“Since the resolve of the expositor is to be faithful to his text, the two main pitfalls may be termed forgetfulness and disloyalty. The forgetful expositor loses sight of his text by going off on a tangent and following his own fancy. The disloyal expositor appears to remain with the text, but strains and stretches …
Strike Three
INTRODUCTION: Saul falls away from his position of favor with the Lord in a series of three falls. In chapter 13, he did not wait for Samuel to sacrifice, as he had been instructed to. In chapter 14, he makes a rash vow concerning the battle, and doubles down with a self-maledictory oath. And here, …
Bramble and Bright
INTRODUCTION:We have seen how Saul stumbled by trying to sacrifice before Samuel’s arrival. In this chapter, we see his second great sin, this time involving his son—a very noble son—Jonathan. The tragedy here is that Jonathan, who would have made a wonderful king, is excluded from that throne by the sin of his father. THE …
Saul’s Slide Begins
INTRODUCTION:God is the Lord of all things—and this means that He is Lord of both the inside and the outside of a man. Sin loves to divide them in two, and yet God does not permit it. True faith begins on the inside, but does not rest content until the outside is brought under. If …
Turns Out the Shulamite’s Belly Is Not the Great Sanhedrin
“The sixteenth century Reformers are rightly given the credit for having recovered this [grammatico-historical] method by rescuing biblical interpretation from the fanciful allegorizations of medieval writers. When they spoke of the ‘literal’ meaning, they were contrasting it with the ‘allegorical’; they were not denying that some passages of Scripture are deliberately poetical in style and …
Unpacking the Suitcase
“Properly speaking, ‘exposition’ has a much broader meaning. It refers to the content of the sermon (biblical truth) rather than its style (a running commentary). To expound Scriptured is to bring out of the text what is there and expose it to view” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, pp. 125-126).
Siloam Means Sent
This last weekend Nancy and I had the privilege of visiting the saints at Riverwood Presbyterian in Tuscaloosa. We were shown wonderful hospitality there, and were greatly encouraged by the trip. During one part of the visit we toured the area demolished by the tornado this last spring (and the picture below represents a miniscule …
Study?
“Instead, tragic to relate, many [preachers] are essentially administrators, whose symbols of ministry are the office rather than the study, and the telephone rather than the Bible” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 124).
Not Just Instruction
“A good shepherd’s care of his sheep is four-fold — feeding, guiding (because sheep go easily astray), guarding (against predatory wolves) and healing (binding up the wounds of the injured). And all four of these activities are aspects of the ministry of the Word” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 120).
Priests and Preachers
“Those with knowledge of the etymology of English words are aware that ‘priest’ is simply a contraction of ‘presbyter’, meaning ‘elder’. But it is also used to translate the Greek word hiereus, a sacrificing priest, which is never used of Christian ministers in the New Testament” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 117).