If we wish to appropriate the wisdom of Charles Simeon as theorist on expository preaching, we must first make clear to ourselves what we mean when we speak of expository preaching. This is necessary because the word expository has often been used in a restricted sense to denote simply a sermon preached from a long text. Thus, Andrew Blackwood wrote: “An expository sermon here means one that grows out of a Bible passage longer than two or three verses . . . an expository sermon means a textual treatment of a fairly long passage.”2 He went on to suggest that young pastors should preach such sermons “perhaps once a month”3 and to give hints on the problems of technique they involve.
Without suggesting that Blackwood’s usage is inadmissible for any purpose, I must discuss it as too narrow for our present purpose—if only because it would exclude all but a handful of Charles Simeon’s sermons (his texts, you see, are far too short!). We shall find it better to define “expository” preaching in terms, not of the length of the text, but of the preacher’s approach to it, and to say something like this: expository preaching is the preaching of the man who knows Holy Scripture to be the living Word of the living God, and who desires only that it should be free to speak its own message to sinful men and women; who therefore preaches from a text, and in preaching labors, as the Puritans would say, to “open” it, or, in Simeon’s phrase, to “bring out of the text what is there”; whose whole aim in preaching is to show his hearers what the text is saying to them about God and about themselves, and to lead them into what Barth called “the strange new world within the Bible” in order that they may be met by him who is the Lord of that world.
The practice of expository preaching thus presupposes the biblical and evangelical account of the relation of the written words of Scripture to the speaking God with whom we have to do. Defining the concept in this way, we may say that every sermon that Simeon preached was an expository sermon; and, surely, we may add that every sermon that we ourselves preach should be an expository sermon. What other sort of sermons, we may ask, is there room for in Christ’s church?
Read it all.Today the Church of England celebrates Charles Simeon, Priest, Evangelical Divine, 1836
— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) November 13, 2023
A key figure in the Evangelical Revival, serving 54 years at Holy Trinity Cambridge, he helped found @cmsmission and supported other mission work, especially to India pic.twitter.com/4sngvrKtoG