There will many in our pews who walk in a false presumption of salvation. This Sunday-morning mission field should burden us to conclude by calling unbelievers – be they professing Christians or conscious unbelievers – to repent of their sins and call on the Lord for salvation. Point the congregation to the Lord Jesus Christ in the conclusion. Finish strong by calling your hearers to trust and obey Christ. “Him we preach,” declares the Apostle Paul, “warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).

Some preachers take off strong. They get to cruising altitude and pilot the sermon without turbulence. Then they land smoothly at the same airport from which they took off. It was good flight. Homiletical policies and procedures were followed. And the congregation enjoyed the ride so much that it never noticed they did not actually go anywhere. These craft-first preachers are lauded as great communicators. But they fail to preach the word, to the detriment of the crowds that sit under their preaching.

Other preachers focus on the God-intended meaning of the text. The process is saturated in prayer for illumination. The meaning and grammar of the words are carefully studied. The literary and historical context is considered. Cross-references are looked up. The best commentaries are reviewed. The doctrinal themes and theological significance of the passage are unearthed. The preacher does his best to rightly divide the word of truth. But there is a heavy fog in the pulpit, because diligent research was not fleshed out in sermon preparation. Careful study became sloppy preaching.

Expositional preaching gets a bad rap for being dry, boring, and lifeless. But zombie preachers should be indicted, not expository preaching. The problem with some expository preaching is that it is exposition but it is not preaching. It is obvious the preacher knows a lot about the text. But the divine message of the text is not preached. Or the various elements of the sermon fail to make the biblical message clear.

When the craft of the sermon overrides the message of the text, it is performance not preaching. But the burden for truth that drives the expositor to study hard should also drive him to prepare well. The ancient herald was under orders to proclaim the message of the king. This all-consuming duty shaped the herald’s message and the presentation of that message.

This is the expositor’s charge. True expository preaching strives to be faithful to the text and clear in the presentation. It is for this reason that introductions, illustrations, and conclusions should matter to the expositor. It is not about being creative, eloquent, or impressive in the pulpit. It is about preaching the word faithfully and clearly to the glory of God and for the salvation and sanctification of the hearers.

Christ-exalting preaching is text driven. It is also clearly communicated. Faithful preachers do not impose their own ideas on the text. They also do not ramble through their introduction, manipulate in their illustrations, or crash-land during their conclusions.

Craft the Introduction

I typically begin my sermons with a word of prayer. I pray publicly to express dependence on God to help us speak faithfully and hear clearly. Then I read the sermon text without comment. I will have the rest of the sermon to explain and exhort. I believe it affirms the authority of scripture to begin the sermon by simply reading the text. After praying and reading the text, I state the title of the sermon. The goal is that the title will be an encapsulated preview of the message. Then I proceed to the formal introduction of the sermon.

The introduction is the front porch of the sermon. The front porch welcomes guest to your home. But you do not arrange the living room furniture on the porch. You do not hang a big-screen TV on the porch. You do not serve dinner on the porch. The front porch is transitional. It welcomes guest to your home and leads them to the front door to enter the house. Sermon introductions work the same way.

Sermon introductions should be brief. Too often preachers spend a major chunk of their allotted time in the introduction. It seems they are sticking all the material they could not find another place for into the introduction. Then they say at some point, “I wish I had time to deal with this.” You did. But you spent it in the introduction. Don’t spend too much time setting up the text. Get to the text and trust it to do the work in the minds and hearts of the congregation. The introduction should point toward where the sermon is headed. But the goal of the travel agent is not to captivate with descriptions of exotic locations. It is to get the traveler on a plane to that destination.

The introduction should set the text in its proper context. A text without a context is a pretext. Expository preaching seeks to explain what they text means by what it says. Context is essential to understanding what the text says and means. The three rules of real estate are location, location, location. The three rules of Bible exposition are context, context, context.

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