Sunday, September 07, 2008

What Is Expository Preaching?


Dan at Ramblin’ Pastor Man shares J. I. Packer’s definition of expository preaching:
Expository preaching is the preaching of the man who knows Holy Scripture to be the living Word of the living God, and who desires only that it should be free to speak its own message to sinful men and women; who therefore preaches from a text, and in preaching labors, as the Puritans would say, to ‘open’ it, or, in [Charles] Simeon’s phrase, to ‘bring out of the text what is there’; whose whole aim in preaching is to show his hearers what the text is saying to them about God and about themselves, and to lead them into what Barth called ‘the strange new world within the Bible’ in order that they may be met by him who is the Lord of that world.
Dan goes on to unpack this definition (while quoting from the ESV) in the rest of the post. You can read J. I. Packer’s compete essay at Crossway’s site.

No comments: