reFocus 08: R. Kent Hughes

This morning, R. Kent Hughes—Senior Pastor Emeritus at College Church in Wheaton, Illinois—is our speaker. He is speaking this morning on Preaching Authority: What the Preacher Must Believe About the Word.

It has now been confirmed that we will post audio and video from all conference sessions on the reFocus Canada website (with links from this blog) as soon as they are available. Thus, it is no longer necessary for me to type up such detailed notes, and so this post will be more of an outline summary.

Introduction

Pastor Hughes "lives, eats, and drinks" biblical exposition, which has been at the heart of his ministry for the last 40 years. He enumerated the many ways in which the Bible is "dis-exposited," the most astounding example of which was using Revelation 11:10a as a Christmas text (!). There has been a drift away from biblical preaching, where rather than getting good Sunday meals, we are instead getting "homiletical indigestion."

Near the end of his introduction, Pastor Hughes quoted from United Methodist William H. Willimon's Fall 1995 Leadership Magazine article "Been There, Preached That" (PDF file). The full quote from that article merits reproducing here:

many...self-proclaimed biblical preachers now sound more like liberal mainliners than liberal mainliners...becoming "user-friendly" and "inclusive," taking their homiletical cues from the "felt needs" of us "boomers" and "busters" rather than the excruciating demands of the Bible...reducing salvation to self-esteem, sin to maladjustment, church to group therapy, and Jesus to Dear Abby [as] our chief means of perverting the biblical text.

Necessary beliefs for expositing the word of God

After summing up the current state of affairs, Pastor Hughes then discussed three fundamental beliefs about Scripture that are essential to biblical exposition:

1. Wholly inerrant: You will not have biblical exposition without a high inerrantist view of Scripture. See 2 Timothy 3:16-17; John 10:35; Matthew 5:18. God is infallible, and therefore Scripture is infallible.
   
   
2. Totally Sufficient: You most also hold to the sufficiency of Scripture. You must personally own the conviction that the Scriptures are our very life and food (referencing Moses 32:46-47; Psalms 1, 19, 119; Isaiah 66:2; Matthew 4:4).
   
   
3. Massively Potent: See Hebrews 4:12. There is the story of a drunk's mocking of George Whitefield by preaching one of Whitefield's sermons back to him, and being convicted by the Holy Spirit as he was preaching it!

Biblical exposition will only flourish when a preacher believes that Scripture is wholly inerrant, totally sufficient, and massively potent. If you truly believe this—not merely claim to believe it, but believe it with all your heart and soul and mind,—then you will countenance nothing less than wholly preaching God's word.

Why preachers don't exposit

But why is it that many evangelical, ostensibly biblical preachers claim to belive in the inerrancy, sufficiency, and potency of Scripture, and yet do not preach expositorially? It could be for such reasons as:

• They don't truly believe in the inerrancy, sufficiency, or potency of Scripture.
  
  
• They do not really believe that the plain word of God (Calvin's verbum nudem) will connect.
  
  
• They are convinced that the Bible was written in the past for a past audience (but we know that God had future audiences in mind as well as contemporary audiences).



• They think exposition isn't worth the effort, and that counselling or programs engage people more.

Word and Spirit

Against all these problems, Pastor Hughes expressed his main point thus: the word of God and the Spirit of God are inseparable. Where the word is preached, the Spirit is at work; and where you don't have the word, you don't have the Spirit.

He referred extensively here to John Woodhouse's September 1988 Briefing article "Word and Spirit: the God of Word II," in which Woodhouse pointed out that the Hebrew word ruah and the equivalent Greek word pneuma can both mean either "breath" or "wind." Citing numerous biblical passages, Woodhouse (via Hughes) demonstrated the close conjunction of God's word and God's Spirit throughout both the Old and New Testaments—so much so, that, to quote John Woodhouse, "where the word of God is, there the Spirit is also. Word and breath cannot be separated."

The surest way to recover preaching the word of God is to truly expound the word of God. Exposition looses the manifold work of the Spirit. Word and Spirit go hand in hand (to paraphrase).

The historical roots of biblical exposition

Pastor Hughes then demonstrated that expository preaching dates back to the apostolic era, undergoing a renaissance during the Reformation. It is exhortation and teaching. Any other kind of teaching is an aberration of the apostolic practice.

Following Calvin's understanding of the sealing of the Mosaic Covenant in Exodus 24 and Christ's institution of the New Covenant in the Lord's Supper, we should view and treat the New Testament Scriptures as if they were written in the blood of Christ. Calvin's response to this was to carefully exposit through one book of the Bible after another in his preaching.

Conclusion

Exposition needs to be the week-in, week-out diet of the church. The singlemost important question a preacher must ask is, "What does the text say, and how can I communicate it to my people?"

There are a number of pluses to biblical exposition:

1. You will be challenged to preach texts you would never otherwise have taught, or would in some cases have avoided (e.g., Matthew's passages on divorce, or some of the material in Joshua). [I can testify to this, as a once-atheist Jew who was saved through our senior pastor's careful exposition of Romans 9 to 11 in a 99.9% Gentile (though multi-ethnic) church. When the word of God is faithfully preached, the Holy Spirit works through that to regenerate and effectually call the lost.]
   
   
2. You will never have to wonder what to preach on Sunday.
   
   
3. Through exposition, you will grow in your knowledge of the Bible, deepen in your walk with God, and improve in your homiletical skills.
   
   
4. It keeps you subject to the text. It forces you to look to the Scriptures for both the theme and the symmetry of Scripture.
   
   
5. It gives you confidence inasmuch as you are faithful to God's word with a "Thus saith the Lord" authority and passion.
   
   
6. When the word of God is opened, there the Spirit speaks. It unleashes the manifold power of God's word.
   
   
7. When you work through sections of Scripture, you avoid the accusation of preaching to people. And anyhow, Scripture is often so appropriate to them, they think you're preaching to them anyhow.
   
   
8. Believers grow in the word of God.
   
   
9. You are continually surprised at the treasures in Scripture, which fills you with passion in your preaching.

What a glory to preach the word. There are those moments when you suddenly perceive yourself preaching—as if you were standing beside yourself—your words being spoken in the power of the Holy Spirit. Those moments are humbling, and wholly of God. Is it possible to imagine a work of comparable experience to that of proclaiming the word of God?