Whose Outline?

Expository preaching has been succinctly defined as preaching in which the point of the text is the point of the sermon. In this sense, all preaching should be expository, whether it handles a topic, a verse, or an extended passage of Scripture. If a preacher uses God’s words to make his (the preacher’s) point, then how does God get a word in edgewise? When a preacher stands before his congregation, he must as directly as possible tell them, “Thus saith the Lord.” Communicating God’s Word may require explanation, illustration, and good and necessary application, but the whole burden of preaching is to relay what God has already said. But why should expository preaching be limited to relaying the point and content of the passage only? Why not the outline as well? Could we be more thoroughly expository if we added this element to our definition: that the outline of the text is the outline of the sermon?

Conventional homiletics, as I have heard it explained, would say no. According to conventional homiletics, a sermon must have a single proposition (or thesis or centralizing idea), and this proposition should be broken down into a few main headings, all parallel: “Reasons we must [main idea]”; “Consequences of [main idea]”; “Means by which [main idea]”; “Motivations for [main idea].” Sound homiletics courses typically warn against strained parallelism and cutesy alliteration; nevertheless, parallelism and symmetry are viewed as pretty good ideas. Conventional thinking is that parallelism and symmetry help the congregation follow the sermon now and remember the sermon later. So ideally, when Mrs. McCabe, who stayed home with the sick kids, asks Mr. McCabe about the morning sermon, Mr. McCabe can rattle off Pastor Phil’s thesis and three main points and briefly describe what was said about each. A valid advantage.

What parallelism and symmetry mean for Pastor Phil’s sermon preparation is that he studies hard, discerns the meaning of the text, then works out a tidy way to package its doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness so that his congregation can carry it away without dropping anything. But is this “packaging” step good and necessary? It’s not blasphemous; it’s not deception; it’s not catering to itching ears. Pastor Phil may even be exactly on target in his explanation of the text’s basic meaning. Yet is the “packaging” good and necessary? This “packaging” for parallelism and symmetry is really a “repackaging.” The biblical writer already packaged the truth according to his own outline, based on his own circumstances; for a preacher to outline for symmetry and parallelism, he must take the elements out of their original packaging and repackage them. Would it not be better to follow the biblical writer’s outline? There are a number of advantages for doing so, and doing so may promote a better kind of comprehension and retention than the conventional homiletical method does.

Consistent With Inspiration

The first and by far the greatest advantage of following the biblical writer’s outline is that it is consistent with a high view of inspiration. God’s Word is “profitable” for His ends (2 Tim. 3:17); and Scripture was penned under the superintendence of an omniscient, deliberate Spirit (2 Pet. 1:21). God’s words are “fitly spoken … like apples of gold in pictures of silver” (Prov. 25:11, KJV). Those who believe God breathed out the Scriptures are not surprised to continually find new depths, new intricacies, new testimonies to the divine unity of Scripture. Like Dvorak’s New World Symphony, each movement adds new ideas yet maintains a remarkably coherent tone. We are accustomed to interpreting the Scriptures with the analogy of faith: there are big ideas that tie the whole story together. Christ fulfills the law and the prophets; the Scriptures testify of Him (Matt. 5:17–18; John 5:39). All the commandments hang on love for God and neighbor (Matt. 22:37–38). God’s grand design is to bring all things into one in Christ (Eph. 1:10).

The perfection of God’s revelation extends beyond its individual components to its structure as well. God has revealed particular truths at particular times in particular ways for particular reasons. God’s people benefit by meditating not just on the components, but on the relationships among the components. It is no accident that a discussion of love (1 Cor. 13) falls in the middle of a discussion of abused spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12, 14). Many psalms reflect not just a theological development, but experiential progress from doubt to faith, from humility to triumph; and the psalmists penned them so that we can meditate ourselves from A to B along with them. The story of the bride for Isaac stretches for 67 verses with a good deal of repetition (Gen. 24), and upon consideration, the repetitiveness supports the story’s point.

How can a sermon that repackages God’s Word into neat, parallel, symmetrical outlines convey the real structure of a passage? There are times when passages do divide neatly, and for such passages, by all means, divide the sermon neatly. But Scripture is full of asymmetry: parenthetical points, excursus, flashbacks, cyclical presentations, progressive argumentation and reasoning, long lists, and short aphorisms. Parallelism and symmetry may distort these passages rather than clarify them.

Better Scripture Comprehension

The second advantage is that the congregation will comprehend Scripture better. If the goal of preaching is to provide people with three or five simple instructions on how to improve their spiritual walk this week, by all means, give them three or five things to work on. But the goal of preaching is bigger than that. We want to work the Scriptures into people’s hearts and minds. “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Neh. 8:8). People need to learn for themselves how to follow a biblical plot or argument; a sermon that underscores the structure of a biblical plot or argument shows them how to do that. This truth goes back to the adage that contrasts giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish. Mature Christianity—especially considering the priesthood of the believers—is about individual responsibility to learn and apply God’s Word. What better opportunity than to follow the lead of a pastor who demonstrates how? Furthermore, proving that a point and application fit into the biblical writer’s point and not just into a contrived parallelism presents the congregation with a stronger biblical mandate: “Thus saith the Lord.”

Better Scripture Retention

The third advantage is that people will retain the point of Scripture better. That Mr. McCabe can relate the sermon’s main points to Mrs. McCabe is not a bad thing. But no matter what, memory fades, and people can carry only so many sermon notes around. But if the preacher has explained the structure and meaning of Scripture, then the Scripture passages themselves are always available for people to review. If the Holy Spirit has—through the preacher—illuminated the passage for the individual believer, that believer can return to the text “with the light on” again and again. It doesn’t matter if the believer can regurgitate what he heard weeks or months ago in church; all he needs to do is refresh himself on what Moses, David, Paul, or Peter is saying in any given passage.

Liberating

The last advantage is that using Scripture’s own outline liberates the preacher in the same way that preaching the content of Scripture does. We the preachers are empty. Without God we have nothing to say, nothing to offer. Like Ezekiel who ate the scrolls before he spoke to Israel, we too must be filled. “Moreover he [God] said unto me [Ezekiel], Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord God; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear” (Ezek. 3:10–11). There is nothing more we can do than say what God has said; there is nothing more we should do than say what God has said. We preach not ourselves, but Christ (1 Cor. 1:23; 2 Cor. 4:5). To structure a sermon as much around the structure of Scripture as possible is to tell the congregation, “This is not my word. Start to finish, it is God’s.”

An Example: 2 Corinthians 4

Let’s look at 2 Corinthians 4 as an example of this method. Assume the scope of the message is to preach through the whole chapter. The text begins with “therefore,” which requires at least a brief summary of the context, describing the occasion for the book (Paul’s defense of his ministry and some follow-up concerns left over from 1 Corinthians). The background should probably include the late verses of chapter 2 through chapter 3, describing what 4:1 means by “this ministry.” What follows the “therefore” is that “we faint not,” a phrase that is repeated in 4:16. The congregation needs to be shown that the passage chiefly discusses Paul’s reason for not losing heart, and the reason centers on the nature of his ministry. Verses 2–6 show that in Paul’s mind, shunning deceitful methods and sticking to the gospel, despite apparent lack of success (which he pins on the spiritual blindness of the people and not on any deficiency in his gospel proclamation), springs from his confidence in the gospel message and beyond it, the God who works through it. Each “for” in these verses draws us along with him as he grounds his gospel method in the gospel itself.

The passage takes a turn, though, in verse 7, moving from what Paul knows to be true to what ministry looks like for the time being: “treasure in earthen vessels.” The grammar of verses 7–11 provides a sermon in and of itself: the English verse 8 may begin with “we are,” but in the Greek, verses 8 through 10 are all participles tying back into the finite verb “we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” If the meaning of the metaphor has escaped you, just look at the participles. This is what it means to have treasure in earthen vessels. Verses 7, 10, and 11 include mutually explanatory purpose statements that frame the set of verses. God has deliberately put Christian ministers in difficult circumstances so that the glory may be His and Christ’s post-resurrection lordship may be evident to everyone; like Gideon, no one can chalk up ministry success to the minister: only a living Christ could do it. The congregation must see these connections so that whenever they return to this passage, they will see them afresh.

Paul continues his existential considerations with a discussion of faith—not bare faith, but a strong conviction that the God who is presently and with good reason delivering His servants to death has great plans for His servants, to wit, resurrection in the same way Christ our Predecessor was raised, the joyous thanksgiving of the redeemed, and a “weight of glory” that far outweighs the present affliction. Since we are “always” bearing Christ’s death (the outward man perishing), the inward man needs just as constant a renewal. The day-by-day renewal is achieved by day-by-day looking—by faith—at the hope of resurrection, thanksgiving, and glory. Again, the intertwining of these ideas defies traditional parallelism.

In no way does this method advocate a disorganized sermon; it argues against a reorganized sermon. The outlining techniques taught in conventional homiletics are helpful in their own way; they lay out categories and thought relationships that are often found in Scripture. But to impose onto the text of Scripture these categories and relationships, arranged in a beautifully symmetrical outline, obscures the beautifully asymmetrical nature of Scripture. Scripture is full of beautiful and startling asymmetries, probably because they are calculated to match real life, which is itself, for God’s own reasons, largely asymmetrical.

Michael Osborne received a B.A. in Bible and an M.A. in Church History from Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC). He co-authored the teacher’s editions of two BJU Press high school Bible comparative religions textbooks What Is Truth? and Who Is This Jesus?; and contributed essays to the appendix of The Dark Side of the Internet. He lives with his wife, Becky, and his daughters, Felicity and Elinor, in Omaha, Nebraska, where they are active members at Good Shepherd Baptist Church. Mike plans to pursue a further degree in apologetics.