Expositional Preaching (1 of 10 non-negotiable elements of a healthy church)

TWELVE 5 CHURCH

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THE GOSPEL (2 of 10 non-negotiable elements of a healthy church)

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I'm going to do something this morning that I very, very rarely do, if ever, around here.

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I'm going to start off by telling a story. I'm not sure I've ever done this.

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This feels awkward. I'm usually saying, open your copy of God's Word, too, and then we jump right in, don't we? But this morning

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I want to share a story with you. It's a story of two families, and this is no particular family.

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This is an amalgamation of families that I've evaluated and seen over the years.

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The first family, obviously we have a husband, a wife, and let's say they have three kids, ranging from teenager to children.

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And the husband, this is a person that has somehow, someway been exposed to some theology.

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He's watched some YouTube videos, and now he's read a few books, and he now is an expert in his mind of what the church is supposed to be.

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And what his family finds is that he is causing them to jump from church to church.

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They're always looking for a new church. They spend their life where they land somewhere, and the kids get excited, and the wife thinks, well, maybe this will be the one.

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And he thinks even this may be the one until finally the pastor maybe says something he doesn't like or doesn't say something that he thinks he should say, or the fact that they have a youth group or the fact that their youth group does something wrong.

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There's a reason, and he's nitpicky about it. And so what does he do? He uproots his family, and he goes and he finds another church.

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And we see this all the time, this family constantly jumping from church to church.

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And what I've seen, the consequences of such actions are numerous, but one of them that is always evident in every single circumstance is that the children of that family grow up to be hypercritical, and they don't have some of the convictions that old dad had, and so they leave the church altogether.

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They think, well, there's no perfect church. It's just a bunch of hypocrites, and nobody ever does it right, so nothing must be right.

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So that's our first family, and we have a second family, very similar, husband and wife, three kids, roughly the same ages.

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And this family knows that they want to be a part of a church, and so what they do is they pick the church in the community that's the best fit for them, they think.

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They've got teenagers, so, man, this church has a great youth group. My kids have a ton of friends from school.

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They've got a great children's program, so we pick this church. This is a great church. The music is excellent here.

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This is a wonderful place for us to be. We love our small group, but the husband knows instinctively somewhere, someway, this isn't everything that it should be.

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He kind of knows that this is not a healthy church for them, and so he's left with two possible choices for his life and with his family.

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He knows that the pastor is a mile wide and an inch deep. He never really preaches anything of any great value.

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Maybe he doesn't say a lot of heresy, but he skips a lot of things, and the youth leader, it's an easy believism.

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He kind of knows, ah, he's not really teaching my kids anything, but he makes excuses of staying there because he doesn't want to rock the boat.

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Now he's left with these two choices. One, he ignores it and goes, okay, so the pastor doesn't say some things and then occasionally says something that's theologically wrong.

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I supplement by watching my YouTube videos or reading my John Calvin commentaries, and so I fill in the voids, and he doesn't mention it to his wife or his kids, and he lets them continue to grow in a church that is a mile wide and an inch deep, that is unhealthy.

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And so they are being indoctrinated in that type of mindset in church while he thinks he's okay.

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But he has a second choice. He can deal with it. He can then, every single time the pastor says something wrong, he can address it.

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So when they go to Cracker Barrel on Sunday after church, he can sit with his wife and kids, and he can say, listen, the pastor said this, but that's wrong.

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The Bible teaches this. Or the pastor didn't say this. He left this out because this is a hard truth, but this is what the

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Bible says. Or your youth pastor, your youth leader, that lesson was wrong. He's not really teaching exactly the right thing.

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And he then, what happens? He does the same thing that the other dad did, is he builds children and a family that grow to be hypercritical, and they have no respect for their church leadership.

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They have no respect for authority. They always assume that somebody's wrong. I've seen it over and over again.

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With these two families. So which one of these families did the right thing?

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Which one chose the right thing? Neither one, right? Neither of these two extreme families chose the right thing.

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Now, the good thing about both of these examples is that both families do know that they need the church.

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At least that much is true. The dad knows that they need the church, and that they must be an active participating member of one.

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I mean, after all, you cannot claim, hear me, you cannot claim to be a

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Christian at all if you are not a participating member of a local church. It's a hard statement, isn't it?

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But at least they have some general idea of this. Now, I say that with a caveat.

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There may be a season where you're in between churches. Okay, don't hear me wrong. Sometimes you move geographically somewhere, and you've not landed, you're evaluating, or something unbiblical happened at your church, and you've had to leave, and you're in between.

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But a saved person, a redeemed saint, will not go long without being an active member of a church.

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They won't go long. Because a true Christian longs to be obedient to the Lord, right? A true

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Christian longs to be obedient to the Lord. And obedience to the Lord requires that you bring your gifts and resources and place yourself under the authority of a local church.

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That's what God's Word requires. So at least these two families understand this at some level.

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The problem with most people like this is that they've never truly been discipled within the context of a healthy church.

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Never been discipled within the context of a healthy church. Hence, much of their perceived, much of those dads, or even the mothers, maybe they're involved in this, but their perceived biblical knowledge is distorted and out of balance in some way.

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They think they understand Scripture really well because they've listened to a lot of Bode Backham. But somehow, somewhere, there's a disconnect.

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Because it's distorted. It's not done within the context of community. It's not done within the context of accountability.

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For example, the first family that jumps from church to church may have a accurate, and I use that loosely, but an accurate view of ecclesiology.

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Ecclesiology is just a fancy word for the structure of the church. How the church should be run. What's the leadership look like in the church?

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They may have an accurate view of what that church should be, but they also have a rebellious spirit that cannot submit to the authority of Scripture.

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See the imbalance? It shows through the rebellious spirit towards imperfect churches, imperfect church structures.

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Then the second family, the one that stays within the context of an unhealthy church, they may have some biblical understanding of submission.

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They may have some biblical understanding of unity, unity within the brotherhood, but even those things are being misapplied, and they're being misapplied to the detriment of their own family.

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You see, there's an inconsistency here, looking for perfection or settling.

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For the sake of these two families, and I use these two extreme examples because I'm hoping for the sake of everyone in between also, for most people land somewhere between these two extremes.

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For the sake of all of us, we have decided to take the next 10 weeks as we start this new series, and look at 10 non -negotiable elements of a healthy church.

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You see, again, the first family's looking for perfection, and they're not going to find it, are they?

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That first family, as they jump from church to church to church to church, they're never going to find a perfect church because a perfect church doesn't exist on this side of glory.

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As my dad used to say, he's like, if they did find a perfect church, they better not go to it because then they'll ruin it because churches are full of imperfect people, so you're not going to find perfection, and this list of 10 non -negotiables is not a list of 10 perfections.

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Keep that in mind. It is not a list of 10 perfections. Some of these 10 may be practiced better than others within a church, but a healthy church will have them present.

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These will be present within the context of a healthy church. Now, the second family, the example, they're settling, right?

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They're not sure what a healthy church looks like, and so in their minds, why rock the boat?

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Why rock the boat? I don't know what I'm looking for, and so you settle for the imperfections that you know.

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He's already learned the things that his pastor's not going to say and going to say, so why go to another church to try and figure out what that pastor's going to say and not say that's wrong or right?

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In their minds, they're a little jaded. They don't know what they're looking for. All the while, their family suffers from it, but this list of 10 non -negotiables is that very thing, non -negotiable.

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You do not have a church without them. You do not have a church without them. You may, a place may have a building.

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They may have a bunch of actual Christians that are gathered together in that building and have some structure and organization of a service.

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They may do all of the same, very similar things that we're doing this morning. They may go through the whole process.

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They may have leadership, all of the things that you would think that a church should need.

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However, without these 10 elements, if any one of them is void from that church, all you have is a denominational country club, certainly not a church.

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All 10 must be present. Again, not perfectly, but they must be present in some way.

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Now, before I jump into this, I want to give you some resources. If you're interested in studying this with us over the next 10 weeks and you want to know more about a particular topic, there's a couple of resources.

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The first one is the nine marks of a healthy church. If you notice, I added one.

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Turns out in the fourth edition of this book by Mark Dever, he added the 10th one that we added. I just recently got this one and found that he did.

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But he still named the nine marks of a healthy church by Mark Dever, if you want to jot that down. Tremendous resource for seeing all of the things that we're talking about in greater detail.

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And then if you want to even dive in a little bit more, there is a series by Nine Marks. They're these tiny books, and it is their church series.

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And they have a book for every single one of these categories and then some. So if you want to look at the things that we're preaching through over the next 10 weeks and you want to dive in to a little bit more depth,

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I encourage you. Both of these resources are excellent. And if you need information on those at the end of the service, come to me or Pastor Jeremiah.

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We can get you whatever you need for those resources. So today we start the first of these 10.

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The first of these 10 is what is referred to as expositional preaching.

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Now, some of you know what that is. And so you know that I have had a very difficult time this week preparing an expositional sermon on the topic of expositional preaching.

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But prayerfully we've landed where we need to be, okay? But the first one is expositional preaching.

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And the reason we start here, the reason we start with this one of the 10, is that if this isn't right, none of the other nine elements can be properly applied.

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If this is not done well, none of the others will be applied. But when this is done right, when this is followed through properly, all the other elements fall into place naturally.

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So this is a natural place to start. So what is expositional preaching, some of you may ask.

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Everyone in here is probably familiar with preaching, right? I mean, that's what you look at me, you're like, well, this is what that guy's doing.

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He's proclaiming something. He's up there talking to us and giving us a lesson. That's preaching.

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However, some of you, if not most of you, may not be familiar with this phrase expositional.

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So I wanna give you some definitions here. Webster's Dictionary defines this as a setting forth of the meaning or purpose as of a writing.

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In other words, it is an explanation of the true meaning of a text. And there's a key word there, the true meaning of a text.

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I want you to remember that. Now, expositional preaching is often contrasted with what's referred to as topical preaching, which

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I think most of us in here probably growing up have been a part of. That's what our pastors did, was more of a topical preaching.

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All that means is they pick a topic, like today, and then they go to scripture to back up that topic.

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And that's topical preaching. But I would like to argue that if done properly, topical preaching can be expositional.

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It can be expositional. Hence, we're seeking to do that today and over the next few weeks.

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So, if topical preaching can be expositional, what exactly do we mean when we say a healthy church has regular expositional preaching, implying that that's in contrast to non -expositional preaching?

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What do we mean by that? Well, in order to expose non -expositional preaching,

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I would like for us to see four things about true expositional preaching. Four things that I want to see, so that when any of these four are not present, you know it's a counterfeit.

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When any of these four are not present in a sermon, then you know, ah, something's not right.

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And then you know that is probably not a healthy church. So, let's look at the first one.

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First one is true expositional preaching illustrates God's words as life -giving.

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Illustrates God's words as life -giving. See, the entirety of scripture points us to this great truth.

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So let's do a brief inventory of that fact. Bear with me. I'm going to break all my preaching rules today.

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I'm going to have you turn into a ton of passages, and hopefully that's not distracting. But I want us to see the entirety of scripture to really understand this.

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So turn with me to Genesis. Genesis chapter one. The very first book of the Bible, right at the very beginning.

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Genesis chapter one. We see there that in the beginning

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God created the heavens and the earth. But in verse three, we see a phrase here.

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It says, And God said, Let there be light.

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And there was light. God spoke everything into existence.

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His words. His very word. His words have the power to make something, to make anything out of nothing.

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We see this right here. There was no light, and God's words spoke light into existence.

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Right here at the beginning of scripture, all through these first two chapters of Genesis, God creates the universe because His words bring life.

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He speaks it into existence, including us. He creates man in His own image.

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He speaks it into existence. But here's the thing. By chapter three, our actions bring death, don't they?

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By chapter three, our actions bring death. But here again, God's words bring life. Look at chapter three.

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Look at verse nine. Here in Genesis chapter three, verse nine. Adam and Eve have sinned against God.

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They've eaten the fruit. And it says in verse nine of chapter three, but the

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Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you?

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God's words called the man back to Him. Adam and Eve sinned, realized that they were naked, they were ashamed, and so they hide from God.

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They hide from the presence of God. And God comes into the garden. He knows good and well where they are. He knows good and well where they've been.

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But He speaks into it. His words, where are you? Where are you is simply

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God calling, come to me. Come out from hiding. I'm calling you out from hiding.

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And He goes on to speak His plan of redemption here in chapter three.

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His plan to defeat the death that they brought into the world and bring back life. And that's why He says there in verse 15, with the consequences to the serpent,

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He says, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head.

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Foretelling of God's perfect plan that He is speaking life into. Flip over to chapter 12 of Genesis.

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Chapter 1. Chapter 12, chapter 1. Chapter 12, verse 1,

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I mean. Right there at the beginning of this chapter,

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He says, now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.

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You see a pattern here? God's words called a people to Himself.

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He used Abraham. He called Abraham out in faith. He called a people, set apart.

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And then, over in Exodus, this is the next book over, Exodus chapter 20. Flip over there with me.

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Genesis, Exodus, just the next book. In Exodus chapter 20, verse 1, it says, and God spoke all these words.

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You seeing it? Now, not only has He called a people, set them apart, now

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He gives those people His law by His word. He's spoken it.

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He didn't leave those people to themselves. He showed them who He was through His law.

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Speaking life. Speaking life into death with His own words. But He doesn't stop there.

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If you can, flip over to Numbers. Familiar with that? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus.

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Alright, four books over. Numbers, chapter 21. I told you,

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I'm breaking all my rules this morning. Bear with me. I want us to see this through Scripture.

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Genesis chapter 1 and verse 8 says, and the

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Lord said to Moses, there it is again, and the Lord said,

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He's speaking truth. He says, make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.

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What's that referring to? What is God giving them a picture of? It's a foreshadowing, isn't it?

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Of the life that He's going to be bringing through His own words, providing this great truth.

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And we know this is a foreshadowing of Christ because Christ Himself confirmed it. Later on in John chapter 3, didn't

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He? He says, and as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.

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So that everyone who looks upon Him, just like God's words had given to the people of Israel back in Numbers.

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And then we see time and time again where God speaks to His prophets all through the Old Testament.

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We see how He spoke to Jeremiah. It says, now the word of the Lord came to me saying. He speaks to Ezekiel. He says, now the word of the

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Lord came to me. He speaks to Zechariah. He says, then the word of the Lord came to me saying. Over and over again.

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And these are just a few examples. The word of the Lord coming to His people. Now turn with me actually.

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I want you to see something in Ezekiel. Ezekiel chapter 37. If you're not familiar where that is, kind of look at where my

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Bible lands and you'll get an idea. You can flip there, right? Not quite in the center, a little right to center.

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Ezekiel chapter 37. You see the people of Israel have lost their land at this point.

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They are no more. They have ceased to be a people. But in chapter 36 of Ezekiel, God tells him that He is to prophesy of their restoration and return.

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And you've got to understand from Ezekiel's perspective, we are no longer. We don't have our land anymore.

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We are no longer even a nation. We don't exist anymore. We're dead. Israel is dead.

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And in his mind, this is an impossibility. But then we get to chapter 37 here.

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This is a big chunk. I want us to read through it. I want to see the words of the Lord here. It says,

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Then the hand of the Lord was upon me, and He brought me out in the

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Spirit of the Lord and sat me down in the middle of the valley. It was full of bones.

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And He led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.

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And He said to me, there are His words, God speaking.

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And He said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered,

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O Lord God, you know. Then He said to me, Prophesy over these bones and say to them,

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O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, behold,

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I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live, and I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the

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Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling.

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And the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there was sinews on them, the flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them.

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Then He said to me, the words of God, prophesy to the breath, prophesy,

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Son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God, Come from the four winds,

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O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as He commanded me.

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And the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.

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The words of the Lord. The power to take bones.

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Not death. Not a just died yesterday corpse. Bones. A corpse where the flesh and the life is completely void.

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The animals and the elements have decimated every other aspect of life and left bones, and God merely speaks life into them.

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And He uses the prophet to do so. He comes to the prophet, and He says,

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These are my words. Now proclaim my words to the bones, and those bones will rise up as an army.

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Do you see the power of the words of God? God's words.

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And expositional preaching, proclamation of the very words of God illustrates

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God's words as life -giving. Because that's precisely what they are.

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This is obviously but a picture of the life -giving power of these very words. But then, let's keep moving along.

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Then the Messiah finally comes, right? The one that has been prophesied. The one that we've been pointing to.

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The one that He told about there in Genesis 3. But, mind you, the same one that was there in Genesis 1 -1 with Him in creation.

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He finally gets there, and John the Baptist is baptizing Jesus to begin

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His earthly ministry there in Matthew 17 -5. And it says,

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And He was speaking, still speaking, this is John the Baptist, And behold, a great cloud overshadowed them, and the voice from the cloud said,

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This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.

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Hear His words. I'm speaking through Him. Talk about life -giving words.

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As the Messiah comes in and God confirms, I can only imagine standing there in the baptism, you're like, oh, another guy's getting baptized.

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Cool. This is Jesus of Nazareth. This is awesome. I'm so glad He's becoming a disciple of John the

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Baptist. Boom! God comes out and says, This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased.

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Listen to Him. I'm not speaking anymore. He is. These are my words.

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To see that, I want you to turn with me over to Hebrews chapter 1. I told you, we're everywhere today, guys.

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Bear with me. This is in the New Testament. Hebrews chapter 1. It's right after the pastoral epistles.

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There, 1 Timothy, Titus, and then Philemon, and then you get to Hebrews. Hebrews chapter 1.

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I want us to look at the first two verses here. The writer of Hebrews says,

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And many times, and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

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That's what we've literally just been kind of flying through, isn't it? That's how God spoke.

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God's words came to the prophets, and the prophets then spoke the word to the people.

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Verse 2. But in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son.

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He's spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also

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He created the world. Remember, back in Genesis 1 .1. I can't help but think of the way

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John introduces his epistle, or not his epistle, his gospel account.

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. See, God goes on to tell us that all

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Scripture is breathed out by Him. In 2 Timothy 2 .15. All Scripture.

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Everything we see in the Word of God is breathed out by God. So you see, the words of God are life -giving, and the totality of Scripture is

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His Word. This is how He speaks. We have to remember this. This is very important.

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He no longer speaks through the prophets. He no longer speaks through men. If somebody comes to you and says,

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I have a fresh word from the Lord, turn around and run, because lightning might strike them.

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They don't have a fresh word from the Lord. They may be repeating a word that the

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Lord has already said to remind you of it, but they don't have a fresh word because God no longer speaks through men.

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God has stopped speaking. And why has God stopped speaking through men, and audibly?

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Because He spoke in everything. He spoke in everything in His Son. That's what

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He was aiming to. Everything that He spoke, when He spoke the world into existence, and then when we brought death into the world, and He spoke the glimmer of light that He was looking towards, and as He spoke a people to Himself, as He spoke the law, as He spoke of the coming

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Messiah, and then as He spoke at the baptism of Jesus, confirming, now listen to Him speaking through your son.

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He's saying, I've said it all. We've arrived. This is the information that I want to give to you.

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No more, no less. This is my word. We don't need a new revelation.

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We don't need the input of man. And why do we not need it? And how do we know we don't need it?

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Well, the passage I just read there in 2 Timothy, chapter 3. Get your eyes on it.

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Just flip a few pages back into 2 Timothy there. 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, right near the end of chapter 3.

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The Apostle Paul writing to Timothy, young Timothy, who is essentially a pastor. He's establishing churches.

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He's setting elders. He's proclaiming the truth to God's people, and he says that phrase that we mentioned a moment ago, that all

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Scripture is breathed out by God. And what is it? Once it's breathed out by God, what is it?

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It's profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be sufficiently adequate.

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Is that what it says? No, it says so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work, every single work.

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God's words give us what we need. We don't need a new word from God. We don't need something that is not here in the

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Word, and He's not left us wanting for anything because everything is done, it's said, it's closed, and He has spoken through His Son.

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Because not only are His words life -giving in the sense of eternal life, which they are, praise

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God. They're life -giving in that we are equipped to do the will of God now, right?

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We're equipped to do the will of God, and doing the will of God is life -giving. It's like light in a dark room.

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It's like air in lungs. You know that feeling when you come up out of the swimming pool and you're underneath and maybe you've gone too deep as a kid and you're like, oh no, and you push off the ground and you're trying to get to the top and you see the light and then you finally break free and then the air goes into your lungs.

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That's a beautiful feeling, isn't it? It feels like life -giving. And that's what obeying the law of God is.

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Doing the will of the Father is. Because we were created to obey

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Him, weren't we? And here's the thing, true expositional preaching, it illustrates those words as life -giving.

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It points to those words. The second thing I want us to see about expositional preaching is that it illustrates

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Christ as the head of the church. It illustrates Christ as the head of the church.

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And we only know this because of His words telling us, right? Those life -giving words.

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Colossians 1 .18, the Apostle Paul says, and He, speaking of Christ, is the head of the body.

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The church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent.

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He essentially affirms the same thing in Ephesians 1, 22 and 23. And He, Christ, put all things under His feet.

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Well, God put all things under His feet, Christ's feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is

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His body. The fullness of Him who fills all and all. Christ is the head of the church.

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And you see, non -expositional preaching seeks to establish authority, but not in its proper order.

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I'm going to say that again. Non -expositional preaching seeks to establish authority, but not in its proper order.

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There are many preachers out there that want to be seen as the authority.

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Listen to my words. Listen to my opinion. Listen to what I have to say.

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This is me. I've got my life together. You should aspire to be like me.

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You guys are looking at my life and you're like, I'm going to aspire to be that guy. Thank goodness, because I'm not trying to put on that facade. I'm a broken sheep just like the rest of you.

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Right? But there are many pastors, they want that. They have that aura of authoritativeness.

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And when these types of pastors, when they take God's words, they slightly twist them usually.

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It always is a twist to fit their agenda. A slight twist to fit their opinion.

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And what are they doing? They're essentially seeking to dethrone Christ and place themselves as the head of the church.

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Place themselves as the head of that body and king.

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But Paul told Timothy, back in 2 Timothy, in chapter 2, verse 15, he says, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved.

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A worker who has no need to be ashamed. Here's the phrase I want you to hear.

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Rightly handling the word of truth. Rightly handling the word of truth.

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What does he mean by that? What is Paul telling

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Timothy here? Well, here's the thing. Any author that writes something and then has 10 different people read those writings, a lot of times those people could go on and express 10 different interpretations of that writing, can't they?

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They see it through the lens of their worldview. They see it through the lens of their experience. They see it through the lens of a preconceived idea.

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And so they read that writing of an author and they can walk away and, man,

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I got something totally different out of his writing than you did. Like, how did you get that? Like, I got this. But here's the thing.

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It doesn't change the fact that the author had one true meaning. One true meaning in that writing.

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Sometimes the only way to arrive at that meaning is to go to the source. The only way to arrive at that meaning is to go to the author himself.

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And you see, this is essentially what true Bible exposition is. It's going to the source.

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And it requires a couple of things. First and foremost, it requires the indwelling of the

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Holy Spirit to illuminate that truth to us, right? Because the words of God are speaking something heavenly and we are earthly -minded and we need the inspiration of the

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Holy Spirit. And the inspiration of the Holy Spirit comes only through Christ's propitiation for us, right?

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We're in Christ. Christ has paid the penalty for us. He has bought us with a price. We're now His. And now

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He seals us with the Holy Spirit, right? But true expositional preaching, going to the source is using

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His words to interpret His words. You ever heard the phrase,

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Scripture interprets Scripture? That's going to the source.

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That's rightly handling the word of truth. That's not just coming up with what you think and taking a passage of Scripture and reading it in your particular context and worldview and then building an entire thought process or doctrine around it.

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That's why we see so many heresies because there's so many men that do this very thing. No. True expositional preaching is only confirmed by Scripture itself.

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And here's the thing. If you were to use any other source, if I came to you and said,

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Hey, I want to confirm this thing about Scripture. You see this verse in here? This is really hard to understand.

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But here's the thing. I'm going to go to this commentary and I'm going to use this commentary to confirm this truth in the

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Scripture. Well, guess what? Now this is not authoritative anymore. This isn't life -giving.

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That's its authority because it confirmed this. You can't do that.

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Now, can we use resources? Do I use these commentaries? Yes, because there's godly saints from the past that I can glean from, but I don't take their word for it.

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I need them to confirm their words with Scripture itself. I have to go to the source. You always go to the source.

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That's rightly handling the word of truth. That's expositional preaching. And it always illustrates Christ as the head of the church.

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Always. If any preaching is not gospel -centered, it's not preaching because the entirety of Scripture is aiming to redemption.

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I call it the gospel goggles. If you go to Scripture without your gospel goggles on, you're reading it wrong.

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You have to see it through the lens of the cross. Man's opinion, man's insight, man's worldview, man's lofty speech carries zero weight when interpreting

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God's words because God's words are the final authority. And we've already established that as we have spoken about the passage in Hebrews.

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When God says, I've spoken through His Son, the head, the authority of the church.

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So when a preacher stands up in the pulpit and he proclaims, Thus saith the Lord. Not, Thus saith the great and powerful

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Nathan. Not, Thus saith that really, really popular or really, really smart professor.

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No. Thus saith the Lord. This is what the Lord said.

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And then rightly handle that word. Then and only then are we truly illustrating that Christ is the head of the church.

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See, I'm but an under shepherd. I'm not making the rules. I'm not casting the vision.

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I'm not leading the march. It's not my job. All I'm doing is

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I'm seeking to follow the lead of our good and gracious Savior, the head, the

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King. That's a pastor, an under shepherd. I'm not a sheep dog.

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You've heard me say that all the time. I hate that phrase. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. A pastor is not a sheep dog.

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He's a dumb sheep. You've heard me say it before. All I am is the sheep that kept running from the shepherd and the shepherd gathered me, broke my leg so that I couldn't run and now

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I'm stuck with him and I love him. And now I don't want to leave because I'm used to being next to him. And then the other sheep gather around.

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That's all I'm doing. That's all we're doing. And if a pastor tries to present himself as anything more than that, then he's probably a wolf trying to pull you away from the shepherd over to his corner so he can devour you.

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This is what expositional preaching is, pointing to Christ, to Christ, to Christ, my only salvation, my only hope, the only authority that I have, the only authority that you have, the only thing that we have is our

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Savior because I can't even approach the words of God outside of Christ because I would be burned instantly within the presence of his holiness because of my sin, but because of Christ.

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It's the third thing I want us to see about expositional preaching. Let's see here. We're doing good time wise.

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Expositional preaching illustrates the Holy Spirit's work of sanctification or in sanctification.

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The Holy Spirit's work in sanctification. I mentioned earlier that topical preaching can be expositional.

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We're doing it right now. It can be expositional. However, I believe there is a danger in making topical preaching a habit.

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We see a lot of churches do it, but there's a danger. If you notice around here, 90 % of what we do here is we pick a book or a big section of scripture, kind of like we just went through the

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Sermon on the Mount for 40 -something weeks, right? We pick a section of scripture and we walk through it line by line, skipping nothing.

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We skip nothing. Lightly skimming over, nothing. Digging into each phrase as we come to it.

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That's the habit here at this church, and there's a reason for that. There's a reason we do that.

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There's a safety in it. I'll talk about that here in a moment. But every once in a while, like essentially right now, we see the need, or an obvious need, something that God has laid on our hearts and says, hey, the church needs this in this moment.

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The plurality of leadership comes to that conclusion together, not one man making that decision.

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We come to that conclusion that God is leading us in this way, and we address that need as we're doing over the next 10 weeks.

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Yet there is a danger in leaving that approach open -ended. There's danger. And that danger is man relying on his own wisdom, man relying on his own intuition, relying on himself to give the people of God what they think they need, week in and week out.

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Or even worse, even worse than that, it causes some to avoid some hard truths.

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It's easy to avoid hard truths when you don't have to address it. Hard truths that would require a lot of study on the pastor's part.

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There's weeks. You can ask my wife and my kids, like I'm in shutdown mode because this is a hard truth.

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I gotta dig. This is hard. I need to dig, and I need to be in prayer, and this is gonna be a lot of work this week.

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Pastor Jeremiah's done that. I know he's dealt with text up here that I'm like, man, he's wrestled through those for three weeks.

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And that happens, but pastors wanna avoid that. Believe it or not, we know some pastors, trust me, many pastors really hate to sit down and do in -depth study.

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They'd rather be visiting or doing some of the other things with the people. They don't wanna sit down in their office and dig and do the hard work, so they avoid it.

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But they also avoid it and or avoid it a lot because a lot of messy problems amongst the church.

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A lot of times they know the propensity of man is to buck against God's will, especially when it comes to hard truths, and so they don't wanna rock the boat.

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And it's easy to avoid when you don't have to address that text. You know what? I don't have to preach

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Ephesians 1. I can just skip that. I can preach some random reference in the

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Gospels and then jump to another one next week. I don't have to address hard things. A lot of times they make excuses like, you know what?

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Your congregation, and we've actually heard this before, your congregation may be ready for that hard truth. Ours isn't.

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I'm like, you've been a pastor there for 10 years. What are you talking about? Why aren't they ready? Because you've been given the milk because you just skip.

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You're preaching topically without dealing with a text. And then there are some preachers who will flat out say that's a truth in God's word.

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I learned it in seminary. I know it. It's obviously true in God's word. But honestly, the average

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Christian doesn't need to know that. That's a deep truth for us scholars, us lofty preachers.

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We know this great truth. The average peasant doesn't need to know that deep truth. They actually think like this.

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They think, well that truth doesn't help their day -to -day life. These people are, you know, they're dealing with their work and their family.

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We need to give them something practical. They don't need that truth from God's word. They don't need to know that deep doctrine. How utterly arrogant of them.

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I despise that type of thinking. It's godless. It's arrogant.

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True expositional preaching illustrates the fact that the Holy Spirit is doing the work in the lives of the people.

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His people. Not the pastor's. His. And the Holy Spirit speaks through what?

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The word. He doesn't just send it to your brain with a lightning bolt. He sends it through His word. It confirms it with His word because God stopped talking.

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He's spoken through His son. And that's it. And He speaks through His word. And when a pastor commits to preach through the text,

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I mean really preach through it. Deal with it. Not skipping, not avoiding, not watering down.

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Even when it comes to text that are hard to understand. You know what His job is? You know what our job is?

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Even when it's a text that we don't fully understand, His job, my job, is to explain it to the best of our ability and give you the best interpretations so that the

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Holy Spirit can work in your life as to how to address that text. But we must address the text.

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Some churches think that expositional preaching is just, they pick a book of the

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Bible and they say, well, we're preaching expositionally. And we walk through it. Only to kind of skim over and avoid things throughout that book.

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Let's just kind of skim through it. Right? They're maneuvering through it like it's a minefield.

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Acting like verses like John 6, 44 are going to blow up in their face. Right? Like, oh man, we've got to avoid that.

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But they don't totally avoid it. They read it. But they read past it quickly. As quickly as possible.

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So they can say that they addressed it. I preach expositionally. I preach book by book. Line by line.

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But they rush through it and they give you an explanation of what it doesn't mean. Well, they fly over it.

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Sorry, that's not enough. That's not expositional preaching. That may be preaching through a book, but you're not actually preaching through the book.

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And not only is it not expositional preaching, it's arrogance. That type of leadership, that type of preaching, is seeking to usurp both the headship of Christ over the church and the work of the

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Holy Spirit in the life of the believers. They've now become the

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Holy Spirit. I'm your conscience. I'm what's guiding you.

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I know what you need. I've become the authority.

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Yet on the other hand, when a church truly preaches expositionally, they are illustrating that they trust the timing, the topic, and the target of the

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Holy Spirit's work of sanctification. When they trust what

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Paul said to Timothy, hey, it's all God breathed, and it's for equipping so that the man of God may be complete.

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It's all there. Don't skip over it. Don't skip over the hard thing. 1

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Corinthians 2, 10, and 11, Paul said, these things God has revealed to us through the

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Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

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For he knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person.

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For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the spirit of God.

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No pastor can comprehend what you're going through, what you're dealing with. They have no idea what you need to solve that problem.

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But God's Word does. The Spirit does. And he uses expositional preaching to do so.

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The Holy Spirit knows each person's needs when they need it, and he provides it through his Word. And lastly,

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I'm gonna skim through this one. This is our last point I want you to see. Expositional preaching illustrates the path and process of true discipleship.

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Theological study is not exclusive to the pastor. Theological study is a hear me out absolute requirement of every saint.

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It's not optional. If you are not digging into God's Word and studying the truths of God very diligently, studying to show yourself approved, you are not being obedient to God.

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Sorry. It's as simple as that. I didn't say it. It's God's Word. That's for every person.

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But it's a pastor's job to teach God's people how to do so. How do we read God's Word in expositional preaching?

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It gives you an example of how to do that and why to do it every single week.

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Every week when I stand up here, the whole structure of my sermon, the whole structure of Pastor Jeremiah's sermon, the whole structure of Keith's sermon is meant to show you how to go to that passage and study it for yourself.

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That's what it's for. It's teaching you. It's discipling you. It's the process. And it should inspire your heart to rest in Christ.

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That's what it should do. Pointing you to the headship of Christ. It should challenge you to mortify sin in your life, to kill sin every day and drive you to the cross.

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And where do we see the cross? Where do we see our Savior? Where do we see the goodness of the

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Father? Where do we see the work of the Holy Spirit? His word alone.

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Nowhere else. So expositional preaching is merely illustrating and illuminating truth of God's words.

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That's what it's for. Anything less from a pulpit, not a church.

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You go to a church and you hear a preacher consistently not preaching this way, get out of the seat, walk out, and never return.

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That is not a church. That is a denominational country club. You go to a place where they do.

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First and foremost. Because like I said at the beginning, they do this and you can see now why the other nine that we're going to talk about over the next few weeks fall into place.

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Because all this is doing is pointing you to those. And it's driving obedience in your heart towards those things.

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So let's now prepare to go to the Lord's table. As we not only hear the word, but now we get to see the word play out before us.

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It's evident before us as we go and take of the elements that Christ has prescribed for his church.

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Showing the unity that we have in him. The unity that we have in each other. And the future glory that is to come in the great feast.

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Amen? Let's pray for our time here at the Lord's Supper. And when we're done, I'll be at this side.

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Pastor Jeremiah will be over here. You can come up, take the elements, go back to your seat, pray as a family. Anyone who is a believer in Christ, who is a...