As my high school career wound down, I dreamed of playing baseball in college. I spent hours before and after school hitting off the tee in the batting cage, trying to improve my swing enough to get recruited. Unfortunately, all those reps off the tee didn’t help because every swing reinforced my bad habits. I needed a coach to guide my practice so it wouldn’t go to waste.
Established preachers often tell younger preachers beginning their ministries, “The best way to learn how to preach is to preach. Take every opportunity you can.” This is true—if you’re taking good reps. The danger is that young preachers and teachers sometimes don’t know how to take good practice swings, so every preaching opportunity can reinforce bad habits.
In Proclaiming the Word: Principles and Practices for Expository Preaching, David J. Jackman, former president of the Proclamation Trust and founding director of the Cornhill Training Course, distills three decades of experience training preachers into a book that provides the tools for preachers and teachers to take better reps. This book is designed to “identify and illustrate biblically the principles and methodology of exposition” to help preachers honor the text of Scripture (xiv).
Justifying Expository Preaching
Unlike textbooks such as Christ-Centered Preaching, Power in the Pulpit, or Biblical Preaching, Proclaiming the Word doesn’t provide detailed instructions on how to craft different parts of a sermon. Instead, it offers examples of developing and applying good preparation techniques so each preaching opportunity leads to growth. Jackman coaches readers to adjust their preparation and preaching methods to grow as a teacher or preacher of God’s Word.
Young preachers sometimes don’t know how to take good practice swings, so every preaching opportunity can reinforce bad habits.
John Stott once wrote that “the essential secret [to preaching well] is not mastering certain techniques but being mastered by certain convictions.” Following this model, Jackman begins his book by outlining the fundamental convictions and character traits a preacher needs to keep going with exposition.
“To many people,” Jackman writes, “preaching seems strangely out of place in the modern world” (1). And so the preacher has to believe in both the expository preaching method and the Bible’s contents to show the importance of proclamation to the world. Instead of adopting modern communication techniques in a quest for relevance, Jackman argues that “expository preaching does not have to create relevance because nothing could be more relevant than the living and enduring word of the one true and living God” (17). Expository preaching is the natural outflow of believing God has inspired the Word.
What makes expository preaching hard, however, is that attempts to shape the message according to the passage can sometimes turn the sermon into a running commentary. Jackman teaches readers to avoid this by knowing and applying the passage to their congregation and by reading well.
Good Preaching Starts with Good Reading
“Expository” sermons that are biblical but not textual begin with a failure of reading. As T. David Gordon points out in Why Johnny Can’t Preach, the same sermon on salvation by grace through faith could be preached from John 3:16 or Ephesians 2:1–10 or Romans 5:6–11 if the preacher doesn’t allow the specific details of each text to expose its unique message. The resultant sermon may be biblical, but it won’t be textual. Jackman shows that good preaching starts with good reading, listening to the text to hear what it’s actually saying so you can proclaim it from the pulpit.
Jackman uses the narrative of Jesus’s temptations in the wilderness as an example. Matthew 4 is often preached as a stand-alone encouragement to resist temptation by memorizing Scripture like Jesus did. There’s some truth to this interpretation. Jesus serves as a model for us, but to only make this application misses Matthew’s larger point.
As Jackman highlights, the passage begins with “then.” That shows the temptation narrative is connected to Jesus’s baptism. Matthew is tying Jesus’s baptism and temptation together to show he’s stepping into the story of Israel. Jackman writes,
The voice from heaven has just declared Jesus to be God’s beloved Son. Now, like Israel before, he faces temptation in the wilderness. But whereas Israel repeatedly sinned and failed the test, this Son triumphed. (117)
Thus Jesus can and will save us by his faithful life and obedient death on the cross. Carefully reading the text of Matthew 4 helps the preacher to make a textual connection to the larger gospel story even as he preaches on Jesus’s temptations.
Bringing It All Together
Proclaiming the Word is an excellent sourcebook for preachers. Jackman provides numerous examples of contextual readings from the Old and New Testament to help the preacher grow in his ability to accurately expose what God’s Word says. Jackman closes the volume with an effort to develop the readers’ “skills and confidence in understanding the Bible’s metanarrative” (195). The goal is to help readers see Scripture as a whole.
Expository preaching is the natural outflow of believing God has inspired the Word.
It’s no surprise a book on preaching method begins with a theological justification for preaching God’s Word and ends by outlining the big-picture theology of God’s Word. Expositional preaching always involves exegeting the sermon passage in the context of Scripture’s larger picture.
By covering the convictions, practical skills, and whole-Bible understanding needed to preach faithfully, Jackman provides “a hands-on training manual” for expositors (x). The best way to use this book is to read it fully and then return to individual chapters as needed.
Paul encouraged Timothy to immerse himself in the task of preaching so all would see his progress (1 Tim. 4:13–15). Reading this book doesn’t substitute for experience, but Proclaiming the Word can help both new and experienced church leaders make the most of every preaching and teaching opportunity.
The Gospel Coalition