Welcome to the Expositor's Quote of the Week. This is the first in a series of weekly emails designed to encourage preachers in fulfilling what Martyn Lloyd-Jones calls "the highest and greatest and most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called."
This week's quote is from John Stott:
All true Christian preaching is expository preaching. . . . To expound Scripture is to bring out of the text what is there and expose it to view. The expositor prizes open what appears to be closed, makes plain what is obscure, unravels what is knotted and unfolds what is tightly packed. The opposite of exposition is 'imposition', which is to impose on the text what is not there. But the text in question could be a verse, or a sentence, or even a single word. It could equally be a paragraph, or a chapter, or a whole book. The size of the text is immaterial, so long as it is biblical. What matters is what we do with it. Whether it is long or short, our responsibility as expositors is to open it up in such a way that it speaks its message clearly, plainly, accurately, relevantly, without addition, subtraction or falsification. In expository preaching the biblical text is neither a conventional introduction to a sermon on a largely different theme, nor a convenient peg on which to hang a ragbag of miscellaneous thoughts, but a master which dictates and controls what is said.
John R.W. Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century, Eerdmans, 1982, p. 125-126. Originally published in Britain by Hodder and Stoughton under the title I Believe in Preaching.
[May Scripture dictate and control what you say in your first sermon of the year 2000! Preach the word! In Christ, Coty]
[Thanks are due to Chip Stam and his Worship Quote of the Week for the idea of beginning this email list. Archives for that excellent list are available at: http://www.biblechurch.org/wqotw.htm ]