Stewarding God's Word: The Art of Pastoral Preaching

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Pastoral preaching is a long line of history preceding that pastoral preaching. There was any time in the New Testament or the Old Testament when you had God having the word as his property. He would then sometimes speak it directly to people, but oftentimes he would then give it to someone else as a steward of his word. [00:00:23]

The Pastoral preacher has been entrusted with the whole Council of God with the completed Canon, and therefore they have to be a steward of it. That's why in the Pastoral Epistles, you get the calls to study the word, to show yourself approved, rightly handle the word of Truth, preach the word. [00:01:55]

Pastoral preaching for the first time is really a person having a congregation, a flock. You see in the book of Acts that the apostles are not pastors; they don't have a congregation. They're doing mainly evangelistic preaching; they're doing church planting in large measure. [00:02:17]

A method for pastoral preaching would be to say what the word is, to show what the word is, and then to Shepherd where the word leads. So just like you're called as an expository preacher to have the main point of the passage become the main point of the message and then apply it to the life of the congregation. [00:02:58]

If you're called upon to be a steward of the whole Council of God, you start to look at some other differences that you have with people in the past. I mean, when we study the Bible, we're studying inspired preaching, so people who were not going to make mistakes, and they didn't have a completed Canon. [00:04:06]

Most people learn to read their Bibles from their pastor, and what you want to try to do is teach them how to read the word of God so that they become stewards of it as well. So one of the key differences is going to be not only seeing what the word says, sharing what it says, but then as a congregation, trying to Shepherd them where the word leads. [00:04:43]

If you take the completed Canon as your guide, you know that what is going to pass for a Christian sermon as you're preaching Jeremiah cannot be the same thing that would pass for a sermon in a synagogue or in a mosque. It's going to be distinctively Christian in that we understand judgment now from our era in Redemptive history. [00:06:07]

I think you have to make a distinction between a topical method and a topical series. So you can have a topical series, say on the topics that we take in January—word, prayer, sanctity of life, racial harmony—and you could say as a method, though, I'm going to treat these topics textually from an expository method. [00:07:29]

An expository series, though, I would still argue, is going to be the best way long term to feed your people because the book itself is going to give you the right balance and the right proportionality. And if you do a topical series, you're leaving yourself open because of the doctrine of sin to your own hobby horses. [00:08:01]

One of the most important things to do is to find your own voice, not try to be a parrot of someone else, but to really discover that heralding. You can't start there; stewarding has to precede heralding. And if you become somebody that likes to copy the substance of what others do, you're never going to find an authentic voice. [00:09:36]

As you try to be a person that is meeting God in a firsthand way, that then can be a firsthand witness. I never forget the difference between being a firsthand witness and a secondhand witness. [00:10:09]

Father in Heaven, would you, Lord, cause your face to shine upon those who are listening to this, those who are wanting desperately to handle your word rightly. Would you give them a passion for stewardship? Would you speak to them in very real tangible ways through the word of God? [00:11:49]

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