Episode 15: Expositional Preaching on the Ground

The Rural Church Podcast.

Two -point -up.

Just a couple of pastors discussing life, ministry, theology, and the gospel from a local

church perspective.

Eddie, what's it time for?

The Rural Church Podcast.

The Rural Church Podcast, episode 15.

I was ready today, Eddie.

Yeah, how are you doing, man?

I'm doing good.

I'm your co -host, Allen Nelson, pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

With me is my brother in the Lord, my buddy, and my co -labor in the gospel, Eddie

Ragsdale.

Say hello, Eddie.

Hello, everybody.

Eddie, did you take your boys hunting this weekend?

I did not because my youngest son does not want to hunt, and man, I feel so old.

My oldest son's too old.

He's too old for youth hunt.

I didn't think about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Brady couldn't hunt in youth hunt.

He's 16, and you've got to be 15 and under for youth hunt.

Six to 15.

I thought I might point out six to 15.

Sometimes you see these guys, they've got the baby and the baby carrier that just killed the

12 -point buck.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll tell you something, Eddie.

It was a tough week last week, physically, because we

had the flu and my whole family.

I was able to preach Sunday.

My symptoms started Monday night.

By the time Sunday rolled around, I was not contagious, but I was still exhausted.

You know what I'm saying?

Wednesday, I couldn't.

Wednesday, the last minute, I had to message some of our men, and I had an extra guy step up and

help run the van.

I had a guy step up and teach.

I had another guy take that guy's class.

It was really encouraging, and it just reinforces this

biblical understanding, I think, of the

practicality of a plurality of elders.

Now, we don't have a plurality of elders,.

But you understand what I'm saying.

To get to the point of plurality of elders, you have to have godly men who can step into those

roles.

What a blessing that is that you had men godly enough

and ready to, especially those teaching roles in your class and other

classes, because if a church doesn't have that, then

they definitely aren't going to have the men to step into the pastoral roles.

Yeah.

What I want to talk about today is expositional preaching,.

And I know that that, in some senses, is a tired subject, but we're not going to talk about it today

from a theoretical standpoint.

We're going to talk about it from an on -the -ground standpoint.

And we've said in the last couple episodes, Eddie, we said that

the pulpit is not the—you cannot reform the church only from the

pulpit.

There has to be other things going on.

However,.

Neither one of us are minimizing the pulpit.

You can't reform the church without it, either.

That's right.

In this episode, we're going to talk about expositional preaching from

our perspective in our rural churches.

We'll start a little bit—first of all, I'm preaching through Ephesians.

You're preaching through Jonah.

We're actually tackling these books a little bit different, which they should be tackled a little bit different because the

genre that you're dealing with.

And then the other thing I want to talk about is when you got to Jonah—I think

you said you're on your third sermon—how do you go about picking what book you're going to preach,

and then how do you go about preparing for that book?

Yeah, I think there.

Are a few things.

Our church, we just finished—we've spent a few years

working through the book of Luke, and we finished

that—it's not been a year ago, but it was early

in probably the spring of this year, like April maybe we finished, maybe

even May.

I can't remember for sure, but we finished Luke, and we had been—I'd taken some breaks.

It hadn't been every Sunday in Luke for the last four years, but we were in Luke a while.

I think I started the first sermons in Luke maybe in 2018,

and so I'd taken some breaks.

I think that we want to be careful.

I've told our church for a long time we didn't want to become known as the Luke Church because that's the only.

Thing we've reached.

Yeah, let me just pause it there, because I know that there's studies, and there's wisdom, and there's people that

are like, you shouldn't spend longer than this amount of time in a book.

I really just think that there's some subjectivity to that.

It depends on the preacher, I think.

Well, it depends on the preacher,.

Depends on the congregation.

There's a lot of factors, but let me say it both ways.

There's Luke for four years in and of itself.

Let me also say this.

There's nothing wrong if you take six weeks to go through Luke, assuming that you're being faithful in

both regards.

I just want to point that out.

In fact, if you feel superior because you preached through Luke for four years and

someone else feels superior that they only took them six weeks, I'd say both those motivations

are wrong.

That's right.

Because what we're trying to do when we preach the Word is we're.

Trying to feed the people what God has given to us in his book.

Right.

So when I was coming out of Luke, I was like, man, I want to do

something a little shorter just because we'd been in something that was longer.

So we did a short, and I was out of the pulpit a couple times this summer for

mission trips and things like that.

So I preached a short series this summer through Jude, and

then I actually took a couple of months, which this is very rare for me

because I'm almost always preaching through a book, but I preached for probably

10 weeks.

I preached through just various subjects, done some topical preaching, preached through the

issue of dealt with some of the texts that deal with elders and deal with pastors and

those things, and some things just that our church, I felt like our church needed to hear at this point

in the life and ministry of our church.

And so we dealt with those.

And then I wanted to go to the Old Testament.

We had done a series during the pandemic through John chapter 3.

We had been in Jude.

We had just done a lot of New Testament, and I just felt like we needed to get back to the Old Testament.

The last book that we had exposited had been quite a while ago, and it had been Habakkuk,

and that's another short book.

And so I had been wanting to preach Jonah for a long time, and

so I even reached out to you here a while back for just some different

commentaries that you'd used, and so I got a hold of some of those and just started studying and

felt like that was the right place to go.

So we're working our way through Jonah.

I don't know.

We're probably going to—it's not going to be a long series.

It's probably going to be something like six sermons probably be done with Jonah

as we're getting into the holiday season, and then we'll probably be

looking at starting with—and I'm actually still in the process of deciding what will be

our next book, but we'll probably start with something at the beginning of January.

I do have a long -term goal.

When I started Luke all that time ago, my long -term goal is to cover all of Luke and Acts,

but I may go ahead, and we've done so much narrative in our church, I feel like we may need

to—I may do another epistle, maybe one of Paul's epistles, shorter epistles,

and then go back and start Acts.

But that's kind of the process that I'm using right.

Now.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's back up.

Before you preach week one of Jonah, is there anything—and this may be different with every

book—but before you preach week one, you're a few weeks out.

Is there anything that you're doing different with the book of Jonah, or is it just like, okay, I don't want to preach Jonah,

and then you get to that week, and you're like, okay, now I'm studying like normal.

Are you doing anything prior to that?

Just curious to know your method here.

Well, when I first start, when I first have the idea, hey, I might want to preach that, I'll go

and read the book a few times and be like, okay.

And really, I'm just reading it to remind myself what all is in here,

and is there something just kind of—and I'm just

re -familiarizing myself with the book.

And maybe a few times into those readings, I'm beginning to go, okay, this is going to

be a really helpful text.

Maybe, I mean, I'm just going to be really honest.

Maybe I start recognizing this one's going to be a pretty difficult text when we get there.

And I'm maybe even starting to get an idea of

how might this break out?

How might I try to preach this?

Not necessarily just how many weeks are in sermons, but where are the natural breaks in this book going to

be?

For example, here a while back, I thought about the book of Judges, and we still probably

will do the book of Judges at some point.

But I went back, and I read it a little more, and I was just like, you know, I don't think it's the right time.

So we're not going to do that one right now.

One time I preached through the book of Ruth, and the first sermon in the book of Ruth was one

sermon on the book of Judges.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so a couple questions I have.

When you work—because there's various skill levels out there—when

you work through the text, now, okay, so you've kind of outlined—oh, no, first

question.

Do you try to come up with some sort of theme?

Do you try to come up with, like, okay, the theme of—for example, when I preached through Jonah, I called it

Jonah, God's Ocean of Mercy, you know.

And it kind of, I think, captures a theme there.

But do you try to come up with any kind of, like, overarching theme, or you just kind of take it week by

week?

Well, here's the thing, and this has really kind of happened more organically than something

I set out to do.

But I noticed that this happened, really started happening as I was preaching through Luke, and then it

went, and then it has just become pretty normal for me.

But the thing—so every week, my sermon,

this—I heard a few years ago, I heard some pastors mentioning that

you ought to be able to put your sermon into a sentence.

If you don't have the basic idea of what you're going to preach down in a sentence, you're probably not ready to

preach it.

And I have taken that, and I basically boil my sermon down into a singular point

or sentence that I work off of for the rest of whatever that message is going to be.

And what I've found is that point throughout a book of the

Bible is often very similar, at least in texts like a narrative text like

Luke or even like Jonah.

So, for example, in Luke, I found that every week it was Jesus is Lord.

It was Jesus is Lord, and then this text is telling us this about how Jesus is Lord.

So what about last week?

And so in Jonah, I found that for me, Yahweh is sovereign, and this

is how Yahweh is sovereign.

So that has been all three sermons.

The central point has been Yahweh is sovereign, and this is how He is sovereign.

So this week, it was Yahweh is sovereign over death and life because

salvation belongs to Yahweh.

And that was the basic thing that we were working off of.

Yeah.

Good.

Okay.

What about your,.

So this is a question I was going to get.

What about your skill level with Hebrew, and is that something,

what's your encouragement there?

Is there any resources you use, any thoughts, like when you're preaching from the Old Testament,

anything you want to say with that?

Yeah.

So I'm not great with Hebrew.

I took Hebrew in college.

I had two semesters, but I'll be honest. I really struggled with Hebrew.

I'm not a great linguist anyway, but I greatly prefer Greek.

In Arkansas, we barely speak English.

That's right.

That's right.

So with that being said, I really lean on the

same kind of tools that a person that had never studied Hebrew at all would have to lean on.

I use now, and I've never really looked deeply into

Lagos.

I've always heard people talk about how good it is, and maybe one of these days I'll be able to afford some, but I

use just a simple free tool, Blue Letter Bible.

I use that a lot.

And then I try to use the work of better scholars than me

in commentaries.

And usually when I'm working through any book of the Bible, I will have a primary

commentary.

Now, my method is I try to spend a lot of time in the text myself,

basically work out an outline of the text, and then I'll even have

not just an exegetical outline, but I'll have basically the outline of what I plan to preach

all done before I go to the commentaries.

And then I go to the commentaries kind of as a check.

But that being said, I usually have a commentary that I'm primarily

using, and then the others to supplement that one.

So for example, with Jonah, I know you're a closer friend

to him than I've just met him a couple times, but brother Randall Easter wrote a wonderful

little commentary on Jonah, and that's probably the primary commentary resource.

And he really does a good job actually even providing his own

translation of each verse and breaking down those things.

So that's really helpful to a guy that's not a great Hebrew student like myself.

And so that's basically my process as I work through week to week

working through a book of the Bible.

So now more of a textual question.

You just finished Jonah 2.

Did Jonah die?

I preached that Jonah died.

I've presented to my church both ways that you could interpret it.

I argued for the fact that you've got to interpret it as at least a

metaphor of death and resurrection because Jesus says it's the sign of the prophet Jonah.

He will be three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, just as Jesus is three days and three

nights in the heart of the earth.

So I argued you've got to consider at least a metaphor for death and resurrection.

But I also put forward that I think it's a metaphor for the way that God

saves sinners because Jonah was into the water, and

if you take his prayer of thanksgiving.

Are you talking about baptismal regeneration?

No.

Jonah was into the water, and his prayer, he doesn't say anything about the fish in the prayer.

The fish is mentioned before and after the prayer, but not in the prayer.

And so I took it that Jonah dies in the water.

He's drowned.

He dies.

He's at the bottom of the sea.

The fish swallows him dead.

God resurrects him in the belly of the fish, just as he resurrects Jesus in the tomb,

and just as he resurrects the dead in sin sinner.

And then Jonah responds in prayer to God after he's been resurrected.

And I told our church, I said, I believe this is exactly the way that we're saved.

We're dead sinners.

God comes and takes out the heart of stone, puts in the heart of flesh.

He does the work of regeneration, and then we respond in repentance and faith.

And so that is exactly how I preached it.

What?

Okay, that text is easy.

What I mean is it's easy in the sense that Jesus makes a reference.

Yeah, that's really helpful.

So it's like, okay, this is easy, tied to Christ.

But as you're preaching through Jonah, how do you,

what is your strategy?

How should you be preaching Christ from the book of Jonah?

Man, I think the whole book of Jonah is pretty easy.

You see in chapter one,

there are a lot of parallels in every chapter.

In chapter one, you see the parallels.

Even though Jonah is disobedient and he's running from the Lord, you see parallels with

Jesus being asleep in the boat, Jonah asleep in the boat.

And you also see just opportunities to preach Christ in the way

that the mariners kind of keep trying to lean on themselves.

And then they eventually just have to submit to the sovereignty of God.

I just see Christ really in every chapter in the book of Jonah.

What would you say, though?

I told our church, I think the

central thing in the entire book of Jonah is that last statement at the end of Jonah's

prayer, salvation belongs to Yahweh.

And that salvation is the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so, I mean, if that's the central message of the whole book, which I think it is, then

as we're going through the book, everything that ties back to that's going to point us back.

To Jesus. Amen. Amen.

So, let me kind of turn this around a little bit.

Hold on.

Let's finish this episode with you.

We usually go about 30 minutes and we've gone almost 20 minutes.

So, it'd be good.

And then we could turn around and we'll talk about Ephesians in the next

episode.

But yeah, that's kind of the question I want to

talk about.

There's different hermeneutics out there.

You're not dispensational, but what is your hermeneutic?

What is your understanding of how the scriptures fit together?

Well, I would say covenant theologian, except for I want to be

careful that I don't overstate like I have a greater understanding than I do.

I mean, I want to understand the Bible the way it was written, but I think it was written understanding the

covenant that God made with His people, the promise, what I would say the promise of the covenant of

grace that we see in the Old Testament, the fulfillment, the accomplishment of the covenant of grace in Christ.

And I think we see that throughout the Bible.

So, I think every place in the Bible,

we're going to be able to see how it fits into the promises that God made to

Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 with the Proto -Evangelion, with

God's promises to Abraham.

And even when we look at the Old Covenant and we see that

greater expression of the covenant of works, we still see God expressing promises of

grace all the way through as He responds.

And I think that's what we see even in the book of Jonah, when you see God showing Himself to be a God who

relents of calamity when people humbly repent of their sin

and believe God, which is exactly what it says in Jonah 3, that the people of Nineveh

believed God.

Here comes Jonah to the people of.

Nineveh, their enemy.

He preaches.

He's ethnically different.

He's an enemy of the people, as it were.

He says, Yahweh is going to judge this place, and they believe Him.

Jesus comes in as a friend, one of the people,

preaches.

They don't believe Him.

That's His point.

One greater than Jonah is here.

So, those kind of spots are easy, but this

would be a whole nother episode.

But there are other things that, as you read through Jonah, just like this is obvious pointing us forward

to our Lord Christ.

So, any concluding thoughts you have or encouragement you have about preaching through the Old Testament or preaching through a

narrative like Jonah?

Yeah, well, and especially, man, I would encourage guys to think through,

if you've never preached through any of the minor prophets, man,

we're really getting a lot out of Jonah.

I'll tell you, when I preached through Habakkuk, that was so fruitful for our church.

Of course, I'm not a prophet nor the son of a prophet.

That being said, I remember now when I preached through Habakkuk, it was

January of 2020 was when I preached through Habakkuk.

And of course, I did not know what was coming, but

I feel like, and I even had people in my church in the spring and summer of 2020

coming to me and saying, you know, the things that we learned in the book of Habakkuk

were so helpful to us as we were going through that season with the pandemic and

all the craziness and all that stuff.

So, I'm not saying try to diagnose whether or not there's

going to be a pandemic because I didn't do that, but I am saying there is so much that is valuable

in the Old Testament, especially in those minor prophets that we can so easily look over because they're small

books, because they're short books.

It's an amazing thing as you preach.

Through the Bible, how we all have these stories where your text and the

events of the day just line up, and you didn't have any plan for that, or it addresses

things going on in your church sometimes you didn't even know about.

So, this is the wonder and the glory of the living and active Word of God.

Anything else you want to add to that before we end this one?

You know, we both love the Word of God, and here's the reality.

I was listening to a conversation between John MacArthur and

John Popper the other day, and I think they said something to this effect, and I think it is true.

If we're going to—or it made me think of it this way.

Maybe they didn't say it this way.

I don't want to misquote, but it made me think of it this way.

Man, if we're going to do effective ministry, if we're going to do the kind of ministry the Lord has called us to in the

local church, I think it requires three loves, and I would even say three loves in this

order.

We have got to primarily love the Lord.

We've got to love the Lord.

Amen.

Or anything else, we've got to love the Lord, and then we have to love God's Word.

We have to love God's Word the way He said it.

No apologies.

No trying to figure out a way around tough things that He said.

I had an interesting conversation with a brother this morning, even discussing the issue of, you know, was

Jonah really swallowed by a fish?

Well, we shouldn't even back up from that, from something like that, because we trust, we love,

and we trust what God says in His Word.

Then third, that ought to cultivate a real love for people, a love for the church,

a love for people in the community, the people around us that they would believe and be saved, a real love for

people that comes out of a love for God and a love for His Word.

I think that will always come out in real exegetical expository preaching.

Amen.

That's a good word.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Rural Church Podcast.

Say goodbye, Eddie.

See you guys next week.