Alistair Begg in his article, What Happened to Expository Preaching is an excellent read. In it, he notes so well,"Young men beginning pastoral ministry are besieged by members of their congregations wanting them to begin their sermons with man and his need instead of God and his glory. Paranoid preoccupation with a new millennium is due more to a preoccupation with ourselves and our needs than to a humble dependence upon the unerring truth of the Bible. The antidote to such a virulent disease is biblical preaching that allows the Scriptures to establish the agenda."
It is not as though I have been in full-time ministry for a lifetime, but having been involved in some sort of pastoral ministry for some years now, I can say that this statement by Begg is absolutely true. It is no wonder that the churches who are faithful to the Word of God are not growing by leaps and bounds while the seeker churches and the emerging churches or those that are not preaching the glory of God. This, of course, is not the standard or a cut and dry statement, but overall, it's true.
You enter a church that begins with the glory of God, transitions to the sinful wretchedness of all mankind, which then takes you to the bloody, horrific and sacrificial death of a man upon a cross, which then inevitably leads to the miraculous and supernatural resurrection of this God-Man; but then it doesn't stop there. Man cannot work his way to the Savior. He must accept the free gift by faith. That's it. There is nothing about man in there except his sinfulness and his absolute need for a Savior. No church that preaches the truthful message of the Scriptures is going to be the popular and the "liked" church in the area.
May God give us young preachers who preach "the unerring truth of the Bible."
