Preaching may be much maligned in our day (e.g., consider the sermon being referred to as “pagan” in Frank Viola and George Barna’s Pagan Christianity).

Consider, however, the statements of Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck in Why We Love the Church (p. 174):

The sermon was not stolen from the pagans or inherited from the enlightenment. It came from Judaism, which developed and redefined the practice of exegesis and expositional preaching in the centuries leading up to Christ. … We can see this in nascent form throughout the Old Testament. The Levites were to teach Israel the law (Deut. 33:10). The true priest was not just a butcher but a teaching priest (2 Chron. 15:3). Ezra read the law to the returning exiles, “giving them the sense of it” (Nehemiah 8:6-8).

And we see the same development in the New Testament. We know John the Baptist preached and Jesus preached. We know Paul preached and instructed his young apprentice Timothy, with the most solemn warning, to also preach (2 Tim. 4:1-2). Even Jesus Himself, we should remember, was a trainer of preachers, sending His disciples out not just to facilitate group discussions but to preach (Mark 3:14). The apostles considered the ministry of the Word such a full time job that they appointed other men to care for the physical needs of the church (Acts 6:1-7).

Clearly, teaching and preaching were far from peripheral to the ministry of the early church.

So why is there such a negative view of preaching in our day. The authors say that it comes from “the ignorance of three theological truths.” I will summarize these truths below.

· The sermon is often thought of as a boring monologue. However, this view fails to recognize that the preaching of the word of God is a necessary part of corporate worship — that is, both the preacher and the congregation are involved in it. “[P]reacher and listener … exult in the Word together. The preacher worshiped as he spoke the Word and his congregation worshiped just as much to hear the Word.”

· There is often no concept that Christ is present in the preaching of the Word. “Christ, the Word made flesh, is present in God’s speech to His people. … God meets with and rules over His people, not through a facilitated experience of group sharing, but through the authoritative preaching of the Word of God.”

· Preaching is proclamation. The NT word for preacher is kerux, which means “herald.” “He is not the leader of an inductive Bible study, as important as those are. He is not engaged in give-and-take dialogue, though there should be some of that in the church. And he is not to simply give testimony to what the Lord is doing in his life, though that can be good to hear. He is a herald, declaring a message for the King.”

The authors warn that “if we lose preaching — the passionate, authoritative proclamation of God’s message from God’s man to God’s people — we are losing more than a half hour talk once a week. We are losing a normative, essential aspect of Christian worship, one that began in the New Testament, stretches back into the Old, and has had a rich and continuous history over the past two thousand years.”

Tim Phillips is a minister in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and currnelty serves as pastor of Midlane Park ARP Church in Louisville, Kentucky. This article is taken from his blog http://gairneybridge.wordpress.com/ and is used with his permission.