Defining Expository Preaching

Discussions about preaching divide it into three types: topical, textual, and expository. Topical messages usually combine a series of Bible verses that loosely connect with a theme. Textual preaching uses a short text or passage that generally serves as a gateway into whatever subject the preacher chooses to address. Neither the topical nor the textual method represents a serious effort to interpret, understand, explain, or apply God’s truth in the context of the Scripture(s) used.

By contrast, expository preaching focuses predominantly on the text(s) under consideration along with its (their) context(s).1 Exposition normally concentrates on a single text of Scripture, but it is sometimes possible for a thematic/theological message or a historical/biographical discourse to be expository in nature. An exposition may treat any length of passage.

One way to clarify expository preaching is to identify what it is not.2

1. It is not a commentary running from word to word and verse to verse without unity, outline, and pervasive drive.
2. It is not rambling comments and offhand remarks about a passage without a background of thorough exegesis and logical order.
3. It is not a mass of disconnected suggestions and inferences based on the surface meaning of a passage but not sustained by a depth-and-breadth study of the text.
4. It is not pure exegesis, no matter how scholarly, if it lacks a theme, thesis, outline, and development.
5. It is not a mere structural outline of a passage with a few supporting comments but without other rhetorical and sermonic elements.
6. It is not a topical homily using scattered parts of the passage but omitting discussion of other equally important parts.
7. It is not a chopped-up collection of grammatical findings and quotations from commentaries without a fusing of these elements into a smooth, flowing, interesting, and compelling message.
8. It is not a Sunday-school-lesson type of discussion that has an outline of the contents, informality, and fervency but lacks sermonic structure and rhetorical ingredients.
9. It is not a Bible reading that links a number of scattered passages treating a common theme but fails to handle any of them in a thorough, grammatical, and contextual manner.
10. It is not the ordinary devotional or prayer-meeting talk that combines running commentary, rambling remarks, disconnected suggestions, and personal reactions into a semi-inspirational discussion but lacks the benefit of the basic exegetical-contextual study and persuasive elements.

Before proceeding farther, consider the English word group “expose, exposition, expositor, expository.” According to Webster, an exposition is a discourse to convey information or explain what is difficult to understand.3 Applying this idea to preaching requires that an expositor be one who explains Scripture by laying open the text to public view in order to set forth its meaning, explain what is difficult to understand, and make appropriate application.

John Calvin’s centuries-old understanding of exposition is very similar::

First of all, Calvin understood preaching to be the explication of Scripture. The words of Scripture are the source and content of preaching. As an expositor, Calvin brought to the task of preaching all the skills of a humanist scholar. As an interpreter, Calvin explicated the text, seeking its natural, its true, its scriptural meaning.… Preaching is not only the explication of Scripture, it is also the application of Scripture. Just as Calvin explicated Scripture word by word, so he applied the Scripture sentence by sentence to the life and experience of his congregation.4

Exposition is not so much defined by the form of the message as it is by the source and process through which the message was formed. Unger poignantly captures this sense:

No matter what the length of the portion explained may be, if it is handled in such a way that its real and essential meaning as it existed in the mind of the particular Biblical writer and as it exists in the light of the overall context of Scripture is made plain and applied to the present-day needs of the hearers, it may properly be said to be expository preaching.… It is emphatically not preaching about the Bible, but preaching the Bible. “What saith the Lord” is the alpha and the omega of expository preaching. It begins in the Bible and ends in the Bible and all that intervenes springs from the Bible. In other words, expository preaching is Bible-centered preaching.5

Two other definitions of exposition help clarify what it is:

At its best, expository preaching is “the presentation of biblical truth, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, Spirit-guided study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit applies first to the life of the preacher and then through him to his congregation.”6

In the 1950’ ML-J [D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones] was virtually alone in England in engaging in what he meant by ‘expository preaching’. For preaching to qualify for that designation it was not enough, in his view, that its content be biblical; addresses which concentrated upon word-studies, or which gave running commentary and analyses of whole chapters, might be termed ‘biblical’, but that is not the same as exposition. To expound is not simply to give the correct grammatical sense of a verse or passage, it is rather to set out principles or doctrines which the words are intended to convey. True expository preaching is, therefore, doctrinal preaching, it is preaching which addresses specific truths from God to man. The expository preacher is not one who ‘shares his studies’ with others, he is an ambassador and a messenger, authoritatively delivering the Word of God to men. Such preaching presents a text, then, with that text in sight throughout, there is deduction, argument and appeal, the whole making up a message which bears the authority of Scripture itself. Given such a conception, a faithful discharge of the teaching office necessitates the preacher being able to say, with Paul, ‘We are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ’ (2 Cor. 2:17). If this involves a staggeringly high view of preaching, it was nothing more, Dr. Lloyd-Jones believed, than is required of the ministerial office.7

In summary, the following minimal elements identify expository preaching:

1. The message finds its sole source in Scripture.8
2. The message is extracted from Scripture through careful exegesis.
3. The message preparation correctly interprets Scripture in its normal sense and its context.
4. The message clearly explains the original God-intended meaning of Scripture.
5. The message applies the Scriptural meaning for today.

The spirit of expository preaching is exemplified in two biblical texts:

And they read from the book, from the law of God, translating to give the sense so that they understood the reading. (Neh. 8:8)

Therefore I testify to you this day, that I am innocent of the blood of all men. For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God. (Acts 20:26–27)

A particular example is Jesus’ expounding of Isa. 61:1–2 in the synagogue (Luke 4:16–22). He later gave a thematic exposition of Himself to the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27, 32, 44–47). In Acts 8:27–35 Phillip expounded Isa. 53:7–8 for the Ethiopian eunuch. Stephen preached a historical/biographical expository sermon to the Jews before they stoned him (Acts 7:2–53).

Greer Boyce has aptly summarized this definition of expository preaching:

In short, expository preaching demands that, by careful analysis of each text within its immediate context and the setting of the book to which it belongs, the full power of modern exegetical and theological scholarship be brought to bear upon our treatment of the Bible. The objective is not that the preacher may parade all this scholarship in the pulpit. Rather, it is that the preacher may speak faithfully out of solid knowledge of his text, and mount the pulpit steps as, at least, “a workman who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

The preacher’s final step is the most crucial and most perilous of all. It is to relate the biblical message both faithfully and relevantly to modern life. At this point all his skill as a craftsman must come into play. We must be warned that faithful exposition of a text does not of itself produce an effective sermon. We need also to be warned, however, that faithfulness to the text is not to be sacrificed for the sake of what we presume to be relevancy. This sacrifice too many modern preachers seem willing to make, producing, as a result, sermons that are a compound of moralistic advice, their own unauthoritative and sometimes unwise opinions, and the latest psychology. Expository preaching, by insisting that the message of the sermon coincide with the theme of the text, calls the preacher back to his true task: the proclamation of the Word of God in and through the Bible.9

[MacArthur, J. (1997, c1992). Rediscovering Expository Preaching (22). Dallas: Word Pub.]

  • 1. Horton Davies, “Expository Preaching: Charles Haddon Spurgeon,” Foundations 66 (January 1963): 14, calls exposition “contextual preaching” to distinguish it from the textual and topical types. (back)

  • 2. These ten suggestions are derived from Faris D. Whitesell, Power in Expository Preaching (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1963), vii–viii. (back)

  • 3. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1988), 438. (back)

  • 4. John H. Leith, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Proclamation of the Word and Its Significance for Today in the Light of Recent Research,” Review and Expositor 86 (1989): 32, 34. (back)

  • 5. Merrill F. Unger, Principles, 33. See also William G. Houser, “Puritan Homiletics: A Caveat,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 53, no. 4 (October 1989): 255–70. Houser proposes that the power of the Puritan pulpit diminished as the mechanical form of the message took precedence over the process of forming the message. Coupled with boring deliveries and exceedingly long messages, the Puritan preaching influence quickly declined when these factors became dominant. (back)

  • 6. Haddon W. Robinson, “What Is Expository Preaching?” Bibliotheca Sacra 131 (January–March 1974): 57. For other definitions, see Broadus, On the Preparation, 119–20 and J. Ellwood Evans, “Expository Preaching,” Bibliotheca Sacra 111 (January–March 1954): 59. (back)

  • 7. Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith 1939–1961 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 2:261. (back)

  • 8. R. B. Kuiper, in “Scriptural Preaching,” The Infallible Word, 3d rev. ed., ed. by Paul Woolley (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967), 253, “asserts strongly,
    Exposition of Scripture, exposition worthy of its name, is of the very essence of preaching. It follows that it is a serious error to recommend expository preaching as one of several legitimate methods. Nor is it at all satisfactory, after the manner of many conservatives, to extol the expository method as the best. All preaching must be expository. Only expository preaching can be Scriptural.”
    A. Duane Litfin, “ Theological Presuppositions and Preaching: An Evangelical Perspective” (Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University, 1973), 169–70, concurs, stating, “Anything less than expository preaching is technically not really preaching at all.” (back)

  • 9. Greer W. Boyce, “A Plea for Expository Preaching,” Canadian Journal of Theology 8 (January 1962): 18–19. (back)

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