I had gotten to a point about a year ago where blogging and reading blogs had achieved a status in my life it shouldn’t have had, simply in terms of time and effort. Scaling way, way down since early October has been a very healthy thing for me: so much so, I almost don’t want to go back. But I do plan on doing more.

On a completely unrelated note, I don’t suppose you’re planning on attending the Ligoneir Conference in March? I am (Lord willing) along with fellow Mafia don, Rhett. I’m already pretty stoked.

I would also that even those who stress the overtly exegesis preaching (who would disagree with the RH method), like, for example, John MacArthur, do in fact practice the RH method in some manner. We must do so if we are Christians, otherwise we could just go to the local synagogue to hear a Rabbi preach on the OT.

But in listening to your comments, I would highly recommend this book to you particularly. Trust me; you need to get it. Even as a reference, it will open up a whole other world to you, and will certainly enrich the way you look at the text.

And BTW, you ever planning on blogging again? Or is Reformed Mafia it for you?

I’ve got Him We Proclaim lined up next, by Dennis Johnson, and I’m looking forward to it (hopefully) being more akin to what we’re discussing. It comes highly recommended, and judging from the size of it, it looks like the author goes into great detail.

Thanks for your comment,
Nathan

I’m preaching through James right now. This has been where some of the weak-spots of the inflexible, ironclad expository method have been highlighted for me. If you’re going to confine the meat of your sermon to simply explaining what the text says, then your congregation is not going to hear much about Jesus Christ, nor will they hear the Gospel preached to them for many, many weeks at a time: these things simply do not appear in the text of James. Now, I’ll happily affirm that they are implied throughout; they are taken as a sort of background information which James assumes his listeners have firmly in their grasp.

This is the sort of thing, plus the desire to have every sermon be Christ-centered, that causes me to tend to be more “textual” than “expository” in many sermons. In fact, as I’ve listened around the ‘net to the famous exp preachers, very few of them are strictly so.

(Technical note: by “textual” vs. “expository” I mean this difference:

Expository preaching, strictly speaking, is a sermon that is focused on explaining the text at hand. What does this text mean? It gets the “fleshing-out” of its body chiefly from grammatical and linguistic research (diving into the Greek and Hebrew).

Textual preaching, while having the same overall goal–to explain what the text means–tends to be much more free in terms of gathering the bulk of the sermon information from other portions of the Bible, rather than keeping a strict focus on only relaying what is in the foundational text. So, for instance, in James 3, the textual preacher may well ask, “What makes the tongue untamable?” and thus explore the issue of man’s depravity and what Jesus said about the mouth speaking that which is in the heart, etc. It is then natural to present God’s remedy for man’s depravity.

Most expository sermons I’ve ever heard actually combine these two technical distinctions to greater or lesser extents.)

So someone needs to write a book that neither follows a Redemptive Historical method of preaching, nor the opposite pole of Moralistic preaching, but I think that will have to come from a practicising pastor, perhaps Dever or someone akin, which shows how they keep Christ at the centre of their preaching week by week. Maybe something like this already exists is so what is it?