Welcome back on this Monday. Today, we have a wonderful ministry question on preaching
right in your wheelhouse, Pastor John. Young Pastor writes in to ask you this quote,
Hello, Pastor John. Thank you for this podcast. I listen every time a new episode is released.
And I'm thankful for the impact that your biblical insights have made on my life.
My question for you is about expository preaching and its place in student ministry. I am the student
pastor at my church, responsible for sixth through 12th grade ministry. Whenever we gather for
our youth worship time on Wednesday nights, I typically preach through books of the Bible in an
expositional way. I try my best to apply the text to them in ways that they can understand. However,
I sometimes question whether I should preach expository sermons to the students because I don't
believe it's a common practice in youth ministries. I love God's word and what my students
to come to love God's word as well. But should I teach to my students in a way that is more
application focused? I would appreciate your thoughts on this. Thank you. Well, I have endless
thoughts about it. Yes. I could just go on and on and on. I love preaching. I believe God has
appointed preaching to be part of the gathered worship of his church on the Lord's day, especially
and I think all of it all the time should be based on and saturated with scripture. That's what
preaching is. It is a God-ordained way of saving sinners and sustaining and growing saints.
I think it's relevant for old people, middle-aged people, young people, children. So I'm thrilled
that our young pastor friend is in a church and leading a youth group where he is doing
exposition. So here are my, I originally had in my head a whole lot of thoughts, but I boiled it
down to three. So here are my three thoughts I can squeeze into our few minutes together. Number one,
as you unfold the meaning of particular biblical text, be sure to stress what I call the reality
factor. Now you don't need to use that phrase, that's my phrase, but here's what I mean.
Some years ago it hit me when I realized that it is possible to do a great deal of explaining
how the thought of the text actually flows and how the words and clauses relate to each other
without actually dealing with the reality of what the words are trying to communicate.
It just clobbered me that we can do this. We can stay at the surface of grammar and not get
to reality. For example, in Philippians 212, it says, work out your salvation with fear and
trembling. For God is the one who is at work in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Now, suppose in your exposition you point out to the students that the first clause is an
imperative command, work out your salvation. And the second clause is not a command, but an
indicative statement of fact, God is at work in you to will and to work. And then you draw attention
to the connection between those two clauses with the word four and you point out that the second
clause, the statement God is working, is the basis or the ground, that's what four means, or the
motive for the first clause, the command, work out your salvation. And maybe you even go further
and you say, this is typical in the New Testament that indicative ground imperatives. And then
you stop end of exposition. Well, the problem is stopping there is that we haven't even touched
the reality behind the clauses and their logical connection until we see how does this work
in life? Why does it work that I work out myself? I should because Christ is it work in me or God
is it work in me? There's a vast difference between words and clauses on the one hand and the
realities they reveal on the other hand. And here you can see this is just blows people away when
I pointed out at least some people who have particular ideas about preaching, how artificial it is
in the distinction between exposition and application. Let me say that again, how artificial it is
to distinguish between exposition and application because we're not really doing exposition of the
reality behind the words until we are dealing with real life and telling how it works.
What will it be like this afternoon? So the question is at 10 o'clock tonight,
after these students are at home, having heard this exposition, they're at home now in their bedroom
as their computer or with their family in the din. What will it look like for these students to work
out their salvation? What is that reality like? What will it feel like for them to experience the
reality of God working in them? Do they have any sense at all what that was talking about?
What's the reality? How does it feel? How does it work? And how will they make the connection between
those experiences of God working in them and they're working? We really don't know what this text
means until we can explain not just the words, clauses, logic, grammar, but the realities
tonight at 10 o'clock in the bedroom, in the kitchen, how it works in people's lives.
That requires a huge effort on the part of the preacher because he's now working at two levels.
The level of words and grammar and logic, we call that the text, and the effort to explain
how the parts of the text fit together. And on the other level, what realities is this author
with these words and this grammar and this logic? What realities is he trying to communicate
to my mind and my heart and my hands? Language and reality, the two levels and both are
absolutely crucial. You can't do a shortcut around the grammar, around the logic, around the words,
but if you stop there, you haven't done the kind of exposition needs to be done. It is real
headwork, it is real heartwork, but the payoff for the students will be huge. So that's my first
suggestion. Deal with the reality factor as well as the text factor. Your students will love it
because it will touch their lives, their reality. Number two, in your exposition through texts,
take doctrinal depth tours, not doctrinal detours, but doctrinal depth tours. Now I just made that
up. I have never in the history of the world said that before. This is my new term and here's what I
mean. What I mean is that preaching that moves through texts without doctrinal depth tours,
they're like detours, but they're depth tours because you're not going away from where you should
go. That's what a detour is. You go away and wish you hadn't didn't have to go, but a depth
tour, you want to go on this this road. So this will build doctrinally strong people and without it,
I just don't know how you can build doctrinally strong youth group, a doctrinally strong people.
What I mean by that is people, youth group who have a clear, deeply rooted understanding of really
important biblical doctrines. You can't do everything as a youth pastor. You're working in tandem
with other groups and worship services and sermons and lessons and classes in your church and maybe
even in the home and in the school. But I mean doctrines like God's sovereignty, God's holiness,
God's grace, God's justice, the deity and humanity of Christ, the deity and personhood of the
Holy Spirit, the nature of sin, both as action and disease of the heart, the nature of redemption
and propitiation and regeneration, calling, faith, justification, sanctification, walking by the
spirit, perseverance of the saints, the nature of the church. What happens when you die? The second
coming eternal life, new heavens and new earth. If a young person studies texts of scripture
without ever taking doctrinal depth tours, he's like a person who lines up all the pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle, but never puts them together to see the beauty of the picture that they make. But in fact,
you can be pretty proud of putting those pieces in line. My pieces are all lined up. They might
even recite the entire first chapter of Ephesians by heart and never have paused to do a
detour into the doctrine of election. But it's the totality of the big picture that holds
person, isn't it? It's the picture that holds, takes hold of a 16 year old and keeps them for
60 years, holds them for a lifetime. Who God is? What is doing? How did Christ save sinners?
How does the Christian life work? Where's it all heading? Now, there are different ways to do this.
You can do an expository series of messages through texts and then do a doctrinal series
separately. I'm not at all opposed to topical messages like that. We're going to do five weeks
kids on election and predestination and we're going to do five weeks on sin and what it is,
what kind of disease you have in your heart and so on. I'm not at all opposed to those kinds of
things because they're all expository, meaning if I'm going to explain anything, it's going to be
exposition of the scripture is where my explanations come from. Or you can take these
doctrinal depth tours that I'm suggesting within the time of exposition. So 15 minutes say
of your 30 minute message might be devoted to painting the big doctrinal reality behind one
word in your text like justification. It's not either or you can mix it up in various ways.
I think students love to see how reality actually fits together, really fits together and they love
to see how texts actually work. So some combination of exposition of texts where they get their nose
in the grammar and efforts to build their doctrinal knowledge both of these are crucial.
And then last thing I would say number three is if your students hear good preaching on Sunday
morning, I would probably not try to turn the Wednesday evening teaching time into another sermon.
I would create a more interactive, socratic method of teaching probably. Now you know your
situation better than I do, but I would do if I were the youth minister and I had a good pastor
who was doing real preaching on Sunday. I would probably not try to do the same thing on Wednesday,
but train these students how to look at the text, look at the book, and how to ask really good
thought questions because questions are the key to understanding. Lots of times people hear me say
a participatory or interactive and they think, oh, I've been in those kinds of groups. Everybody
shares their ignorance. All what I mean. I mean, I teach like this generally, I stay in control.
I'm asking the questions, right? And if students ask stupid questions, then you delicately,
and wisely, you guide them towards good questions. You don't let everybody just share their
ignorance. You know where you want to take them and you take them there by training them to get
there themselves. You're modeling how to pose really good questions about what you see in the
text and getting them to look and think and speak and then correcting them so that they get better
and better at reading their Bibles. It is possible to do very serious exposition and
doctrine of teaching this way. You can do this so radically. And the key is really good questions,
provocative questions. I mean, I've been in so many groups where they say, uh, who said this?
And the students are looking at each other saying, that's the stupidest question. It says Peter said
this. Why is he asking me that? That is such a stupid question. Who said this? Where are we in the text?
Those are not the kind of questions that get anybody excited about anything. They have to be
thought questions, hard thinking questions, questions that really have to pay off in textual
understanding and real life experience. So those are my three suggestions for handling the
word with your youth group, deal with the reality factor, take doctrinal depth tours and ask
provocative thought questions. And of course, a whole other episode soak it all in earnest prayer
because if God doesn't show up, then everything is in vain.
Yeah. Amen. So bring God must act for anything we do to bear eternally lasting fruit.
Thank you, Pastor John. And for churches that don't preach exegetically on Sunday mornings,
if that's a concern, see an old episode that we have recorded titled, is the 40-minute sermon
passe. Is the 40-minute sermon passe? That was abj 118 on why discussions and the
Socratic method are out of place in the Sunday morning preaching context.
Sermons are not just about learning the first aim of preaching. He says in this episode,
the first aim of preaching is not education, but encounter with the living God.
Excellent. I was able to check out on the purpose of preaching abj 118 in the archive right now.
At AskPastorJohn.com. Thanks for joining us today. I am your host,
Tony Rankie. We will see you back here on Thursday. Thanks for listening.