My wife and I attained a Sunday preaching service in a local church in New York today, it was one with a lot of verses. Generally it’s exhortation from the Bible however there was the repetitive nature of some of the obvious points. The high amount of Bible references scripture brought into the sermon makes it impossible to expound them sufficiently and neither do people have the energy to keep tag of them. It therefore can get a feel of “touch and go” kind of a sermon without the deep exposition people are looking for. This is problematic because it’s sort of giving you a mixture of all kinds of spiritual feeding without a direction of in-depth exposition from the text passage.

 

I think preaching requires substantial time of meditation and reflection on the scripture to bring out the depth of the word of God as per the revelation of the Holy Spirit. And that revelation and the reflection you got will have to sync with the needs and the fallen conditions of the modern contemporary society that we live in. Without all these things we will be finding ourselves doing a technical theological discourse without feeling and connection to the modern time.

 

Also exposition will require us to exegete the text from which we preach based on the context and the culture and the historical background of the passage when it was written. Without knowing the background of such it will be not accurate exegesis. Once we execute the context the real meaning of the passage at that point of time, we are able to move forward to project that to the modern community today and saying what it means. That kind of exegesis will really require a good commentary to help you to bring out the original meaning original historical context.

 

I don’t think you will need highly technical commentary to achieve that purpose. Or else you’ll find yourselves being too  immersed into the technical highly  theological thinking which is not suitable for the congregation.

 

In conclusion after learning from preaching lab one in my MDiv hybrid class preaching lab 1 in RTS Orlando, I discovered that I myself have a tendency in bringing a lot of verses to expound on the message but insufficiently in depth. Although mine is deeper exposition with the side verses. Actually my problem is expounding the sidekick versus too deep that overwhelms the main passage. This is this is actually the exact words or almost exact words of my professor.

Case in point I was preaching from the text of genesis 12 about Abraham’s obedience at one point, and I quoted Hebrews on Jesus struggling and with loud cries of tears in prayers to God the Father to save him, and Jesus learned obedience through suffering. That exposition impacted my professor more than the actual passage of Genesis 12. I learned a big lesson. I think I need to go back to Martin Lloyd Jones book preaching and preachers. Lloyd Jones is such an expert in exposition message preaching. Thank God for his servant like Martin Lloyd Jones and others like Tim Keller etc.