(upbeat music) - Speaking of preaching, we have another question on the topic, this one from a podcast listener named Caleb who writes in to ask this. Pastor John, the teaching style of look at the book is extremely helpful as you mark up a Bible text on a screen on videos available at DesiringGod.

Would you ever consider adopting this method for when you preach a sermon? Why or why not? What would you say to Caleb? - I will probably lose this battle but because of how omnipresent visual media are in our day and I love to use them in their right place but I suspect I'll fight this battle till the day I die.

No, I don't encourage the use of any visual media in preaching including what I do in look at the book. Look at the book for me is an exposure for others to see of what I do in private to get at the meaning of texts and to get ready to preach or teach.

It's not a replacement for preaching and I do think there is a place for it, namely look at the book type analysis of text with an overhead projector or some kind of media. I do think there's a place for that in the church and I would encourage pastors and Sunday school teachers to do it in classes and other settings that are not considered the heralding of God's word but rather the more informal explaining of texts.

In other words, I don't think preaching is the only important form of communication in the New Testament or in the church. There's a place for visual analysis like look at the book and a place for discussion and a place for Q&A and a place for poetic expression and song, et cetera, et cetera, but none of these is preaching and I wanna preserve the integrity of preaching as preaching.

I think it has a special place in God's design and God's purposes for the church. Now, before I say why that is, let me just make clear that in all my 40 plus years of preaching, I've never in my own church used an overhead projector or a slide or a picture or a movie clip or a skit or anything else.

I know that this is almost taken for granted nowadays by preachers and I don't expect everybody to follow me in this regard, but it might have a leavening effect for good if I just at least give my opinion for why minimal or zero media in preaching is better. It has to do with my understanding of the very nature of preaching.

When Paul says in 2 Timothy 4, to preach the word, he uses a word, keruso, which implies heralding like what a town crier does. Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, the emperor has a message for all the people of the empire, all who were involved in the recent insurrection will be granted full amnesty if they lay down their weapons and swear allegiance to the king.

That's what a kerux does, he heralds, he announces, he proclaims. Now he might have to circle back and explain for somebody on the front row what amnesty means, like, ooh, excuse me, preacher, amnesty, what are you talking about? But he'll never speak as one who is indifferent and he knows he carries great news of utterly important things from an infinitely important king, and so I've called preaching expository exaltation with a U, E-X-U-L-T-A-T-I-O-N.

Preaching exalts over the truth that it explains and this exaltation is a work of the Holy Spirit, or it's unreal. It's an act of spirit-anointed worship. It's experience of the truth as glorious and beautiful and precious, even while the truth is being explained, and therefore preaching is a work of the Holy Spirit.

It carries in it a power, the old-fashioned word unction, an anointing from God for the accomplishment of his miraculous purposes in preaching, and my experience is that the intrusion of other media into this moment of spirit-anointed heralding does two negative things. One, it signifies a loss of trust in the preached word itself, and two, it distracts from the actual spiritual dynamic of the flow of the power of the spirit from the word to the preacher to the people.

It starts to create an atmosphere of the classroom or the lecture hall or the theater, and all of those atmospheres are contrary to what I call the atmosphere of expository exaltation, the very atmosphere of worship. This preacher is worshiping over the word, and a sacred mediation of divine truth is happening into the minds and hearts of people.

Preaching has its own dynamic and its own atmosphere. It's a kind of incarnation in the preacher of the beauty and the value of the truth of God's word in Scripture. So I say again, I doubt that I will win this battle, but it seems to me that preaching of this kind was not a temporary phenomenon for the first 2,000 years of Christian history, followed by something more technologically arresting for the remainder of church history.

I suspect that for those who have really tasted the nature of true preaching, there will always be a pull away from technical media intrusions into that sacred, precious, powerful hour called expository exaltation. If they know it, there's nothing like it. - Thank you, Pastor John. I can imagine some listeners familiar with Bethlehem's multi-campus model will ask, how does this priority not conflict with preaching on video and using video of the preacher's preaching, either live or recorded?

What would you say to that? - Well, I've done it for many years at Bethlehem because we have campuses. I regard it as not ideal. It seemed to be the best solution, given our options 13 years ago. That is a little different than what I was talking about in the sense that the video is an attempt to capture the moment of preaching, not intrude into the moment of preaching with something different from preaching.

You see the difference? - Yeah, I do. - So I would much rather be encountering the people face-to-face because of the living dynamic between the preacher and the people, but all the arguments that I just gave are not mainly arguments against duplicating the authentic moment of preaching by showing it on a screen in another place or even in the same place, like when I preach at Passion, you know, they got a screen up there because they can't see me from a quarter mile away up in the bleachers.

So I don't think anything I've said is undermined by the use of the replication of the moment in another place by the video. Nevertheless, I would say that in the fullest, most wonderful moment of expository exaltation, it is an incarnation of a real person and a real people connecting in a real room.

- Very good, thank you Pastor John. And if you want more information about, look at the book and the style of teaching that we've been talking about today, go online and check them out at DesiringGod.org/labs, L-A-B-S. And we're gonna return tomorrow and look at how and why Christians who float in the Christian life will actually drift.

The sobering warning from John Piper, drawn from 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 11, a very necessary warning we need to hear. That's tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)