Healthy Church, part 2

The first mark of a healthy church, according to Dever is “expositional preaching.”

He writes, “Expositional preaching is the kind of preaching that, quite simply, exposes God’s Word. It takes a particular passage of Scripture, explains that passage, and then applies the meaning of the passage to the life of the congregation.”

Expositional preaching is more about “how a preacher decides” what to say. What is the thing that drives the sermon? Is it the text or something else? This is not a matter of style, Dever says, but rather a matter of the “biblical content” of the sermon itself.

Expositional preaching is taking the subject from the text for the sermon; then taking the structure of the text about the subject for the structure of the sermon. Notice, everything is tied back to the text itself. Dever says it this way: “the point of the passage is the point of the sermon.”

The fundamental assumption behind this approach to preaching/teaching is the assumption that we believe God has spoken to us in his Word and that he has a particular message for us in his word. Every word, phrase, and sentence is “God-breathed” from the Holy Spirit. The purpose in this method of preaching is to get at what the author intended under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

A “steady diet” of expositional preaching/teaching fosters a hunger for “hearing” from God through His Word, not just a man’s opinion about His Word. Then, God’s Spirit uses his word to cultivate spiritual growth in His people.

There you go...a summary of Dever’s first mark of a healthy church. There are other methods of preaching/teaching that can be beneficial to congregations, but it seems to me that this approach helps people, including the one speaking, that we are after what God says rather than what man says.

Now, you can test your pastor. Does he preach expositional sermons? (Please be kind, I’m still learning)