Expository Exultation (eBook)

Introduction

The Roots and Scope of Expository Exultation

I have dedicated this book to Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), minister of Westminster Chapel in London for almost thirty years. No preacher has inspired in me a sense of the greatness of preaching the way Lloyd-Jones did. When he preached, I felt, as with no others, the weight of the glory of heralding the very word of God. When he gave his lectures on preaching at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1969, he gave two reasons why he was willing:

My reason for being very ready to give these lectures is that to me the work of preaching is the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called. If you want something in addition to that, I would say without any hesitation that the most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching; and as it is the great and most urgent need in the Church, it is obviously the great need of the world also.1

It was typical of Lloyd-Jones to state things in superlatives. His aim was not to minimize other callings. He knew as well as anyone that in the last day the Lord will reward a person’s faithfulness, not his office. He knew that the one who would be great must be the servant of all. And he knew that “neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:7).

But he also knew that to be an ambassador of the King of ages is a staggering privilege and burden. He had tasted something of the glory that moved the apostle Paul to say that faithful servants of God’s word are “worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Tim. 5:17). He had trembled at the warning, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). The supernatural nature of his calling amazed him: “As commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ” (2 Cor. 2:17).

He knew that the great aim of preaching is the white-hot worship of God’s people. And he knew that this worship is nothing small or constricted or parochial. It finds expression in weekly worship services and daily sacrifices of love, and finally will be freely and fully released in the perfecting of the bride of Christ and her cosmic habitation. And so he knew that this worship is as personal as the heart’s deepest desire, as expansive as the universe, as enduring as eternity, and as visible as the radiance of love and the renewal of creation.

He knew that the Bible is true and exists for the glory of God. Therefore, reading it and preaching it share that goal. The unrelenting seriousness of Lloyd-Jones’s handling of the glories of God’s word has been a great inspiration to me in a world that seems incapable of serious joy. I am deeply thankful that God raised him up in the middle of the twentieth century and gave me a taste of what J. I. Packer meant when he said that Lloyd-Jones’s preaching came to him with the force of electric shock and brought him “more of a sense of God than any other man.”2

The Origin of This Book

This book is an organic outgrowth of two previous books. Together they form a kind of trilogy. The first volume, A Peculiar Glory (2016), focuses on how we can know that the Bible is God’s word and is completely true. The second volume, Reading the Bible Supernaturally (2017), focuses on how to read the Bible—specifically, how to read it in the pursuit of its own ultimate goal that God be worshiped with white-hot affection by all the peoples of the world. This third volume, Expository Exultation, now asks, If the Bible is completely true and is to be read supernaturally in the pursuit of worship, what does it mean to preach this word, and how should we do it?

Foundations of Worship and Preaching

Most preachers assume that their congregations should gather weekly for corporate worship. Many of us have devoted little time and effort to justifying this practice from the New Testament. We take it for granted. Further, most pastors assume that preaching should be part of that corporate gathering. This too is taken for granted by most, though some fall prey to the predictable put-downs of preaching in every generation. In fact, both of these assumptions—that we should gather for worship and that we should preach—do have explicit biblical foundations. And preachers need to know them. On what basis does the congregation gather for worship, and why is preaching part of it?

Focus on Preaching in Worship

As I set out to write a book on preaching, I assume that perhaps 95 percent of the preaching in the world happens in “worship services” of some kind—whether with a dozen believers in the shade of a tree or with five thousand people in a modern auditorium. Preaching in such worship contexts is what I will be defending and describing and celebrating.

The reason for this focus is not that I don’t think preaching belongs on the streets, or in the stadiums, or on the campus quad, or in the jails, or before kings. It emphatically does belong there. I would certainly like to see more of it there. The reason is that I believe with all my heart that preaching in corporate worship is essential for the health and mission of the church. God has appointed preaching in worship, I will argue, as one great means of accomplishing his ultimate goal in the world.

Why Preach in Corporate Worship?

I am aware that my conception of worship and preaching is not shared by all Christians. Nor do all Christians believe that preaching is an essential part of corporate worship. So the first task I set for myself is to show from Scripture that Christian congregations should gather for corporate worship and that preaching should be part of that gathering. That’s what I do in parts 1 and 2.

Part 1 is a description and a defense of corporate worship. It may seem strange, in a book on preaching, to devote so much space to corporate worship. But if you believe, as I do, that corporate worship is divinely appointed for a unique and indispensable impact on God’s people, and that preaching is uniquely designed by God to assist and express that worship, then the strangeness might vanish. The most important thing to establish about corporate worship is what the essence of it is. There will always be a thousand variations of the forms of worship around the world in thousands of cultures. But what is the essence? That’s the task of chapter 1. What emerges, then, in chapter 2 is that the essence of worship leads Christians to discover how beautifully fitting it is for the people of Christ to gather for corporate worship.

Then, in part 2, I try to show what preaching is and why it belongs in corporate worship. It is precisely what preaching and worship are that justifies that they should be—and that they should be together. So in part 2 I try to show how this extraordinary form of communication—and which I call “expository exultation”—became a biblically sanctioned, normative part of corporate worship. The reasons are both historical and theological (chapters 3 and 4), reaching into the Trinitarian nature of God (chapter 5).

Preaching as Worship and for Worship

One of the primary burdens of this book is to show that preaching not only assists worship, but also is worship. The title Expository Exultation is intended to communicate that this unique form of communication is both a rigorous intellectual clarification of the reality revealed through the words of Scripture and a worshipful embodiment of the value of that reality in the preacher’s exultation over the word he is clarifying. Preachers should think of worship services not as exultation in the glories of God accompanied by a sermon. They should think of musical and liturgical exultation (songs, prayers, readings, confession, ordinances, and more) accompanied and assisted by expository exultation—preaching as worship. Music is one way of raising and carrying the heart’s exultation. Preaching is another. I will argue that preaching is worship. And preaching serves worship.

Worship: All of Life, Forever

When I say “preaching serves worship,” I don’t mean that it serves only “worship services”—not even eternal worship services. When I say that the ultimate goal of Scripture and preaching is that God be worshiped with white-hot affection by all the peoples of the world, I am referring to the complete transformation of all God’s people and the final renovation and renewal of heaven and earth (Rom. 8:19–23). This transformation of God’s people and this renovation of the universe will be such that its greatest effect will be to magnify the supreme value and excellence of God.

What we will see, in more detail and with biblical argument, is that worship means consciously knowing and treasuring and showing the supreme worth and beauty of God. When I say that preaching serves this worship, I am thinking of it in at least three expressions:

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