There’s an old saying about not being able to see the wood for the trees. I wrote the other day about the problems with equating verse by verse with expositional preaching. In fact, a sermon may be expositional when taking a short phrase, a verse, passage, chapter or even whole book of the Bible. I guess you could preach an exposition on the whole Bible as well.
Furthermore, sometimes the most helpful way to get people seeing and understanding what the detail of a text is, isn’t so much to dig into the detail and go small as to go large by stepping back in order to get the whole picture.
So, for example, recently I preached on Jesus and Beelzebub in Luke 11. In order to start helping people get what this text is about, I did something different. I spent about half of the sermon painting in broad brushstrokes the story that the whole of Scripture tells of a Good and Great God who created, sustains and has saved us. I contrasted that with the rival story which offers an impersonal deity, lots of competing rival gods and an accidental, chaotic creation. Too often, we get those stories muddled and act as though God is another of those small g gods fighting it out. If we believe that, we will see Jesus and Satan (Beelzebub) as equal rivals, fighting it out for supremacy. Instead in Luke 11, we see Jesus as the true and greater strongman, effortlessly greater than all rivals and pretenders to his throne.
This is not how I would always approach preaching but stepping back and helping people see the big picture can be helpful if we want them to understand the detail concerning what is going on in any given text.
Faithroots 