The Foolishness of Preaching
September 24 – 26, 2009

Meeting at
Heritage Baptist Church
201 East Broad Street
Mansfield, Texas 76063

[email protected]
Phone: 817-453-5580
Fax: 817-453-5570

“Churches today must be recovered. They must once again put the Word of God at the center; and that happens most fundamentally through preaching…

The great Puritan pastor Richard Baxter said that ‘All churches either rise or fall as the ministry doth rise or fall, not in riches and worldly grandeur, but in knowledge, zeal and ability for their work.’ As I thought and prayed about the role of the pastor and the work of the ministry, my attention naturally turned to the situation at Corinth, where fake ministers were threatening to spoil the fruit of Paul’s ministry. This crisis called forth from Paul some of his most pointed words and sustained meditations on the role of the pastor…As the Word of God, the text of Scripture has the right to establish both the substance and the structure of the sermon. Genuine exposition takes place when the preacher sets forth the meaning and message of the biblical text and makes clear how the Word of God establishes the identity and worldview of the church as the people of God…That means that we are to present [the biblical] text in the way the apostle would have presented it. We are to present it in its enduring and eternal truthfulness, understanding that the truth of that text is unchanged and unchanging even as its authority also is unchanged and unchanging…Yet even in the face of cultural diversity, Christians must assert the trans-cultural authority of the Bible, because they are the only people on the entire planet with a message that is addressed to persons within every culture. Moreover, we have the only message that does not have to be transformed and redefined in every cultural circumstance, because we are talking about constants like sin, the character of God, and the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. We begin with the primacy of the text of Scripture, because we begin with certain definite convictions about that text that hold true in every culture – its inerrancy, its authority and its total trustworthiness.”
-Preaching the Cross; Mark Dever, C. J. Mahaney, R. Albert Mohler Jr., John MacArthur.