Verse By Verse Bible Exposition

Over the past year I have written much about expository preaching from how to do it to why to do it. I believe in every word I have written. Today I want to explore and area that we rarely talk about. That is the physical environment in which we preach. Environment does not make the preaching or the sermon but it certainly can take away from it. Preachers need to take into consideration the hearers. Who is in the congregation? What physical things do they bring with them that they cannot control? I have always been very conscience of the temperature of the room and building I was preaching and teaching in. In my one church I had two ladies. Mrs. J was always cold. You could have the room 80 degrees and she could still be cold. Mrs. P was usually always too warm. So when we moved into a new auditorium I experimented with the temperature for a few weeks. I finally found the spot where Mrs. J was a little cold and Mrs. P was a little warm. The rest of the congregation was just right.

In this blog I am going to tackle what may be a sensitive subject to some. It is the question of Manuscript Preaching vs. Outline Preaching. I am an outline preacher. I have never written out and preached from a manuscript. The only time I use a manuscript is for a wedding ceremony. I don’t use a manuscript for any other service including a funeral service. Let me say at the outset that I am not totally against manuscript preaching. Some can preach no other way. I have also heard a few good manuscript preachers. But I have also heard a lot of bad ones. When I start my sermon preparation I follow my own rules of expository preaching. I look for the main point of the passage. I then break down the passage into the writer’s steps toward the main point. Then I expound on the sub points to bring the message of the passage as a whole out to the hearer as the original writer is trying to get across. As I build the sermon point by point the passage comes alive and burns on my heart. I writ

I believe in expository preaching with my whole heart, my whole soul and my whole life. I have dedicated my adult life to expository preaching and promoting it in churches, to pastors and to Christians in the complete world. I do not understand why it is not more widely promoted, accepted and used. Maybe I do. It will not make you rich. It will not make you popular. It will not make you famous. There is nothing to personally gain from it. But I just do not understand all of the other preaching in the world that is not expository. There is a key to expository preaching that I can sum up in one phrase: “Look at the verse!” Look at the passage. Look at your Bible. Look at the Word of God. I said that over and over in my ministry. I don’t know why others don’t say it more. It is so simple. It is very direct. Do you have a Bible in your hands? Do you have a Bible in your lap? And then throughout the sermon, look at it. I do. I do that constantly when I am listening to a sermon. Keep refer

I believe in expository preaching. It is my pet peeve. It is an obsession with me. It makes it very hard for me to attend church many Sundays. This is nothing new. I have been an expository preacher for the last 50 years. The first sermon I ever preached was an expository sermon. My last one was too. Every sermon in between has been an expository sermon. Yep, I am focused. There is a reason for that. When I stand in a pulpit the authority is not in my words but in God’s Word. I want to get it right. I want people to be able to trust, rely on and depend on what I say. Not because I said it but because God said it. If I ever preach just what “I think”, then there is no reason for me to preach ever again. There are millions who do just that. I hunger to preach the Word of God. I long to do it and do it right. Last Sunday I sat in a worship and sang a well-known contemporary Christian song. A lyric caught my ear. It said “I was an orphan.” Some of you might know that song and that phra

Right preaching should bring right practice. The reason I believe so strongly in expository preaching is so that I preach the Word of God accurately, honestly and precisely. Then I want to “practice what I preach” accurately, honestly and precisely. I have noticed an alarming trend in the last 10 years. The majority of churches that I have been in during that time are not regularly having a communion service. These are mostly Baptist churches. One of the Baptist distinctives for me has always been “Two Ordinances”, baptism and communion. We also call the later The Lord’s Supper. Am I missing something? Did something change? Did the Bible change? My Bible hasn’t changed so I have not seen nor heard anything differently. In my 31 years of active pastoring in 3 different states it was my practice to have communion once a month on the first Sunday of the month. On a rare occasion I moved it to a different Sunday because of a conflict. But I always led the congregation in the Lord’s Sup