God has ordained the preached Word, working in unison with the Holy Spirit, as the method by which he turns mortal enemies into adopted sons. In Romans 10, Paul asks, “How are they to hear without someone preaching?” He answers: “So faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (v. 17). How then is the Word of Christ to be proclaimed? By the foolishness of preaching on the lips of weak clay pots known as preachers. Yes, we are weak, but he is strong, and God’s work done God’s way brings him glory.

For many years I wondered why Paul called preaching “foolishness” in 1 Corinthians 1:21. Preaching is the glorious means by which the Spirit saves and sanctifies sinners, the method by which the Lord builds his church. So how could he refer to it as folly?

After preaching for a couple of decades now, I’ve come to understand Paul’s paradoxical descriptor a bit better. I think he refers to the “foolishness of preaching” because the world sees it precisely that way. No surprise there.

Here’s what is surprising: Christians have sometimes viewed preaching the same way—as  foolishness that should be abolished. The reformers fought to recover preaching as the central act of Christian worship after centuries of sacerdotalism in the Roman Church. In more recent years, other sermon substitutes have been suggested in Lord’s Day worship: drama, storytelling, music, interviews, art, videos and other new technology, the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper (again), and more.

Why?

I think C. S. Lewis lands close to the answer in The Screwtape Letters when Uncle Screwtape gives the young tempter, Wormwood, an ingenious strategy for distracting believers: Use their penchant for boredom against them.

Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing. The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. . . . Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.

Christians are easily bored. We tend to lose confidence quickly in methods that don’t produce swift, measurable results. Thus church history is, in part, a narrative of orthodoxy contending with theological and methodological novelty for first place in believing hearts. And often, the devilish activity focuses on messing with the preached Word.

Surely a man standing before a gathered group, preaching the Bible for 30 minutes to an hour each week, cannot accomplish much, we’re told. But therein lies the foolishness: a steady diet of Christ-centered, Scripture-saturated expositional preaching is exactly what sinners need to become more and more like Jesus. It may not look like much, but it’s everything.

And it should remain the centerpiece of corporate worship for at least three reasons.

1. The Bible bristles with preaching and preachers.

Preaching is the overwhelming witness of Scripture as the means of communicating the words of God. If Scripture is the church’s regulating principle—and most Christians throughout the history of the church have believed it is—then this is really the only reason we need for keeping Sunday mornings sermon-centric.

Moses preached God’s Word to God’s people, giving two lengthy expositions/exhortations in Deuteronomy on Israel’s covenant obligations. Ezra, in Nehemiah 8, took up the Torah and led Israel in “reading from the Law of God clearly, and gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Neh. 8:8). He read and taught the Word before the assembled people, who “answered ‘Amen, Amen,’ lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground” (Neh. 8:6). God’s Word drove worship.

Jesus preached the most famous sermon of all in Matthew 5–7. Peter and Paul thundered forth with some of the most powerful sermons in history as recorded in Acts. The church was birthed in Acts 2 through gospel proclamation. And then there’s Paul’s charge to Timothy, a timeless admonition for all preachers: “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2).

Martyn Lloyd-Jones summarized the point well: “The primary task of the church and of the Christian minister is the preaching of the Word of God.” Scripture makes this view plain. So the real question the church must answer here is, “Has God really said?”

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