Journal: Masters Seminary Journal
Volume: TMSJ 01:2 (Fall 1990)
Article: Rediscovering Expository Preaching
Author: Richard L. Mayhue

---

MSJ 1:2 (Fall 90) p. 109

Rediscovering Expository Preaching

Richard L. Mayhue

Vice President and Dean
Professor of Pastoral Ministries
The Master’s Seminary

Biblical preaching’s authenticity is significantly tarnished by contemporary communicators’ being more concerned with personal relevance than God’s revelation. Scripture unmistakably requires a proclamation focused on God’s will and mankind’s obligation to obey. With men wholly committed to God’s Word, the expository method commends itself as preaching that is true to the Bible. The method presupposes an exegetical process to extract the God-intended meaning of Scripture and an explanation of that meaning in a contemporary understandable way. The biblical essence and apostolic spirit of expository preaching needs to be recaptured in the training of men newly committed to “preaching the Word.”

* * * * *

The Master’s Seminary joins with others1 in accepting the urgent responsibility for transmitting the Pauline legacy to “preach the Word” (2 Tim 4:2). The current series of articles in The Master’s Seminary Journal signal an effort to instill in twenty-first century preachers a pattern of biblical preaching inherited from their predecessors.2

Every generation shares the kind of dire circumstances that Amos prophesied for Israel: “‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘When I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for

MSJ 1:2 (Fall 90) p. 110

bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the LORD’“ (Amos 8:11). The last several centuries have proven this need again.

Reviewing Recent Trends

In an explanation of Heb 8:10, the Puritan commentator William Gouge (1575–1653) remarked,

Ministers are herein to imitate God, and, to their best endeavour, to instruct people in the mysteries of godliness, and to teach them what to believe and practice, and then to stir them up in act and deed, to do what they are instructed to do. Their labor otherwise is likely to be in vain. Neglect of this course is a main cause that men fall into as many errors as they do in these days.3

To this editorial by Gouge, Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) adds a word about nineteenth-century England:

I may add that this last remark has gained mor...

visitor : : uid: ()