(Part 1)

JBTM 3
Hearing God’s Voice: A Practical Theology
for Expository Preaching
Jim Shaddix, DMin, PhD
Jim Shaddix is W. A. Criswell Professor of Expository Preaching at Southeastern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina.
Expository preaching is a sacred obligation, not a sermonic option. It is a stewardship
preachers have been given. Consider the rationale of the preaching task. V. L. Stanfield,
one of my revered preaching predecessors at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary,
described preaching as “giving the Bible a voice.” 1 He concurred with John Broadus’s simple
and accurate definition of preaching as “letting God speak out of his Word.” 2 In other words,
Stanfield rightly saw the Bible as the written record of God’s voice, and preaching as the act
of giving God his voice in the hearing of people.
If the Bible is God’s voice, it follows that preachers are compelled to preach it. The
prophet Amos rhetorically asked, “The Lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has
spoken; who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8). 3 The Apostle Paul, citing Psalm 116:10, similarly
confessed, “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I
believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak” (2 Cor 4:13). John Stott
rightly concluded:
Here then is a fundamental conviction about the living, redeeming and self-revealing
God. It is the foundation on which all Christian preaching rests. We should never presume
to occupy a pulpit unless we believe in this God. . . . Once we are persuaded that God has
spoken, however, then we too must speak. A compulsion rests upon us. Nothing and
nobody will be able to silence us. 4
Preaching, then, is rooted in basic assumptions that God has spoken, and he has orchestrated
the record of his words to be compiled and preserved in our Bible. 5 These assumptions drive
both our hermeneutic and our homiletic.
1
John A. Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, 4th ed., revised by Vernon L. Stanfield
(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), 19.
2
Ibid.
3
All Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version.
4
John R. W. Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1982), 96.
5
The terms Bible, Scripture, and Word are used synonymously and interchangeably by the author.