In this sermon by Scott Brown, he discusses the rewards and benefits of expository preaching. Brown highlights that expository preaching best achieves the biblical intent of preaching by delivering God's message, promotes scripturally authoritative preaching, and magnifies God's word. Additionally, it provides a storehouse of preaching material, develops the pastor as a man of God's Word, ensures the highest level of Bible knowledge for the congregation, and promotes thinking and living biblically. Expository preaching also encourages depth and comprehensiveness, forces the treatment of hard-to-interpret texts, and imitates the preaching of Christ and the apostles.

I would like to speak about the reward of expository preaching and I would just like to remind us of where we've been. I don't know if you calculated this but we spent four hours at least in this session just talking about the granularity of the different kinds of passages of scripture that there are. Jason led us through how to deal with narrative passages, Andy through poetic passages, Steve through didactic and parable texts, Jonathan talked to us about how to read it, to give it its voice. Scripture is so variable. Scripture gives us flowers and rocks and pasture and water.

It gives us all of those things. And of course, we know that it is fire. It's like a sword. It's like a hammer. It's like bread.

It's so marvelous. It's better than gold. It's better than honey. It's absolutely unbelievable. And God has given us this rich testimony, I hope, that spending four hours just sort of laboring over what a didactic text is, that it would just help us to see it in a clearer and better light, that we would love it more.

I trust that that will be the legacy of spending so much time just trying to see how different types of scripture are. God is that way. He is colorful. He provides textures that are absolutely unbelievable. Nothing is the same in nature.

From a snowflake to a flower to a human being, God just provides all this richness and I trust that this will help us to see that in a fresh way. That we would have used these last two days just to slow down for a minute and say, okay, let's consider what we're doing with Scripture, how we're seeing it, and how we're teaching it, and try to give it its voice as Jonathan was attempting to help us dumb, you know, un-theatrical men to do. So just think of the different genres that are there. God has done that in every area of life with sounds and colors and tastes and everything. It's a marvelous world.

I trust that as we go from here that we would give scripture its voice in a new way, better than we ever had before, that it would be more beautiful to us, It would be more colorful to us. It would be louder to us and softer. It would do everything that it has intended to do. And of course, the work of the Holy Spirit in us and the hearers is critical for it all. We're so dependent upon that.

And so we must be men of the Holy Spirit. We started this conference out with an appeal. I hope it was urgent enough for expository preaching. And we actually said it was the need of the hour. Well, there are a lot of people that say it exactly like that.

And we do believe it is the need of the hour. And he then came back and he defined expository preaching and gave us the range of what we mean by it. And then Jason came right behind it with an example of expository preaching, taking us back to Athens. And Paul's experience there, drawing from scripture as it related to that passage and giving us historical information to help us understand what that was all about. Then Dan Horne gave us a very convicting message regarding the qualifications for teachers.

That we would prepare ourselves, that we would see that our homes are prepared and that we would see that we are actually prepared doctrinally to do this work. Let not many of you become teachers. Let all of you become teachers in your homes every day. Let not many of you become teachers in the church. But let all of us strive to exercise the gifts that God has given us and if teaching is that then give time to it to develop it.

We talked this morning about Christ-centered preaching and then we saw another example. Andy took us to Romans 11 and we paused on one single letter. A word, O. And I was so grateful for that message and I trust that we would have that same sense of the depth of the riches of the wisdom of God as Andy did his his best to help us to get it. And then Andy also helped us in the preparation of expository sermons and how we should go about that or at least how he does that.

I want to leave you with some of the advantages of expository preaching just to leave us with his final taste. These are not mine. Richard Mayhew, Vice President and Dean of Pastoral Ministries at Masters Seminary wrote these, and I don't want to even try to improve on them. They're so good. So here they are.

I'd like to click through them and then wind up our conference and send us out with joy in our hearts at this wonderful treasure that we have. We have many advantages in expository preaching. The first of which is, expositional preaching best achieves the biblical intent of preaching by delivering God's message. We literally can speak the voice of God. The more that the words of scripture are in our mouths, we should memorize it and let the voice of God be heard through human vocal cords.

We were created for this to declare the glory of God. The Bible says, Let everything that has breath, praise the Lord. Think of how much we use our breath for things that are not the Word of God. I trust that we would each determine to use this breath more. He's given it to us.

We never know when the breath will be away from us and we won't have any more. But today we have it. And what we ought to do is in our closets commit it to memory and then devote more of our breath to it. Expositional preaching promotes scripturally authoritative preaching. It provides authority in a culture that has totally lost a sense of authority at all.

The moral resolve that exists among the populace today is so low and who would recover it? Those who would preach the word with the authority that God provides. Expositional preaching magnifies God's word And what we know about God's Word is that it is perfect. The law of the Lord is perfect. What better thing to do with your life than to magnify God's Word?

And with the practice of expository preaching, we can come alongside of God. I believe we bring joy to His heart when we speak the Word of God. Expositional preaching provides a storehouse of preaching material. You can never run out, ever. I don't think you can ever get to the bottom of any passage you'll ever preach on.

You can't say, well, I read that before, I know it. Absolutely not. That never happened to anybody, at least didn't really happen to them. They might have thought it, but it wasn't true. Expositional preaching develops the pastor as a man of God's Word.

What kind of man do you want to be? Do you want to be a man of the world? Do you want to be a man of advertisements? Do you want to be a man who all he has in his head are quotations from the last movie that you saw? Maybe it was a clean movie but that's all that's in your head.

Or the last song that you saw, the ditty that's in your mind because you've been listening to some stupid song or what do you want in your mind? Well this expositional preaching develops the pastor as a man of God's word and not silliness that the world would fill your head with. Next, expositional preaching ensures the highest level of Bible knowledge for the flock, how deplorable the knowledge of God's Word is in the pew today. You can do something about that. You can help.

You really can. You can make a dent in the foolish thinking that we find in the modern church today. Please give your life to developing wisdom and to chase out foolishness in the church. Next, expositional preaching promotes thinking and living biblically. People don't even know how to think biblically about a subject anymore.

If you throw a subject on the table, they don't think from Genesis to Revelation. They think of something that they heard from someone. They arise thoughts out of their emotions, but they don't think biblically about anything anymore. And we must help the church to think biblically about everything, lest we be tossed about by every wind of doctrine. Expositional preaching encourages both depth and comprehensiveness.

It gives us not a narrow range of teaching, but a broad, a comprehensive range. We are charged by God to deliver the whole counsel of God, to not hold back anything that's valuable. And that's the kind of men that we ought to be. God needs men like this today who would passionately and urgently give breadth to give the whole counsel to not be men of just one subject, but to be, in effect, biblical renaissance men, men who are competent in a range of subjects and who can be helpful in time of need, who can be helpful to any person along a continuum of need and questioning. God would have us give this kind of preaching because it gives us depth and comprehensiveness across a whole range of subjects.

God would, I believe, desire to raise up men in this generation like that. Next, Expositional preaching forces the treatment of hard to interpret texts. God has not given us an easy book. Sometimes we have to pound on the text day after day. It's almost like we're beating our heads against the wall.

We lose our wits about us. We don't know what that means. God is brilliant. God is so far beyond us that we have to work to understand Him. His ways are not our ways and so He gives us things that stretch our minds.

He wouldn't leave us as dolts. He wouldn't leave us as idiots. He would raise us up and make us men who think better than we ever did before. And expositional preaching helps us with that. It takes us out of our comfort zones and expands our knowledge.

Next, expositional preaching allows for the handling of broad theological themes. It makes us to know the mind of God across a broad spectrum of wisdom and knowledge. Next, expositional preaching keeps preachers away from ruts and hobby horses. How susceptible we are to all of these things. We are men of our own minds.

We have particular passions. Every man is that way. But God would deliver us from that. And God would deliver our people from that as well. And we would not subject our people to a one-man band, a kind of a life.

Next, expositional preaching prevents the insertion of human ideas. Of course we are weak, of course we do have many human ideas and we do bring in our preaching and of course God has mercy on us but he will also judge us for that. But the closer we stick to the text the better off we'll always be. We can be safer in the next ten years than we have in the last by gravitating more to God's ideas and not human. Next, expositional preaching guards against misinterpretation of the biblical text because it keeps us focused on it and it helps us to interpret it properly in many of the ways that we've spoken of here these last two days.

Next, expositional preaching imitates the preaching of Christ and the apostles. This perhaps might be one of the most important things, that we are disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, that we are carrying, that we are delivering the preaching of the Apostles and that we're faithful not to be our own men but to be men like the Lord Jesus Christ. One thing you notice about the Apostles is that they're like Christ. We should be imitating them and taking their patterns and moving them into the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's not our church.

It's His church. And the only way to truly make it His is to follow those patterns and not our own. And then next, expositional preaching brings out the best 001 001 in the expositor. And what that means is that it takes the expositor 001 001 out of himself and gives him to God. That would be our most important legacy is to be longed to God to be his and not our own you know his ways are pleasant ways all his paths are peace ours are not that way at all and that's why we so need him The law of the Lord is perfect.

The statutes of the Lord do rejoice the heart. I've never known a man who didn't want to bring joy to the hearts of the people that he's preaching to. How would you better do it? How would you better help them deal with their problems? How would you help them be consoled in the midst of their trials and tribulations?

The Word of God really is the only hope. Look at what psychology has done. It has only made people stupider. It's only made them sicker. They never, ever get well, but not with God, not in His Word.

He makes His patience well. And so if we would desire to bless, and I know we do, we would deliver it to them as best we can. Oh, how important it is that we have the Word of God on our lips ready, ready to deliver so that the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts are acceptable in His sight and it makes us valuable men instead of just regular old men. I trust that we would not just be ordinary men in this life, but that we would have something to say that is so far beyond ourselves and our own wisdom. Nobody needs our wisdom, but they do need God's wisdom.

The most valuable men to me in my life are the men who are so saturated with Scripture that when they talk, Scripture just comes out. Let's be that kind of man. If you would be a friend of men, this is the kind of friend to be. If you would be a husband to your wife, this is the kind of husband to be. Would you be a father?

Then be a father that has the words of God on his lips, who happily and passionately delivers them. These are the kind of men that God would have us be. Now we've just spent two days, it's been a long time hasn't it? And we've really set all of life aside to come and consider these things. It's really been a major investment of time, I know.

And I know the men who have prepared to deliver these things labored over it. You have labored as well to listen, to try to stay attentive, you know, in the long afternoons. Even after you eat grass-fed beef you could be tired. I don't know how that happens. But we've all labored here.

But I trust that it will have been an effective labor, a good labor, that it would be sweet not just for now as we're thinking about the benefit of it, but for many, many years. Often we're going so fast in life that we're shooting ourselves in the foot. And we've not slowed ourselves down enough to consider holy scripture. We've tried to do that, or at least as best we could to try to explain the different kinds of scripture and to urgently appeal for it. I read of a situation in the desert of Nevada some time ago where a jet was testing and was shooting along at a very high speed and shot off its rockets.

The jet was going so fast that it passed up the rockets and its own rocket shot him down. That's what we do often. We're going so fast that we're shooting ourselves down. If a man would be a man of the word, he would have to slow down. How many of us are shooting ourselves because we're moving so fast?

We don't take time to memorize it. We don't take time to savor it. And even sometimes when we're memorizing it and reciting it, we run it over so fast we don't even cogitate over the meanings of those words that we're even saying. How many of us allow our children to just breeze over a memorization of scripture instead of really saying it from the heart? We should be stopping one another and saying, no, say it again from the heart.

Don't just say the words, but be like Ezra. Ezra who prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it. And to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel. For all of Scripture, for every part of it, for every genre, from Genesis to Revelation, the whole counsel of God. This I trust would be what we would end up with in the midst of our imperfect and inadequate teaching in this conference, but that the Holy Spirit would use it to slow us down and to really get into it.

Every word of it. And that we would love it just like Ezra loved it so much that it was in his heart. It is the way that we love God and it's the way that we are useful in this life. Last night I went home from the conference. I was very tired and I was crying out to God for help and I went and took a walk and I sat down on a rock.

And I cried out to God and I said, oh God, I want to be useful to you. And I know that it is true that our relationship with the Word of God is the key to our usefulness that we would not just be hearers of the Word but to be doers of it and then I trust that would be what we would walk with here now as we go. So I commend you to God and to the word of His grace which is able to build you up among those who are being sanctified. And all of God's men said Amen. For more messages, articles, and videos on the subject of Conforming the Church and the Family to the Word of God.

And for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website, ncfic.org. I C dot o r g