Give God the microphone

Chrisopher Ash explains seven blessings of consecutive expository preaching:

My minister once asked me to interview someone in church, using a hand-held microphone.

However he warned me, ‘This man is tremendously talkative and we need to keep the interview to its allotted time. So, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T GIVE HIM THE MICROPHONE!’ I held the microphone as I asked the first question and then clung to it tightly as I waited for his answer. All seemed well until, a few seconds into his answer, he said, ‘Do you mind if I take that thing [the microphone]?’ I couldn’t have a public tug of war, so I lamely surrendered the microphone and the interview overshot its time by some way!

I want to persuade us that teaching through Bible books gives God the microphone. Of course it’s not wrong to preach on a topic; but the most nourishing staple diet will be Bible books. The jargon name for this is consecutive expository preaching ministry, which simply means preaching through Bible books, bringing out of them what God has put into them by his Spirit.

Lifestyle tips?

A few years ago I took our daughter and a friend to Thorpe Park. While the girls went on a terrifying ride, I was minding my own business reading a book. To my surprise a stranger came up and asked me where I went to church! It turned out he was a Christian, and had seen me reading a Christian book. We chatted. When I said my job was to train preachers, he said — slightly wistfully — that at his church the sermons are ‘more like lifestyle tips’ than anything serious from the Bible. What he needed, though he may not have realised it, was consecutive expository preaching ministry!

Here are seven blessings from that kind of Bible teaching ministry.

1. Consecutive expository preaching safeguards God’s agenda against being hijacked by ours.

When we teach a topic we hold the microphone in front of God and ask him our questions. We hold the microphone there just long enough to hear his answers, and then take it away. We do not want to risk letting him have the microphone; after all, he might want to tell us all sorts of things we don’t want to hear. With consecutive expository preaching we give God the microphone and listen while he tells us whatever he wants. He sets the agenda.

So we won’t worry about whether our preaching is relevant, because we know that the Bible properly expounded is always relevant. God, who inspired it, knows our hearts. And we won’t be enslaved by feeling that we must entertain our hearers. We live in a culture in which we are ‘Amusing ourselves to death’ (the title of Neil Postman’s provocative book). Preachers feel they must compete with the movies and the soaps. Charles Spurgeon spoke of preachers who used a Bible text ‘as a mounting block from which to climb up onto our winged horse Pegasus’. The text doesn’t quite seem entertaining enough. So we launch off from it to something which will entertain. But expository preaching trusts that the Bible will be rivetingly interesting to hungry hearts.

God knows best what we need — expository preaching.

2. Consecutive expository preaching makes it harder for us to abuse the Bible by reading it out of context.

You can make the Bible mean whatever you want if you read it out of context. It’s hard to read lots of separate verses each in their context. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard. When people preach on a topic, they have to try. It’s also difficult for the hearers. It’s like being on a whistle-stop tour. The helicopter comes down briefly in Exodus; we have a quick look around. And then, before we know what has hit us, we have taken off and seconds later we have landed perhaps in Revelation. And so on. It is bewildering, even if our guide is being responsible and careful.

One of the great blessings of a consecutive expository series is that we are taken to a book and then quietly walked through it, reading the verses in context.

3. Consecutive expository preaching dilutes the selectivity of the preacher.

My heart sinks when someone asks me, ‘Please will you preach on the topic of Christian assurance?’ Help! What must I do? I ransack my mental map of the Bible (and some reference books) trying to forage anything helpful. I only have limited time, so I cannot read the Bible through from end to end. I pick the bits of the Bible that I happen to know and love that might help, try to put them in some coherent order and then give the talk.

But all the while the nagging thought in the back of my mind says, ‘Christopher, how can you be sure you haven’t missed some vital part of the Bible’s teaching in this area? Or how can you know you have got the proper balance in Scripture’s teaching?’ I can’t be sure. My teaching is likely to reflect my own partial knowledge and my prejudices.

But when I tackle a consecutive exposition, I know what I have to do. I must read, re-read, pray and worry away at this week’s passage, like a dog at a bone, seeking to preach what this passage says and not what I happen to want to preach about. Of course, someone still has to choose which Bible book to preach, and we should try to keep the whole Bible’s balance in this. But, having chosen the book, we have to preach it faithfully and in context.

This also means that we have to cover unpopular topics, simply because they come up in our series. The only reason I have preached about excommunication is that I preached through Matthew 18, and couldn’t avoid it. It doesn’t get picked for many series of topical sermons!

4. Consecutive expository preaching keeps the content of the sermon fresh and surprising.

You know in advance what some preachers are going to say. If their Bible passage is about prayer, you will get their standard prayer talk. Choose another passage that touches on prayer, and you will get the same sermon. Their preaching feels very much the same week after week. The result is a truncated gospel, a two-dimensional word of God.

But every Bible passage is there because it contributes something unique to God’s revelation. When a preacher asks, ‘What does this passage contribute? Why is this truth told in this way by this passage to these hearers?’ then there is a sense of healthy surprise and freshness in the preaching. It is always the same gospel, but never the same sermon.

5. Consecutive expository preaching makes for variety in style.

The fifth blessing is closely related to the fourth. If the fourth is about freshness of content, the fifth is about freshness of style. People sometimes associate expository preaching with a monotonous sameness of style. It should be just the reverse. For the Bible has a wide variety of styles. Romans, John, Proverbs and Job have very different styles. Preaching ought to reflect this (although it often doesn’t). If our preachers are really expounding Bible books, their preaching styles will be fresh and varied.

6. Consecutive expository preaching models good nourishing Bible reading for the ordinary Christian.

A good topic talk looks to the young Christian like a lucky dip, in which the preacher has dipped into the Bible and brought out plums. A bad topic talk looks like an unlucky dip! Either way, the young Christian can’t see how she or he could ever do that. They get to know the Bible as I got to know London as a teenager, by little pockets around underground stations. I remember how exciting it was to discover that London actually joined up overground! Bible books begin to introduce us to the bigger chunks of which the Bible is made up.

Consecutive exposition says to the ordinary Christian, you too can take Philippians (for example) and read through it day by day. You can take Philippians as a project for your personal times of Bible reading and prayer. Live in Philippians for a while. Read it all, and then read it bit by bit, connecting it up. This is a model for Bible reading that will nourish and sustain.

7. Consecutive expository preaching helps us preach the whole Christ from the whole of Scripture.

Mature discipleship comes from a full revelation of Jesus. And this comes only from the whole Bible. The only access we have to the authentic Jesus is from the whole Bible, which is the Father’s testimony given by the Spirit to the Son. So we may expect to grow in our knowledge of Jesus as we are taught the whole Bible. Christians who are only ever exposed to part of the Bible are only ever exposed to a truncated Jesus. The job of preachers is so to proclaim Christ that we may present people mature in him (Colossians 1.28,29). A diet of consecutive expository preaching will best preach the full riches of Christ.

So let us encourage our preachers to give God the microphone by opening up the books of the Bible to us. Let’s never be satisfied with ‘lifestyle tips’!

Christopher Ash works for the Proclamation Trust as Director of the Cornhill Training Course (http://www.proctrust.org.uk). This article is adapted and abbreviated from The Priority of Preaching (PTMedia/Christian Focus Publications, published in June 2009).