The other day I talked about breaking the Conservative Evangelical rule that every sermon has to be expository. Here is the paradox, you may have ended up being at least as if not more expository by relaxing the rule.
I say potentially more expository first, because what happens when we try to force fit an expository sermon in is that we can find ourselves tempted to find in the passage what we wanted to say. If we are Biblically soaked, if the word of Christ dwells richly in us, then what we want to say may well be from Scripture, just not that passage. We end up reading into the text, otherwise known as eisegesis.
The second reason is that I’ve argued over the last few years that our aim should not just be expository preaching but expository worship. The aim should be that the whole service is expository, enabling people to hear Scripture and hear it applied.
That’s what a good carol service does, especially if it follows the 9 carols and readings model. At our carol service we had readings from John 1, Luke 1 and Luke 2. You may well have had Isaiah and Matthew in the mix. We also included an interview testimony and a poem written by someone who has been with us, exploring faith in Jesus. And of course we had lots of carols taking us through the Gospel story.
My short talk brought together the themes we had heard in readings, interviews, poetry and carols. All of it was about bringing out the message of Scripture, exposing it to the congregation so that our hearts would be exposed and God could work.
It was expository.
Faithroots 