Dever, Mark (2004), Nine marks of a healthy church. Wheaton: Crossway Books.
Mark 1: Expositional preaching
Expositional preaching
My main role, and the main role of any pastor, is expositional preaching … God has decided to act by His Spirit through His Word. (39)
… expositional preaching is that preaching which takes for the point of a sermon the point of a particular passage of Scripture … Expositional preaching is preaching in service to the Word. (40)
Christian preachers today have authority to speak from God only so long as they speak His message and unfold His words. (41)
The Central Role of the Word of God
Preaching should always (or almost always) be expositional because the Word of God should be at its center, directing it … His Word is His own chosen instrument for bringing life. (42)
The role of God’s Word in bringing life
… it was by His Word that God created the world and all the life in it. (43)
God’s people were created … by hearing that word of promise and by responding to it … God’s people were created by God’s Word … It was by God’s Word that the people of Israel were constituted as God’s special people. (44)
His Word is to be trusted and relied upon with all the faith that we would invest in God Himself … The Word shows us what we are to believe. (45)
How does God put His Spirit in Israel so that they will live? He does it by His Word. (46)
… a people who show the life of God in them as they hear His Word and as by His grace they respond to it. (47)
He speaks, in order to interpret for us His great saving acts. (48)
God’s Holy Spirit creates His people by His Word. (50)
The role of God’s Word in sanctifying
God’s Spirit uses the Word to create faith is us and because He also uses the Word to make us grow. (50)
We need God’s Word to be saved, but we also need it to continually challenge and shape us. (51)
The role of the preacher of God’s Word
… the congregation’s commitment to the centrality of the Word coming from the front, from the preacher, the one specially gifted by God and called to that ministry, is the most important thing you can look for in a church. (52)
That is the great task of the preacher: to “hold out the word of life” to people who need it for their souls. (53)
… sound, expositional preaching is often the fountainhead of growth in a church. (54)
It is good to preach the truth, and to preach it in such a way that people can see where the truth is coming from. (55)