It is from the pulpit that God speaks to His people through the preaching of His Word. When His voice is removed and replaced with another, the church is quickly led astray. History bears witness to the fact that when the church loses its influence, the culture suffers and degrades. But worse than the damage to culture is the absolute tragic end of souls who meet their demise without ever being reconciled to God through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The modern pulpit has been hijacked. At many times throughout history, pulpits have been filled with the preaching of the Word of God, but now they are often filled with the shifting opinions of men. The thrust of the problem in much of the preaching we see is the pervasiveness of weightless sermons devoid of biblical truth. Churchgoers are consistently fed a steady diet of junk food, which leaves their souls emaciated. This is a tragic thing.

It is from the pulpit that God speaks to His people through the preaching of His Word. When His voice is removed and replaced with another, the church is quickly led astray. History bears witness to the fact that when the church loses its influence, the culture suffers and degrades. But worse than the damage to culture is the absolute tragic end of souls who meet their demise without ever being reconciled to God through the gospel of Jesus Christ. The church must be willing to herald God’s Word unashamed, and to do this, we must be willing to give our pulpits to God.

Through the years, much ink has been spilled on the topic of preaching. It is not my goal to exhaust this topic or to explore every element of it, but instead, to note three main characteristics that must exist in faithful preaching. If I may, let me submit that to give God the pulpit, we must preach biblically, expositionally, and passionately.

Preach Biblically

When Paul told Timothy to “preach the word” (2 Tim. 4:2), he did not mean that Timothy was to make cursory references to obscure verses in his preaching, but rather, that he would make the Scriptures the source and the focus of his preaching. In other words, the content and main point of our preaching must be the special self-revelation of the person of God, which is found only in the Bible. Otherwise, it cannot be called biblical.

So, what does biblical preaching mean?

It means the Bible is our primary, secondary, and tertiary source. It means that the main idea of our sermons is not based on a TV show we recently watched or a chapter of a book we just read. It means that we are endeavoring to deliver to God’s people something from His Word. The Bible is our main text—the authoritative source of our sermons. Bryan Chapell is correct when he says, “Without the authority of the Word, preaching becomes an endless search for topics, therapies, and techniques that will win approval, promote acceptance, advance a cause, or soothe worry.”¹

Further, our supporting texts are also from the Scriptures. The best way to interpret the Bible is not by bringing in some other authority. To do so would be to undermine the Bible’s inherent authority. We must understand and interpret Scripture with Scripture. This is called synthesis.

When we employ the method of synthesis—Scripture interpreting Scripture—we are also able to derive biblical doctrine. We do not derive Christian doctrine—our theology—ultimately from religious tradition, but from carefully interpreted, rightly synthesized verses of Holy Scripture.

The ultimate goal of biblical preaching is to drive believers back into the Word of God, which cleanses and nourishes them (Eph. 5:26–30). Understanding the Scriptures is the key to understanding God, because in them, we see the revelation of Jesus Christ, who is Himself “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) and “the exact imprint of His nature” (Heb. 1:3). The way to ignite the church is to give them the unadulterated Word of God, because in His Word, we encounter the words and works of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Bible must be preached from our pulpits. As John MacArthur writes, “If there is to be a reformation of the pulpit, and a revival again in the church, it will only come about through God-glorifying, Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered preaching. This and this alone is the kind of preaching God blesses—biblical preaching.”²

Preach Expositionally

Expositional (or expository) preaching has gotten a bad rap through the years. Oftentimes, it is assumed that expository preaching means dry ninety-minute sermons or laboring in a single book of the Bible for decades or droning on with Hebrew and Greek word studies and tenses. But these are merely gross characterizations that do not really reflect the true heart of expository preaching.

Read More