We must be actively depending on God, the Holy Spirit, to grant illumination and understanding to us and our hearers so that in our preparation we are governed by his life-giving word and praying for its impact on all who hear. Equally, we must be dependent on the Spirit who inspired the text to give us clear thinking, a warm heart, and effective delivery in the process of preaching so that the wind of God may be in the sails of the sermon. Convictions such as these need to be rooted in us through the power of the Scriptures themselves.

God Speaks through Preaching

To many people, preaching seems strangely out of place in the modern world. Why would anyone choose to go to a church building, week by week, to hear a preacher (often the same person) deliver a monologue for twenty or thirty minutes (sometimes even longer) about an ancient book with characters who lived, at best, two thousand years ago? This doesn’t happen in any other context. Educational methods are increasingly interactive. Learning by discovery is the watchword. Preaching seems to be just another example of the church being out of touch, out of date, and out of steam.

Of course, it’s not difficult to find examples of preaching that are sadly boring or irrelevant. Nor is it hard to hear arguments put forward to claim that preaching has had its day: we live in a visual learning culture, listeners have sound-bite levels of concentration, study groups or one-to-one mentoring is more effective, moderns are opposed to domination of a congregation from an elevated pulpit, and so on. But the remedy for the disappointing level of much contemporary preaching is not less preaching, nor its removal from the church’s agenda, but better preaching. And that is because something happens through preaching that cannot occur in any other communication context.

God is committed to preaching, by which he speaks through the proclamation and explanation of his word. So the preacher’s task and privilege is, in J. I. Packer’s memorable phrase, “to mediate a meeting with God.”1 Preaching matters not because human beings decide that it does but because through preaching God speaks today. His voice is heard. So let’s look at three basic convictions or principles (and key Scripture passages for each) that help us to understand not just why preaching matters but why it is of supreme importance.

Preaching Matters Because the God of the Bible Is a Speaking God

The act of preaching today cannot be separated from the word of God that he has infallibly spoken in the Scriptures—the sixty-six books of divine revelation that make up our Bible. That is the bedrock foundation on which all preaching is to be built.

A basic biblical definition of the preacher is that he is a herald or proclaimer. It’s a significant description because it implies that there is a message, or declaration, that the messenger is to pass on faithfully and accurately without distortion. Because God has spoken in his word, the preacher can and must preach. Without that divinely given biblical content, all that a preacher can achieve is the expression of his own, often highly questionable, opinions. On offer, then, are the mere words of human beings. They may appear attractive and promise all sorts of comfort and joy, but ultimately, they are just human words—transient and powerless. Instead, in biblical expository preaching, the authentic voice of God is heard. What is expected is that God will speak to our souls through the human agency of the preacher.

To mediate a meeting with God will require the preacher’s disciplined preparation and dependence on the Holy Spirit. The conviction that such a meeting is God’s purpose and, therefore, possible will have constant implications for the preacher. If we are to be expositors, we must take sufficient time for preparation so that we have more than just a surface acquaintance with the text. We must read and reread, to listen carefully and hard, if we are to represent God’s truth faithfully.

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