Why Preach at All

Start with a working definition, so that the rest of the track has something to test. Preaching is public speech in which a person recognised by the church opens a passage of scripture and presses it on the people gathered as God's address to them now. Every part of that sentence will be argued over somewhere in this track, and some of it will be argued over in this module. But it gives you four things to hold: preaching is public, it is tied to the text, it is aimed at these hearers in particular, and it claims to carry more than the speaker's opinion.

It helps to say what preaching is not. It is not a lecture, though it teaches; a lecture can be complete without anyone changing, and a sermon cannot. It is not a testimony, though the preacher's own life is never absent; a testimony says what God did for me, and a sermon says what God says to you. It is not a Bible study, though it should send people back to their Bibles; a study invites everyone to bring what they found, and a sermon brings one person's prepared and weighed reading to the whole body. And it is not the reading of scripture itself, though it depends on that reading. The text is read, and then it is explained and applied. Where the reading is skipped or rushed, the sermon has lost the thing that gives it any authority at all.

The New Testament has no single word for what we call preaching. It has a family of words, and each one picks out a different side of the task. Kerysso is to proclaim as a herald does, announcing what someone else has decided. Euangelizomai is to announce good news, and it is the verb behind Acts 8:4, where 'Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.' Didasko is to teach, to explain and hand on. Parakaleo is to urge, encourage or comfort, and it is the third verb in the anchor verse. And dialegomai, the word behind Paul 'reasoned' in Acts 17:2, is to argue a case and answer back. A sermon that only announces will be thin; one that only explains will be cold; one that only urges will be manipulative. The vocabulary is itself a warning against reducing preaching to one of its parts.

In 1936 the English scholar C. H. Dodd published The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, which drew a sharp line between kerygma, the proclamation of the saving events to outsiders, and didache, the moral and doctrinal instruction of believers. The distinction is useful and you will meet it often. Many later scholars judged the line too sharp, since Paul's letters teach by proclaiming and proclaim by teaching, and Acts uses the vocabulary loosely. For a preacher the practical lesson is that a congregation of believers still needs to hear the gospel announced, and a crowd of outsiders still needs to be taught. Peter's sermon in Acts 2 does both.

The first reason to preach is not that it works, though it does, and not that churches expect it, though they do. It is that speech is the way God has chosen to act. Scripture opens with God speaking and the world coming to be: 'And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light' (Genesis 1:3). Hebrews opens by tracing the same speaking through history: 'On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets. But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son' (Hebrews 1:1-2). John calls the Son himself the Word. A God who creates, judges and saves by speaking is a God whose people will be shaped by hearing.

Isaiah 55 states the confidence on which every preacher has to lean. 'For just as rain and snow fall from heaven and do not return without watering the earth, making it bud and sprout, and providing seed to sow and food to eat, so My word that proceeds from My mouth will not return to Me empty, but it will accomplish what I please, and it will prosper where I send it' (55:10-11). Notice what the promise is and what it is not. It is a promise about God's word, not about any preacher's eloquence. It promises that the word will accomplish what God pleases, which is not always what the preacher hoped. Rain that falls on a field does its work slowly and mostly out of sight. A preacher who measures every sermon by what he can see by Sunday evening has not yet believed this verse.

Romans 10 makes the human link explicit. Paul has just said that 'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved' (10:13), and then he asks how that can happen: 'How then can they call on the One in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can they preach unless they are sent?' (10:14-15). His conclusion is in verse 17: 'Consequently, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.' The phrase 'word of Christ' can be read as the word about Christ or as Christ's own word, and commentators divide on it. Some go further on verse 14. In Greek the verb 'hear' followed by a person in the genitive case normally means to hear that person speak, so the clause the BSB renders 'of whom they have not heard' could be read 'whom they have not heard'. John Murray, in his Romans commentary, took it that way, and drew the conclusion that in the preaching of the gospel the hearers hear Christ himself. That is a reading, not a certainty, and the BSB does not follow it. But even the plainer reading puts a human voice inside the chain by which God brings people to faith.

Paul says the same thing from the other side when he thanks God for the Thessalonians: 'when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God, which is also now at work in you who believe' (1 Thessalonians 2:13). The word was heard from Paul. It was received as God's. And it kept working after Paul had left. In 2 Corinthians 5:20 he uses the image of an embassy: 'Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His appeal through us.' And Jesus told the seventy-two he sent out, 'Whoever listens to you listens to Me' (Luke 10:16). None of these texts says the messenger is infallible. All of them say that God speaks through messengers, and that how people receive the messenger is bound up with how they receive the one who sent him.

There is one more reason, and it is the one the anchor verse puts first. Paul does not charge Timothy to preach because preaching is effective. He charges him 'in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead' (2 Timothy 4:1). The preacher speaks with a judge listening. That is meant to be sobering, and it is also meant to free him. The congregation is not the final audience. A preacher who is speaking before God can afford to say what the text says to people who will not like it, which is precisely the situation verses 3 and 4 predict.

The pattern that lies behind Christian preaching is older than the church. Deuteronomy 31:11 commands that the law be read 'in the hearing of all Israel', and the next verse explains why: so that the people may listen and learn to fear the LORD. The fullest picture in the Old Testament comes after the exile, in Nehemiah 8. The people gather in the square before the Water Gate and ask for the book. Ezra reads from daybreak until noon. The Levites instruct the people as they stand in their places, and the summary verse is the closest thing in the Old Testament to a definition of expository preaching: 'So they read from the Book of the Law of God, explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read' (8:8).

The Hebrew word behind 'explaining it' is meporash, from a root meaning to make distinct or clear. Some translations render it 'clearly' and some 'with interpretation'. The rabbis later read it as translation, since many of the returned exiles spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and the Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 3a) connects the verse with the Targum, the Aramaic rendering read alongside the Hebrew in the synagogue. Whichever sense is right, the point holds: reading alone was not enough. The words had to be made understandable to these particular people in their own speech. That is the task of preaching in one sentence, and it is why preaching through an interpreter, or in a second language, or to people who cannot read, is not a lesser form of the work but the work itself in its oldest shape.

Look at what the scene contains. The people ask for the word; the preacher does not have to drag them. They stand for hours. Men and women and all who could understand are present, so the hearers are mixed. The Levites read, explain and give insight to people standing in their places (8:7), so the explaining is not left to the one man on the platform. The response is first grief and then joy, and the joy comes, verse 12 says, 'because they understood the words that had been made known to them.' Understanding produced the joy. That should correct a preacher who thinks he must choose between teaching the mind and moving the heart.

By the time of Jesus the synagogue had made reading and explanation a weekly habit. Luke 4:16-21 shows Jesus standing to read from Isaiah, sitting down to speak, and beginning 'Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.' Acts 13:15 shows the same order in Pisidian Antioch: after the reading from the Law and the Prophets, the synagogue leaders invite the visitors, 'if you have a word of encouragement for the people, please speak.' James can say at the Jerusalem council that Moses 'is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath' (Acts 15:21). The church inherited the pattern. Paul tells Timothy, 'Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, and to teaching' (1 Timothy 4:13): reading, urging, explaining, the same three movements as Nehemiah 8.

The pattern continued after the apostles. Justin Martyr, writing his First Apology at Rome around the middle of the second century, describes a Christian Sunday gathering in chapter 67. The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read for as long as time allows. When the reader stops, the one presiding speaks, instructing the people and urging them to imitate the good things they have heard. Then they stand and pray, and the bread and wine are brought. Read that beside Nehemiah 8 and 1 Timothy 4:13 and you are looking at one practice across some six hundred years: the book is read aloud, a recognised person explains it and presses it home, and the people respond to God.

In 1566 the Second Helvetic Confession was published. It was written by Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli's successor at Zurich, first as a personal statement of faith, and it was adopted by Reformed churches in Switzerland and well beyond, in Hungary, Poland, Scotland and elsewhere. Its first chapter, on scripture, carries a heading that has become the most quoted sentence in Protestant homiletics. In Latin it is Praedicatio verbi Dei est verbum Dei: the preaching of the word of God is the word of God. It is the boldest claim the Reformation made about preaching, and a student should know exactly what it says before agreeing or disagreeing.

The paragraph under that heading, with the short one that follows it, makes four moves. First, when the word of God is preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, the very word of God is proclaimed and received by the faithful. Second, no other word of God is to be invented or expected from heaven; the confession is not opening the door to new revelation. Third, it is the word itself that is preached which must be attended to, not the minister, and even if the minister is evil and a sinner, the word of God remains true and good. That is an old argument, made by Augustine against the Donatists in the fourth and fifth centuries about the sacraments, now applied to preaching. Fourth, the outward preaching is not made useless by the fact that true faith depends on the inward illumination of the Spirit, and the confession cites 1 Corinthians 3:7, that 'neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.' God uses the outward word, and God gives the growth.

The strength of the claim is that it takes the texts in section 2 at their word. If the Thessalonians were right to receive Paul's preaching 'not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God', and if whoever listens to Christ's messengers listens to him, then something more is happening in faithful preaching than one Christian sharing his reflections. Calvin, in book four of his Institutes, argued that God chooses to address his people through human mouths partly to test their humility, since it is harder to receive God's word from an ordinary man than from an angel. Karl Barth, in the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, built a whole doctrine around the threefold form of the word of God: the word revealed in Christ, the word written in scripture, and the word proclaimed in the church, each depending on the one before. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530, in its fifth article, says that God instituted the ministry of teaching the gospel and giving the sacraments so that people may obtain faith, and that through the word and sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Spirit is given. On this view the sermon is a means of grace, not a talk about grace.

The weakness, or at least the danger, is just as plain. Preachers make mistakes. Some preachers lie. If the sermon simply is the word of God, how does a congregation correct a preacher, and what stops a man from wrapping his own opinions in the authority of heaven? The confession's own wording answers part of this: what it calls the word of God is the word of God preached, not whatever is said from a pulpit. The claim is conditional. To the degree that the sermon says what the text says, God speaks; to the degree that it does not, it is only a man talking. That is why the New Testament insists that what is preached be tested. The Bereans 'examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true' (Acts 17:11), and they did it to Paul. Prophets in Corinth were to speak while 'the others should weigh carefully what is said' (1 Corinthians 14:29). A high view of preaching that leaves no room for that testing has misread its own texts.

Other traditions hold a high view of the spoken word from different starting points, and you should know them. The Second Vatican Council's constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), says in its seventh article that Christ is present in his word, since it is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the church, and in its fifty-second article it calls the homily part of the liturgy itself. The Catholic emphasis falls more on the reading than on the preacher's exposition, and on the homily as one part of a single act of worship that culminates at the altar. Many Anabaptist and free church traditions place the weight on the gathered congregation discerning the word together, wary of any one voice that cannot be answered. Pentecostal preachers speak of the anointing, the Spirit's empowering of the preacher in the moment of speaking, and point to Paul's 'demonstration of the Spirit's power' (1 Corinthians 2:4). These are real differences about where the emphasis falls.

What is settled across all of them is this. God brings people to faith and builds them up through his word spoken by human beings; nobody in any of these traditions thinks preaching is optional decoration. And nobody in any of them thinks the preacher's own opinions become scripture because he says them from a pulpit. What is genuinely debated is how direct the identity is between a sermon and God's speech, what makes a sermon faithful enough for that identity to hold, and who decides. You will need your own answer before you finish this track, and the next lesson, on the preacher's authority, is where you start to build it.

Paul does not tell Timothy that preaching will be welcome. 'For the time will come when men will not tolerate sound doctrine, but with itching ears they will gather around themselves teachers to suit their own desires' (2 Timothy 4:3). The image is of people whose ears itch and who collect teachers to scratch them. The charge to preach 'in season and out of season' means that the preacher does not get to choose the moments when the congregation is ready. He is to be ready when they are not. Some weeks the most faithful sermon will be received coldly, and he must not take that as proof that it was unfaithful.

The cost to the preacher is real and the Bible does not hide it. Jeremiah tried to stop: 'If I say, "I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name," His message becomes a fire burning in my heart, shut up in my bones, and I become weary of holding it in, and I cannot prevail' (Jeremiah 20:9). Paul felt it as obligation rather than achievement: 'Yet when I preach the gospel, I have no reason to boast, because I am obligated to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!' (1 Corinthians 9:16). And James adds the warning every preacher must carry: 'Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly' (James 3:1). The one who speaks for God in public is answerable for it in a way that the listener is not.

There is the cost of preparation, which in many places is paid by a pastor who also farms, drives, teaches school or runs a shop, and who prepares on Saturday night by lamplight with one Bible and no commentaries. This track is written with that preacher in mind. There is the cost of exposure: the preacher's life is watched, and Paul's instruction 'Pay close attention to your life and to your teaching' (1 Timothy 4:16) puts the two side by side because a congregation reads both. And in some places there is the cost of danger. In much of the world, to preach the gospel is to be noticed by people who would prefer it was not preached, and believers there know the meaning of Philippians 1:14, where Paul's chains made the brothers 'dare more greatly to speak the word without fear.'

The Puritan pastor Richard Baxter of Kidderminster, who wrote The Reformed Pastor in 1656, put the weight of it into two lines of a later poem, printed in his Poetical Fragments (1681), that preachers have quoted ever since: 'I preached as never sure to preach again, / And as a dying man to dying men.' (Baxter spelled it 'preach'd'.) You do not need to adopt his intensity to take his point. Every sermon is preached to people some of whom will not hear another. That is not a reason to frighten them. It is a reason not to waste their time.

Every lesson in this module adds one paragraph to a single page in your notebook. At the top of a fresh page write: Before I preach. By the end of the module you will have four paragraphs on it, and you will carry that page through the rest of the track. The track ends with a sermon of your own, and this page is where that sermon starts.

First, do what the Levites did. Choose Nehemiah 8:1-12, or a short passage your church read last Sunday. Read it aloud, slowly, to one or two people: your household, a friend, a small group, whoever is willing. Then explain it in no more than three minutes, in the language they speak at home, without notes. Then ask them to tell you, in their own words, what the passage said. Write down what they understood and what they missed. The gap between what you said and what they heard is the first thing this track will train you to close.

Second, go back to the three sentences you wrote in the inquiry, about why you want to preach. Rewrite them now as one paragraph, the first on your page. It must contain at least one text from this lesson that you are standing on, written out in full. If your first draft was mostly about yourself, do not be ashamed of that; most first drafts are. Rewrite it so that God and the hearers come first, and keep the honest part about yourself at the end, where it belongs.