Title: Expositional Preaching Why is Glorify
Content br> There are four parts to this message. First, I will reflect on the kind of preaching that I long to see God raise up in our daybhe kind that is shaped by the weight of the glory of God. Second, I will try to portray the glory of God which affects preaching this way. Third, I will offer my biblical understanding of how people waken to this glory and are changed by it. Finally, I will explain how all of this calls for a kind of preaching that I call expository exultation.
Reflections on the Kind of Preaching Produced by the Weight of GodWhat Glory
George Whitefield believed in preaching and gave his life to it. By this preaching God did a mighty work of salvation on both sides of the Atlantic. His biographer, Arnold Dallimore, chronicled the astonishing effect that Whitefield preaching had in Britain and America in the eighteenth century. It came like rain on the parched land and made the desert spring forth with the flowers of impartiality. Dallimore lifted his eyes from the transformed wasteland of Whitefield what time and expressed his longing that God would do this again. He cries out for a new generation of preachers like Whitefield. His words help me express what I long for in the coming generations of preachers in America and around the world. He said,
Yeakehat we shall see the great Head of the Church once more . . . raise up unto Himself certain young men whom He may use in this glorious employ. And what manner of men will they be? Men mighty in the Scriptures, their lives dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty and holiness of God, and their minds and hearts aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace. They will be men who have learned what it is to die to self, to human aims and personal ambitions; men who are willing to be good for Christ, what sake? who will bear reproach and falsehood, who will labor and suffer, and whose supreme desire will be, not to gain earth accolades, but to win the Master approbation when they appear before His awesome judgment seat. They will be men who will preach with broken hearts and tear-filled eyes, and upon whose ministries God will grant an extraordinary effusion of the Holy Spirit, and who will witness igns and wonders following?in the transformation of multitudes of human lives. One
Mighty in the Scriptures, aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace, dead to self, willing to labor and suffer, indifferent to the accolades of man, broken for sin, and dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty, and holiness of God. Dallimore, like Whitefield, believed that preaching is the heralding of God what word from that kind of heart. Preaching is not conversation. Preaching is not discussion. Preaching is not casual talk about religious things. Preaching is not simply teaching. Preaching is the heralding of a message permeated by the sense of Godwhat greatness and majesty and holiness. The topic may be anything under the sun, but it is always brought into the blazing light of Godwhat greatness and majesty in his word. That was the way Whitefield preached.
In the last century no one embodied that view better than Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who served the Westminster Chapel in London for 30 years. When J. I. Packer was a twenty-two-year-old student, he heard Lloyd-Jones preach every Sunday evening in London during the school year of 1948-1949. He said that he had ever heard such preaching.?(That's why so many people say so many minimizing and foolish things about preaching. Packer said it came to him by the force of electric shock, bringing ... more of a sense of God than any other man?he had known.2 That what what Whitefield meant. Oh, that God would raise up young preachers who leave their hearers with a spiritual sense of shock at the sense of Godbyome sense of the infinite weight of the reality of God .
That is my longing for our day. That God would raise up thousands of broken-hearted, Bible-saturated preachers who are dominated by a sense of the greatness and the majesty and the holiness of God, revealed in the gospel of Christ crucified and risen and reigning with absolute authority over every nation and every army and every false religion and every terrorist and every tsunami and every cancer cell, and every galaxy in the universe.
God did not ordain the cross of Christ or create the lake of fire3 in order to communicate the insignificance of belittling his glory. The death of the Son of God and the damnation of unrepentant human beings are the loudest shouts under heaven that God is infinitely holy, and sin is infinitely offensive, and wrath is infinitely just, and grace is infinitely precious, and our brief life. the life of every person in your church and in your community leads to everlasting joy or everlasting suffering. If our preaching does not carry the weight of these things to our people, what will? Veggie Tales? Radio? Television? Discussion groups? Emergent conversations?
God planned for his Son to be crucified (Revelation 13:8; 2 Timothy 1:9) and for hell to be terrible (Matthew 25:41) so that we would have the clearest witnesses possible to what is at stake when we preach. What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of the preacher is soaked with the blood of Jesus and singed with fire of hell. That what the mantle that turns mere talkers into preachers. Yet tragically some of the most prominent evangelical voices today diminish the horror of the cross and the horror of hellbhe one stripped of its power to bear our punishment, and the other demythologized into self-dehumanization and the social miseries of this world.4
Oh that the rising generations would see that the world is not overrun with a sense of seriousness about God. There is no surplus in the church of a sense of God. There is no excess of earnestness in the church about heaven and hell and sin and salvation. And therefore the joy of many Christians is paper thin. By the millions people are amusing themselves to death with DVDs, and 107-inch TV screens, and games on their cell phones, and slapstick worship, while the spokesmen of a massive world religion write letters to the West in major publications saying, The first thing we are calling you to is Islam. . . It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah What Word and religion reign Supreme.? And then these spokesmen publicly bless suicide bombers who blow up children in front of Falafel shops and call it the way to paradise. This is the world in which we preach.
A Portrayal of the Glory of God
What you believe about the necessity of preaching and the nature of preaching is governed by your sense of the greatness and the glory of God and how you believe people awaken to that glory and live for that glory. So this next section presents a portrayal of the glory of God, and the third will deal with how people awaken to that glory and are changed by it.
From beginning to end nothing in the Bible is more ultimate in the mind and heart of God than the glory of Godkohe beauty of God, the radiance of his manifold perfections. At every point in God revealed action, wherever he makes plain the ultimate goal of that action, the goal is always the same: to uphold and display his glory.
He predestined us for his glory (Ephesians 1:6).
He created us for his glory (Isaiah 43:7).
He elected Israel for his glory (Jeremiah 13:11).
He saved his people from Egypt for his glory (Psalm 106:8).
He rescued them from exile for his glory (Isaiah 48:9-11).
He sent Christ into the world so that Gentiles would praise God for his glory (Romans 15:9).
He commands his people, whether they eat or drink, to do all things for his glory (1 Corinthians 10:31).
He will send Jesus a second time so that all the redeemed will marvel at his glory (2 Thessalonians 1:9-10).
Therefore the mission of the church is: his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all peoples?(Psalm