(Part 1)

JBTM
Jim Shaddix
If you stop and think about it, you are constantly encountering different genres in
the course of ordinary life. In a single day you might read a newspaper, look up a number
in a telephone directory, order from a menu, reflect on a poem, enjoy a love letter, wade
through instructions on how to get to a friend’s house, or meditate on a devotional book.
When you meet these different genres, you know (whether you are conscious of it or not)
that you need to play by certain rules of communication, the rules established by the
genre itself. If you fail to play by its rules, you run the risk of misreading. 30
15
And if we misread the text, then we most certainly will speak incorrectly when we preach.
In other words, we will say what God did not say. Because the form or genre of the text is
connected to the content of the text—and thus the meaning of the text—we must consider
literary genre a crucial mooring for expository preaching. The meaning of the Bible is at stake
and, therefore, the voice of God is at stake!
Conclusion
During my tenure on the faculty at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, a colleague
surprised me with a question one day after listening to me preach in chapel. He asked, “Where
did you get your convictions about expository preaching?” Not wanting to admit I had never
thought through such a basic issue for a preaching professor, I quickly rattled off the names
of some of the great preachers who had influenced me over the years. But throughout the
evening I could not get his question out of my mind, and I finally admitted to myself that
I had responded too quickly. My father was not a preacher. The pastors under which I sat
during my formative years would not have been considered expositors. After several hours of
processing the question, I finally landed on the real answer. The next day I told my colleague
I had a better and more accurate answer for him. I told him that my parents raised me to
believe that the Bible was God’s inspired, supernatural, and authoritative Word. So when
I started preaching, the thing that made the most sense to me was to do it in such a way
that my words were as close as possible to how the Holy Spirit gave them to us. That is the
primary reason I am constrained to biblical exposition—it is the most reasonable way to let
people hear God’s voice as close as possible to how the Holy Spirit gave it to us.
30
J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God’s Word: A Hands-On Approach to Reading, Interpreting,
and Applying the Bible, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 151.