Here are a few quotes from F. B. Meyers book entitled Expository Preaching Plans and Methods (Meyer, F. B. Expository Preaching Plans and Methods. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1910) They come from the second chapter; Expository Preaching-What Is It?"But among all these[preaching methods] Expository Preaching should have a very conspicuous place. It should be the standing dish; nay, it is the table on which all the dishes are placed." (26)
"We are now able, in the light of these distinctions, to define Expository Preaching as the consecutive treatment of some book or extended portion of Scripture on which the preacher has concentrated head and heart, brain and brawn, over which he has thought and wept and prayed, until it has yielded up its inner secret, and the spirit of it has passed into his spirit." (29)
"The main burden of all our preaching, as we have seen, must be Jesus Christ, and the expositor questions often how much of Christ there is present and how he can make Him known."(33-4)
" Many a track of Scripture, when we first read it over, seems as though it were hardly worth considering, and then the hidden Christ is suddenly discovered ; and to have found Him is to have come on a mine of treasure from which the whole congregation will be enriched on the following Lord s Day." (34-5)
I also enjoyed Meyers description of the preachers summer vacation:
But let us consider more particularly the method adopted by the Expository Preacher. We will suppose that he had been led to choose either the Book of Exodus or the Epistle to the Hebrews. He will perhaps have made his selection for the coming autumn and winter before he starts on his summer vacation. With all his other preparations for golf, or fishing, or camping out, he takes a handy pocket copy of the chosen Scripture. On the moor or in the hammock, within sound of the break of the waves or of the crunching of glaciers, he reads again and again, until the central lesson, the motif, begins to reveal itself. (30)
This is great stuff!
ReplyDeleteIndeed, we are never on vacation from the call and ministry wherewith we have been called. If we are ever able to just check out, to clock out as it were from our faith and the enjoyment of the work that Christ has involved us in, then I would think we were not truly called as much as hired.
Meyer has an ironclad argument on expository preaching and how its focus must be Jesus Christ. We must point to Christ, always. Great post!