Well, the PCA web-magazine, By Faith Online may actually have restored a little bit of my faith in it. For a while, it seems that the magazine has been publishing a lot of fluff, and not much real content, but a recent article by Rev. Alistair Begg entitled What Happened to Expository Preaching? is an excellently meaty article on the lost art of expository preaching, that is, the reading of scripture as central to the sermon. Expository preaching will preach through scripture sequentially, and explain and expound upon what is read, rather than choosing a subject to preach on, and finding random verses through scripture that speak to that subject.

One of the things that I think scares many pastors from preaching expositionally through the “obscure” parts of the Bible is that pastors feel obligated to preach “the gospel” in their sermons. The problem is not their desire to preach the gospel… the problem is that many pastors have limited “the gospel” to the last few chapters of John. However, God’s Word is just as much in Leviticus as it is in Matthew. The Gospel was in God’s words to Abraham, just as it was in God’s words to Peter.

This line, for me, though an aside in the article, was well worth reading:

On the other side of the fence we discover others [preachers], equally mistaken, who claim to know better. They are committed to the faithful exposition of Scripture but are so buried in the text that they are completely divorced from the culture to which they have been called to preach. They are like those John Stott describes who shoot arrows from the island of the biblical text but fail to hit the island of contemporary culture. The arrows go straight up and come down on their own heads. These well-meaning and faithful students of the Word are so tied up in their “systems” that they do not discover what happens when one makes a reasonable attempt to bring together the two horizons of biblical theology and contemporary culture.