Everything God has revealed about Himself is to be proclaimed and the preacher who is faithful to the written Word of God is functioning as God’s mouthpiece to deliver God’s message to the people.

Preaching is not optional to the life and health of the church. A church that does not emphasize and value preaching is not simply a different style church, it is an unfaithful church. J.I. Packer warns,

History tells of no significant church growth and expansion that has taken place without preaching (significant, implying virility and staying power, is the key word there). What history points to, rather, is that all movements of revival, reformation, and missionary outreach seem to have had preaching (vigorous, though on occasion very informal) at their center, instructing, energizing, sometimes purging and redirecting, and often spearheading the whole movement. It would seem, then, that preaching is always necessary for a proper sense of mission to be evoked and sustained anywhere in the church. ¹

Preaching is uniquely the God-ordained means for the proclamation of His gospel message and the nourishment of His people. Edmund Clowney critiqued the contemporary fascination with drama over preaching. He wrote, “Preaching the Lord as present in the Gospel narratives has more power than do the best films that seek to portray the ministry of the Lord. . . . The effort to give reality beyond the preached word fails as fiction. The actor is not Jesus.” ² Haddon Robinson noted that “To the New Testament writers preaching stands as the event through which God works”³ There have always been those who have considered straightforward preaching to be outdated, irrelevant, and foolish, but God calls it His wisdom and declares that He “was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe” (1 Cor 1:21).

According to Paul, preaching is an expression of the sovereign purposes of God. As Leon Morris notes regarding Paul’s statement about preaching in 1 Cor 1:21, “Pleased fixes attention on God’s free and sovereign choice.”⁴ In Speaking God’s Words: A Practical Theology of Expository Preaching, Peter Adam describes the great theological foundations for preaching with the following simple phrases; God has spoken, it is written, preach the Word.⁵ The Scripture begins with a sermon, Adam carefully explains,

God’s revelation begins with a sermon; God preaches and the world is made. ‘God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.’ Six sermons are preached in a wonderful sequence; the Word of God is proclaimed in heaven’s pulpit and all comes to pass; the preaching forms the universe . . .

Read More