses the Bible to preach the Bible. But much of what emanates from modern pulpits misses the mark. We should not expect preaching that fails to explain the Scriptures and exalt Jesus Christ to provide anything more than a superficial impact in the lives of its hearers.
Expository preaching uses the Bible to preach the Bible.
How do we explain the lack of expository preaching in many of today’s churches? A loss of confidence in the Bible and a tendency to fight the wrong battles are two prominent reasons.
A Loss of Confidence in the Bible
In recent years there has been an erosion of confidence in the Bible’s authority and sufficiency. Several factors are at work to undermine the church’s view of the Bible.
Undermined by Liberalism
In the early nineteenth century, the church was at war—not against flesh and blood but against theological liberalism. Certain groups challenged the miraculous, questioned the divine, and contested the New Testament’s historicity. Evangelicals largely weathered that storm, and many of the empty churches we see today testify to the futility of the quest for a demythologized Christ.
But the battle for the Bible didn’t die with nineteenth-century liberalism. It’s alive and well today, though in subtler forms. The war wages on in certain colleges, for example, with students sitting under the instruction of professors who are theologically conservative in name only. “We affirm Jesus’ resurrection,” they’ll say, “just not His bodily resurrection. It’s a spiritual or metaphorical resurrection the Bible has in mind.”
If schools and institutions are training the next generation of ministers to embrace—or at least to be sympathetic toward—such views, it should come as no surprise that the churches led by these ministers will lose confidence in the Bible’s core teachings.
Undermined by Felt Needs
Secondly, and increasingly, sermons begin with man and his need rather than with God and His glory. The Scriptures are neglected or abused, serving as a springboard for talks far removed from biblical exposition.
Speaking at a pastors’ conference, Dick Lucas once warned of this felt-needs approach to preaching, explaining that the pew cannot control the pulpit; pastors cannot deliver demand-led preaching, because no one demands the Gospel. Perhaps this is what Paul had in mind when he instructed Timothy to preach the word “in season and out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2). Even when people demand something else, the pastor’s task is to preach the Bible.
Our sermons must begin with God and His glory and not with man and his need.
Undermined by Extrabiblical “Prophetic” Words
Thirdly, whether he knows it or not, pastors may sideline the Bible’s authority when they use phrases like “God spoke to me” or “That is what God said then; this is what God is saying now.” Or perhaps his people might approach him, saying, “Pastor, I have this problem, and I wonder if you wouldn’t give me a word directly from God to address it.”
Like the new liberalism, this attack on the Bible takes a subtle form. Sinclair Ferguson comments that while many such pastors will deny “that additions are being made to the canon of Scripture, it is nevertheless implied that an actual addition is being made to the canon of living.”2
God speaks authoritatively and sufficiently in His written Word. The task of the preacher is to proclaim it and apply it.
Undermined by Psychological Theory
Finally, confidence in the Scriptures has been eroded by a preoccupation with psychological theory. Too many modern pulpits offer a strange blend of psychology and theology, resulting in a paradigm the Bible wouldn’t recognize. When sin is redefined in terms of lacking self-esteem, people will be directed toward a psychologist’s couch but not to the Savior’s cross.
A Tendency to Fight the Wrong Battles
A second reason pastors stop preaching expositionally is because of a tendency to use the pulpit to fight the wrong battles.
There are many “civilian pursuits” (2 Tim. 2:4) in which a pastor can get tangled—and these matters are not always inherently bad to address! But if secondary issues become the sole focus of a pastor’s ministry, the result will be an eventual and inevitable drift away from faithful preaching.
The political pulpit is an example. When a pastor becomes convinced that the central issue facing the church is political rather than theological, exposition will take a back seat to political speeches—for calls to “wage war for the soul of the nation.”
The Bible calls us to wage war not for governing entities but for eternal souls, irrespective of the political climate in which they live. Whether individuals are under the burden of a dictatorial regime, living in an atheistic communist state, or in an environment of rampant capitalism, the need is the same: Men and women need to hear where they stand in relationship to God. If a congregation loses this focus, it will soon prioritize voting over praying, mobilizing on the strength of human agendas rather than on the divine mandate to make disciples.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, preaching in Canada on one occasion, clarified what true Gospel-proclamation is and is not:
The thing that makes the Christian message a Gospel is that it is a proclamation of the good news.
It is not just topical comments on the latest scandal in the newspaper or the latest bits of news. It is not that we spend our time in telling kings and princes and presidents and prime ministers how they ought to be running their countries and how they ought to be solving the international problem. We are not qualified to do so. …
What was it that the Apostle preached about? Did the Apostle preach politics to these people? Did he say to them that it is about time you bandied yourselves together and raised an army to rid yourselves of the yoke of the Roman Empire? Did he object to taxation? Did he protest against the various things that were happening? That was not his message at all.3
And politics is just one example of a secondary concern that can overtake a pulpit. Pet doctrinal issues, denominational disputes, matters of preference and practice—these and more besides, when wrongly prioritized, will displace the Gospel preaching that should be central to pulpit ministry.
So how are we to determine what battles to fight? First and foremost, by reading the Bible prayerfully and dependently. We have the ministry of Christ and His apostles as our example. While they were not ignorant to the cultural issues before them, they were clear on their emphasis: No matter the context, they preached the Gospel.
An Invitation to Recover Expository Preaching
Writing just after the Second World War, James S. Stewart summarized what he believed was the root of the decline in expositional preaching by quoting the Anglican bishop Charles Gore: “The disease of modern preaching is its search after popularity.”4 This same disease threatens to infect today’s churches. Rather than preaching the Bible, some preachers have attempted to gain cultural traction by addressing felt needs and integrating psychology with theology. And rather than preaching the Gospel, certain pulpits have become nothing more than soap boxes for the latest political or cultural moments.
These emphases are popular. They scratch itching ears. But they will never produce saving faith. The Gospel proclaimed from the Bible is the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16–17 ).
For many, it’s high time to bring preaching out of the shadows—to borrow Sangster’s phrase—and into its rightful place: front and center, guarding and guiding the church.
This article was adapted from the sermon “What Happened to Expository Preaching?” by Alistair Begg.
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W. E. Sangster, The Craft of Sermon Construction (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1951), 11. ↩︎
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Sinclair Ferguson, The Holy Spirit, Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 231–32. ↩︎
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“Not in Word Only,” in Tony Sargent, The Sacred Anointing: The Preaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 264, 267–68. ↩︎
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Charles Gore, quoted in James S. Stewart, Heralds of God (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 29. ↩︎
