May 28, 2024 Show with John Samson on “Expository Preaching: How It Reveals the True God & the True Gospel”

Expository Preaching as the Normal Diet of the Church

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's iron sharpens iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and direct it to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of iron sharpens iron radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 28th day of May 2024.

I trust you all had a blessed Memorial Day weekend and that you had not only opportunities to enjoy feasting and fellowship and enjoyable, memorable times with your family, friends, and loved ones, but that you also had opportunities to remember the fallen soldiers who gave it all to provide the freedoms we take for granted in this nation.

And also we hope that you had opportunities to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with all those that you know and love, with whom you are sharing this holiday. But today, before I introduce to you my guest and our topic, I just want to remind you that the next free, biannual, Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon is coming up next week already.

It's Thursday, June 6th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, which is Perry County, Pennsylvania. And for the very first time, we are honored with the privilege of having Dr. Joel Beakey as our guest speaker.

He is the founder and chancellor of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And not only is this event free, not only will you get free admission and free lunch, but every attendee receives one and possibly two heavy sacks of free brand-new books personally selected by me and donated by generous Christian publishers all over the United States and United Kingdom.

Everything is absolutely free at the insistence of my precious late wife, Julie, who launched these luncheons with me back in the 1990s when I was still living on Long Island. And we continue these luncheons in tribute to my precious late wife, Julie, and in loving memory of her.

So if you would like to attend this free event on Thursday, June the 6th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com and put Pastor's Luncheon in the subject line.

John Sampson on Expository Preaching and Health Update

But today we have a returning guest, a very dear friend of mine and a very generous supporter of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. His name is John Sampson. He is an author. He's a former Word of Faith Pentecostal pastor and televangelist who converted to Reformed Baptist theology and cessationism, and now he is the pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona.

Today we're going to be addressing expository preaching, how it reveals the true God and the true gospel. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor John Sampson.

Thank you. It's great always to be with you, Chris.

Well, I'd like you to first of all give our listeners an update on your health. I have already since promoting this interview with you in social media been getting contacted in various ways, emails, texts, social media posts, private messages, people requesting as to the current status of your health.

They had heard of your prayer requests in the recent past regarding your health, so if you could please explain as much as you care to explain about your health condition and what the updates and praise reports might be regarding that.

Yeah, I'd be glad to. On Sunday, March the 10th, 2024, just a few months back, I approached the pulpit to start the service and couldn't really get my breath, and someone looked at me and said, are you okay?

And I said, no, and within moments, I was down on the floor. People saw that I was falling and somehow caught me before I fell, but I was immediately just completely out of it, and if you can imagine, it was a little bit chaotic.

People were saying, is there a doctor in the house? And thankfully, someone actually was just visiting from another state, happened to find us online the night before, and I think that was just miraculous right there, plus someone with him who was a nurse who was visiting, and so I was in immediate care right there, and I was out for maybe 45 seconds or a minute, but didn't look like I was coming back, looked like I actually died.

A medical team arrived, and they did their various medical procedures, and one guy said, I think you're dehydrated. That's all this is. Well, that wasn't true, and then I was rushed to hospital, and they assumed I'd had a heart attack.

This was all after about three weeks before, having this horrendous infection that had left my jaw completely locked, and I was in hospital for that, and so this was just a couple of weeks, maybe three, after that, so this was the second time in hospital.

I was told with that that I'd had a mass, and it had taken over my face, and had made my face, on the right side, three times the normal size, and I was told, yeah, a mass, very sorry. It was kind of the speech you never want to hear, and I thought, maybe, do I have three days to live, or five, the way this is taking over my face?

So, all of that was before, then this, was told it was a heart attack, after a few tests, and was about to go for a procedure in the hospital. Ten minutes before the procedure, a man, who I'm just so thankful for, came into the room, kind of burst into our hospital room, and asked a series of questions, and to cut a long story short, said, we're going to cancel that procedure on your heart, catheterization of your heart, and we're going to just give you some, a CT scan of your lungs.

That's what saved my life, because they found out my lungs, both of them were filled with clots, and so I'd suffered a pulmonary embolism. It's not really a term I'd known too well before then, but there are different shades of that.

I know a number of people who've had that. Mine was what they call a saddle pulmonary embolism, and very few, one in four, survive a normal one. The one I had, it's just, again, amazing that I'm surviving, and have survived, and yeah, what happened after that was various procedures, and they without going into all the details, just a long, long series that would cause recovery, and I'm three months into that, and the normal span of time of getting back to so-called normal is between three months and two to three years, and we're at the two and a half month time right now, and I didn't know if I'd ever be preaching again.

I had involuntary twitching going on in the upper part of my body, and it was heightened whenever I went near the church, believe it or not. Subconsciously, certainly not consciously. Consciously, I think it's a wonderful place to go to.

Subconsciously, my body was reacting. That's the place where we were traumatized, or I was traumatized. Yeah, there was a couple of attempts of even going to church, and I couldn't do it. My body wouldn't stand up to it, so I've actually been preaching the last three Sundays and taking it easy, not doing anything else in the service.

My fellow elder is doing the other part, which he stepped up to the plate just so brilliantly, but that's the update. I'm up and around and just thankful to be alive, and my dear wife has been through the mill not knowing if I'd survive even the night at times, but I'm here, and I'm preaching the Word.

Praise. God, and everyone who knows and loves you is delighted to hear that praise report, and I'm going to request, obviously, that all those listening continue, or begin for the first time, to lift up Pastor John Sampson of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona, in prayer that he would be very soon completely recovered of this health crisis, and that Romans 8 28 would prove to, once again, to be a genuine promise of God, and that my dear friend, Pastor John, would begin to quickly witness, experience, and take hold of tangible evidence that our Lord is working even this for His good, because He is certainly among the cold of God, who loves God, and is cold according to His purpose.

So, we would really appreciate to hear ongoing updates from you. Well, now tell our listeners about King's Church in Peoria, Arizona.

Yeah, it's a Reformed Baptist Church. We hold to the 1689 Confession of Faith, the London Baptist Confession of Faith, and we started in our home and have branched out and now rent a facility on a Sunday, and we've seen some amazing folk come in.

Just, I feel they're the best church in the world, but other pastors would disagree. Just love the folk, love the folk, and we're very encouraged by what we've seen. In fact, through this time, there's the level of unity is just off the charts.

Everybody, if you can imagine that service, it wasn't ever going to be a normal service after what happened on March the 10th, and they just turned it into a prayer meeting, and I'm just very grateful for the family of God being the family of God in more than name only.

So, I love those people, and they seemingly love me, and they're behind me, and it's a great place to visit if you're in the area, in the Phoenix area. And it is a Reformed Baptist Church. Yes.

And if anybody wants more details about King's Church in Peoria, Arizona, go to kingschurchaz .com. Kingschurchaz .com, and God willing, we'll be repeating that later on in the program. Well, as I've already announced, today's topic is a topic we have addressed before a number of times on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

I don't believe I've ever addressed it with my guest today, John Sampson, but this is actually a more focused conversation on expository preaching, where we are highlighting how expository preaching reveals the true God and the true gospel.

And if you have questions about this topic, submit them to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Please only remain anonymous. If your questions are of a personal and private nature, perhaps, for instance, you disagree with your own pastor and elders over something we are addressing today, and you don't want to draw attention to your identity publicly at this point.

Well, that makes sense, and maybe you're even the pastor. You disagree with your fellow elders over something we're addressing, or your denomination, or what have you. Whatever the case may be, if it's personal and private, feel free to make your question anonymous.

But if it's a general question, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Well, as always, when we have a topic and it involves a term or a word that may be unfamiliar to some in our audience, I know that the vast majority of Iron Trepans, Iron Radio listeners are likely Reformed and are very familiar with the frequent repetition in their own congregations of the term expository preaching.

But there are those that are not from our background. There are also those that are new Christians. In fact, I was very encouraged just a few days ago to get an email from somebody who describes himself as a baby Christian who is being edified and growing in his knowledge of the Lord through my guests and topics on this show.

But there are even non-Christians who are listening, and they don't know what expository preaching means, so why don't you give us a definition of that?

Yeah, you'll hear in the word expository, I'm sure, the word expose. And what we're exposing in preaching of this kind is the text. We, as pastors, hopefully are spending our time studying the text rigorously, making sure we've got a true interpretation of the text, and then we take the meaning of the text and expose it to the congregation, to those that hear, so that the meaning of the text.

Becomes the message of the sermon. Which is why sometimes it's called exegetical preaching. Yes, exactly.

And that can happen with topical preaching. I mean, I know you read C .H. Spurgeon, and he would be in Isaiah one week and John's Gospel the next, but in expository preaching what we're doing is something different.

He was able to, because of his knowledge, go to texts by themselves, but bring out the meaning of the text in their context. He had that kind of brain that allowed him to do that. Just by way of background, my upbringing as a Christian was in a very strange church.

I look back and think there were many great things I learned there, but a lot of things I had to unlearn as well. But the idea was, you don't know who's going to be preaching at this particular church any given Sunday.

And by the way, it could be you.

How much notice would you get?

You wouldn't get any. It would be you feel your hands shaking a little bit, and you think that's the Holy Spirit. And yeah, it was a very strange environment, but it allowed me as an 18-year-old to preach.

Sounds like Plymouth Brethren or something. You know what? It was exactly that. It was a Plymouth Brethren congregation that had now encountered the Holy Spirit, as they would call it, and now were charismatic.

But they had the Plymouth Brethren baggage, if you like. And so to say it was topical was an understatement. You have no idea where the service is going. You don't know if you're going to be involved in some way.

Later on, I would after seminary begin preaching and would be very topical, be by Tuesday. I'm thinking, what am I going to preach on Sunday? And therefore, I was studying. But by Friday, I should have an idea.

By Saturday, I definitely should have an idea and then could change it all because of a restless night on Sunday morning. And now this is fresh from the Holy Spirit, so to speak. That was my background.

Looking back, I shudder at that, but certainly want to allow for topical preaching. But I believe the mainstay of the church would be to go book by book and verse by verse through our Bibles. And we're going to hopefully get into why that's the case.

But that's what expository preaching is. It's not just taking a text and showing the truth of it in its context. That is expository preaching. But what we're usually referring to is verse by verse. You start at chapter 1, verse 1 and go through to the end of the book.

And I've come to understand that's what the Holy Spirit inspired. He inspired chapter 1, verse 1 before he did chapter 1, verse 2 and chapter 1, verse 3. And he has things to say that we wouldn't normally go to topically.

We as pastors and preachers usually have our topics we want to talk about. But expository preaching allows the Holy Spirit to help us to talk about and preach what he has inspired. And the Bible says all Scripture, as you know, is inspired, breathed out by God.

And so this is a method that is simply taking God's word at face value and verse by verse going through the text. And every Tuesday, you know what you're going to be preaching the next Sunday because it will be the next verse or the next passage.

And after the pulmonary embolism I had, we were in verse 19 through 22 of Hebrews chapter 10. That was the passage that I'd preached the week before. And after two months, picked up again with verse 23.

Well, you are certainly a Reformed Baptist. And we are, I'm sorry, brother.

That's what we do. That's right.

Expository Preaching and the True God

Well, we are going to our first commercial break and send us an email if you have a question to chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We're going to be right back right after these messages from our sponsors.

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That's royaldiadem .com. Don't forget to mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with John Sampson, pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona, and we are talking about expository preaching and how it reveals the true God and the true gospel.

And our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. We have Andrew in Brooklyn, New York, who asks, do you know of people recently in your church that were brought out of false belief systems through your expository preaching?

Well, there are so many false teachings that it would be hard not to think of certain people as the answer to that question. Yes, there's a lot of folk who become members of the church and in the process of the interview before they become members, I or my fellow elder will ask, tell us how you came to Christ.

What was the story behind you coming to Christ? And they say I was actually converted here because I had been at a particular church and never heard the true gospel. It was always assumed or I never heard it, but I've heard it here and I've come to Christ here.

And this is people who've been in, quote, the church for maybe a decade and a half or so. And that's happened a number of times. So it's not only people that come out of cults, but false religions and included in that is Roman Catholicism.

And yeah, we've seen that for sure. And expository preaching allows the preacher to go to the text, but it also allows the Holy Spirit, and this is something I wanted to stress, it's an honoring of the Holy Spirit in that the Holy Spirit didn't simply or merely inspire verses.

He inspired books. There are 66 inspired books in our Bible. In the Old Testament, we have 39. In the New Testament, 27. Add that up. You've got 66. These are the very words of God. And he's inspired books and he inspired verse one of chapter one and then verse two.

And then as we continue reading chapter four, verse eight and chapter four, verse nine. And going through the Bible that way sequentially, that's a key word that would sum up what we're talking about when we talk about expository preaching.

You now get to subjects you wouldn't normally gravitate towards as a pastor, but it's good for the people because it's the Holy Spirit's diet. If you think of the Word of God as our food, it's the Holy Spirit's agenda rather than the preacher's.

And that's what I've come to see. And so you do address the deity of Christ. You do address salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, because the text takes you there. And it gets the preacher off his hobby horse.

I was just talking about that a little before. There are eight, maybe, messages that are in his heart. He wants people to know. But the Holy Spirit has more than that to say to the people. And he has inspired the Word of God.

And this is last Sunday. I was preaching about hell because that's where the text takes us. It's not something you'd normally do if you have this idea, well, I can't mention this because people will not really like it or else they might be offended.

And when we actually go to texts that speak to what the Holy Spirit wants us to talk about, it could be offensive. But I found this. The goats will obviously leave, but the sheep will love it. And with many people, many churches, the idea is, what can we say that will bring them back next week?

Whereas.

Jesus.

Told people the truth and folk walked away. And he didn't say, look, just read John 6. He didn't say, look, we'll be giving away bicycles next week or I'll do better next week. I'll please come back. No, he turned to his own and said, are you going to go away too?

Yeah, and it's interesting that.

As far as the Arminian Calvinist divide in the body of Christ, the very thing that Jesus said that was the straw, the final straw that broke the camel's back with his disgruntled hearers that made them walk away and never return was when he said, no one can come to me unless it is granted to him by the Father.

Yes.

You know, as someone who didn't used to but now embraces the doctrine of election because it is there in our text, it's not a hobby horse for me. And it's not that people can complain. Oh, there's Pastor John again.

He wants to talk about this all the time. I am able now to go to the text and when it's there in the text, I preach it and then I move on to the next verse and people can tell it's not a hobby horse. It's not just something I have to talk about.

I want to talk about it because the Holy Spirit has revealed that and he has the right as God, the Holy Spirit, to say this will be the diet of the people, of the church. And that's what I feel I'm submitting to rather than I'm dictating.

There's a big difference. As a topical preacher, I can dictate what people hear. And there are times when it's good to bring out, say, a message on the doctrine of the Trinity, but you can't just do that from one verse.

And so you would be topical at that moment when you're talking about the Trinity, because there's not one verse that just spells it out. You have to go to many verses and many passages. But the normal diet of the church, I believe, is healthy when we as, if you think of waiters waiting on tables at a restaurant, we're not on the way from the kitchen taking certain things off the plate saying they won't like this.

We're actually just taking what has been handed to us and passing it on to the people so that no one messes with the food.

So basically, for clarification's sake, what you are saying is that when expository preaching is the manner with which the Scriptures are expounded from the pulpit every week, uh, the intention of the pastor and the church is that eventually, and this is going to take a long time, it's going to take years, but the concept is that every verse of the Bible will be exegeted eventually.

I mean, you could be in one chapter for months, you could be in one book for years. But at the same time, the intention is to go verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book, every Lord's Day, with the exception of, you know, it's Christmas, you want to have a topical message on Christmas or what have you, or if there's a unique event that has occurred, like what happened on 9 -11 back in 2001 when the United States had the most severe attack from a foreign enemy on our soil, you might want to have something topical, obviously.

But other than those exceptions, you're going verse by verse, and therefore, the phrase you used before, hobby-horsing, is less likely, especially if you're exegeting, and very often, even to unbelievers, it can be obvious when somebody is doing the opposite, eisegeting, when they're inserting things that are not there.

So that's where you're coming from. And it was laughable that just, I think it was yesterday or the day before, someone on Facebook said that Calvinists do not preach all of the Bible, they selectively preach on the texts that they think favor their viewpoint and ignore the other verses.

And my response was, that's patently absurd, slanderous, and ridiculous, because Calvinists are the ones that are most well-known for expository preaching. And therefore, and every Reformed church that I have ever been, especially where I've been a member, Calvinists don't hide from the verses that may, on their surface, especially when they're isolated, may appear to be favoring an Arminian view of the will of man, or someone coming to a saving faith through their own free will, it may appear that way, until the whole counsel of God is taken into consideration.

But on the other hand, you have those that do not believe in, or even hate the doctrines of grace, who'll avoid, you know, texts that involve predestination and election, like the plague. In fact, a humorous story that's actually tragic, but you can't help but laugh about it.

I know a brother who came to the doctrines of sovereign grace. He came out of an independent, fundamentalist, King James-only, non-Calvinist background. His father-in-law is a vehement anti-Calvinist, and also a pastor.

And before he had the courage to admit to his father-in-law that he had become a believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace, and he was actually just looking for the best moment to spring that on his father-in-law, because he knew what kind of damage it would do to family relations, his father-in-law asked him, so what are you preaching on this Sunday?

And he swallowed hard and said, well, we're going through Romans 9. And his father-in-law said, wait a minute, you have got to preach through that book all in one sermon, like you're ripping off a band-aid.

You can't dwell for a long period of time in that book, because people are going to get the wrong idea, and they might wind up believing in Calvinism. So here you have a fundamentalist who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, and yet he is afraid of the very words that the Lord in his sovereignty has breathed out in his Scripture, and is treating passages as something to be avoided and to be terrified of.

That's exactly right. There's so many benefits to preaching consecutively through books of the Bible, and one of those benefits is that the congregation usually can remember what was said the week before, and maybe even the week before that.

And so it's harder to take verses out of their setting, out of their context, because you're living with a congregation, you're saying verse 20 says this, but it can't say that if verse 19 says this. And so it's a safeguard for the pastor, but it's also a safeguard for the people, because they're getting the verses in their context by definition, because no verse has been left out in the run-up to the verse that's currently, or the passage that's currently in view.

So there's so many benefits to it. I really believe that steady diet, the normal diet of expositional, sequential preaching, means that we're submitting to the Bible in its context.

Expository Preaching, the True Gospel, and the Whole Counsel of God

We have a listener question from Barry in La Vista, Nebraska, and Barry asks, how specifically is expository preaching uniquely able to reveal, as your theme presented today, the true God and true gospel?

Obviously, topical preaching can do that too. You might have a sermon specifically on the deity of Christ or the Trinity, and you might have a sermon specifically on what is the true gospel, but what makes the expository element.

Something uniquely revealing in these aspects? That's a great question. Let's talk on a broader scale about the Christian community. There's a radio station called K-Love, and I was new to the United States, having come from England, and was thrilled that there was such a thing as Christian radio over here.

But it didn't take me two or three days before I realized there's kind of an agenda there. And then I realized it's actually in their theme, positive, encouraging, K-Love. All right. Well, what's wrong with that?