Episode 15: Expositional Preaching on the Ground

The Rural Church Podcast, 2 .0. 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. 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 in the baby carrier that just killed the 12 -point buck.

Yeah. I'll tell you something, Eddie. This week has been 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 with these men that are...

But to get to the point of plurality of elders, you have to have godly men who can step into those roles, and so 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, yeah. What we 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, and so...

You can't reform the church without it, either. That's right. So, in this episode, we're going to talk about expositional preaching from the perspective, from our perspective in our rural churches, and 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 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 the 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 mean, 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, and I really just think that there's some subjectivity to that.

It depends on the preacher, I think. Well, it depends on the preacher. It depends on the congregation.

There's a lot of factors, but let me say it both ways. There's nothing wrong with preaching through Luke for four years in and of itself, and 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 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 been in Luke. I'd done a series during the pandemic through John chapter three.

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. 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 end.

I 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. 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, you know, 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 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.

Okay, so a couple of 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 overarching theme, or you just kind of take it week by week?

Well, here's the thing, and this is 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 has just become pretty normal for me. But the thing, so every week, 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. So this is a question I was going to get. What about your skill level with Hebrew, and 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

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'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.

So 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.

You've got, and what I mean is it's easy in the sense that Jesus makes a reference. Yeah. So it's really helpful.

So it's like, okay, this is easy. But as you're preaching through Jonah, 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.

And I just see Christ really in every chapter in the book of Jonah. And what would you say though?

What would you say? Well, 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.

Well, hold on. Let's finish this episode with you and then, because 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.

That's kind of a question I want to talk about with, 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 say, I think we see that throughout the Bible. So, I mean,

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 -evangelium, 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 chapter 3, that the people believed God, 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 and 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, you know. 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 Piper the other day, and I think they said something to this effect, and I think it is true.

You know, 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