The seasoned pastor stood into his pulpit with the audience ready to receive God’s Word. He had about five times the amount of people in his sanctuary as he normally would. Area churches had gathered together to have a sort of moving revival. One night they’d be at one guys church, the next night another. This guy was amped up about the opportunity.
What he said next floored me.
“I’m not really sure what the Bible says about this, but here is what I’d like to tell you this evening…” He went on to give us “a message from the Lord” that had nothing to do with God’s Word. For the sake of your understanding, I need to mention that this was not some sort of charismatic service where this fella was being anointed and then prophesying. This was just an old preacher who had a lot of opinions that he thought we needed to know.
I wish I could say that this guy was alone in his preaching style. But judging from the chorus of “Amen’s”, I fear that this is a bit more common than we’d like to admit. In fact if what I read in history books—and what other dear saints have told me—is correct, this was a pretty prominent way of preaching back in the day. Judging from studies done on the biblical ignorance of many professing Christians, I have to believe that there has indeed been a famish in our land.
But history tends to follow pendulum swings. The church is not immune. As finite and sinful human beings we have a tendency to bounce from one extreme to another—dancing around the truth along the way.
The Over-swing
In recent years I have witnessed a revival of expositional preaching. There are so many books out on how to do expository preaching. Seminaries are training young pastors to preach expositionally. It is being drilled in our heads to only preach what the text says, to make the main point of your sermon the main point of your text.
I praise God for this revival. Not for one moment will I say that I believe we need less expositional preaching.
Having said this, I think we preachers (especially those of us who are more inexperienced) can ride the horse of verse-by-verse expository preaching straight off a cliff. In so many books on expositional preaching I’ve seen whole sections devoted to the dangers of topical preaching. Seldom do I see sections devoted to a style of preaching that I think is about as dangerous; namely, what I like to call commentary preaching.
Commentary preaching is when a well-meaning pastor stands before the congregation and faithfully tells us what the Bible says. He walks through each verse providing a good commentary as he goes along. He then closes the Bible, prays, and expects God to do the work of using His Word in a way that it doesn’t return empty. While I admire this guys faith in God’s ability to use His Word, I don’t know that we can rightly call this preaching.
Bryan Chapell calls this a “pre-sermon” noting that “they dispense information about a text without relevant application from the text that helps listeners understand their obligations to Christ and his ministry to them.” (55) He then rightly notes that “information without applications yields frustration”. (56)
We rightly don’t want to be like one of those guys who just spouts out a verse and then spends the entire time on something he calls “application”. But in our efforts to not be “that guy” we’ve become another “that guy” and we aren’t feeding our sheep.
Think of it this way. If I always only plopped a big juicy rib-eye steak in front of a 3 month old at supper time—she’d die of starvation just as if I hadn’t fed her at all. The better method—if you want your three month old to eat steak—would be to put it in a blender and serve it to her in a way she can digest. And as you go along and she grows a bit, eventually you work towards showing her how to use a knife and start cutting it up herself.
That analogy breaks down at many points so don’t press it any further than you ought. All I’m trying to say is that a verse-by-verse running commentary doesn’t feed the sheep much better than topical preaching. You’re probably just training them how to be Job’s counselors—feeding them full of biblical truth but not helping them learn how to rightly apply it.
Let’s not over-swing and simply starve our sheep by another method.
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