It's grieved me ever since I read what he said. Who's he? Well, he's a popular and highly influential pastor in the U. S. of A. Multitudes pack the pews to hear him. After all, he is an excellent speaker.
Droves of pastors hang on to his every word and salivate after his success. He's not shy when it comes to telling his ministerial audience how to pack bodies into the pews, lots and lots of bodies, multiplied thousands of bodies, as he does.
Our focus will be on his telling the ecclesiastics how the pews will not be packed, and this is grievous. He says, and very dogmatically so, that church pews will never be filled if the pastor teaches the Bible verse-by-verse. He doesn't stop there, he goes on to say that anyone reading the Bible can't find a single instance of verse-by-verse preaching in the Bible.
But, he doesn't stop there--he says verse-by-verse preaching is "cheating" and "easy."
Let him speak for himself: "[P]reaching verse-by-verse through books of the Bible-- that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that. There's not one example of that."
Is it true that no one modeled that? If you turn to the book of Acts, yes, it is true that neither Paul nor Peter preached verse-by-verse, but that's in Acts which contains the historical record of summaries of the evangelistic sermons of Paul and Peter, some directed to Gentiles and some to Jews.
That doesn't count as a point against verse-by-verse teaching to believers meeting in their churches. Paul couldn't tell the pagan elites assembled on Mars Hill to take out their Bibles and turn to Psalm 22 while he instructed them verse-by-verse on the prediction of the death of the Savior.
When we turn to the epistles which are addressed to the churches, what do we find? Listen to what Paul wrote as he closed out I Thessalonians: "I adjure you by the Lord to have this letter [I Thessalonians] read to all the brethren."
When the reader read what we call I Thessalonians to the believers in their house churches, he would have read it verse-by-verse and they would have been instructed that way as it was read. Would we think that the reader just read I Thessalonians in 15 minutes and said, "Well, it was good to hear from brother Paul. Brother Publius, lead us in prayer after which we're dismissed"? No, they would pay close attention to each sentence, word by word, sentence by sentence.
When Paul concludes Colossians, he writes, "When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea." The reader in those two churches read it aloud from start to finish, verse by verse to the assembled.
There's a misconstrued verse in the book of Revelation 1:3. The misconstruing of the text is based on our egocentric tendency. The verse says, "Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near." This sentence is addressed to each of the seven churches that will receive the book.
The verse is, first and foremost, a statement of blessing to the one who reads the book to the church ("those who hear"). The reader read it sentence by sentence one right after the other. (Don't worry, however, the promise stands today, there is a special blessing for reading the last book in the Bible.) And the church was instructed thereby.
Now let's look at the pastor's statement, "That's not how you grow Christians." I was in a church for 22 years in which the pastor never ever, not one time, taught a book in the Bible to us, going verse by verse. What were the results of that? Not good.
One
of the terrible things about topical preaching, that is preaching on this text
in this book and next Sunday text in another book and another
text in some book in the Old Testament and still another text in another place, and all
you get are just texts that are floating around
in the breeze, a few from Mark, a bit from Deuteronomy the next Sunday, and we were in Matthew at the next gathering.
The audience that listens to that kind of preaching never really has anything solid and substantial. I never got anything definite. Nothing was nailed down; nothing fit with anything else.
Was what my pastor was saying true to the context? I had no idea because I was never told what the context was. But when I was taught the Bible books verse-by-verse, the Bible began to make sense. Things fit together into a cohesive whole. I saw that the Bible was God's complete and connected thought toward man.
And what about the popular pastor's saying that verse-by-verse teaching is "easy." Really? Those who teach verse-by-verse study and learn how each word, sentence, and paragraph of the book fit into the context or "argument" and flow of the book. Without such teaching, what the people say and what they do in the Bible appears disjointed and out of left field.
My pastor and my Sunday school teachers never answered the question of, "What is the purpose of this book in Bible?" They never showed me how this paragraph jives with the Holy Spirit's purpose of the book, so that each verse makes sense.
The "verse-by-verser" must teach the book so as to demonstrate the authorial intent for the book and how each verse verse fits into his purpose.
Then there's the necessity of the study of the culture of the 1st century and how the first readers/hearers of the book would have understood what Paul, Luke, Peter, et al. wrote. For example, what was slavery like during the Roman Empire. If the teacher doesn't know what the master/slave relationship was like, he will import the slavery of the Confederacy back into the New Testament and present a very distorted and false picture.
Another example would be that of a first century wife who has become a Christian and her husband remains a pagan. What would her life be like? What would dinner in her home be like? From a study of the culture, we know that every dinner would be a battleground between light and darkness.
It would be important to study what the prison conditions were back then and that those conditions would cause us to understand why Paul would lavish compliments on Onesimus and his family for what looks like a simple visit to an inmate, but it was far from that.
As a scholar of church history wrote, "One of the saddest things in the history of the church of Jesus Christ has been the fact that so many churches have gone down the drain having been the recipient of the preaching of outstanding preachers.
"For example, Joseph Parker was one of the great English preachers. He was the pastor of the great City Temple. But unfortunately, Joseph Parker was a textual and topical preacher. He was known all over the country as a great preacher. He has written some interesting books, but when he left because the people were not grounded in the truths of Holy Scripture, systematically that congregation fell prey to a man who was the leader in what was called New Theology in his day, R. J. Campbell.
[Campbell introduced Biblical criticism into his preaching, questioning the traditional authorship of books, and the origins of the text. The theology held by Campbell and a number of his friends came to be known as 'The New Theology.]
"DeWitt Talmadge had a tremendous ministry in Brooklyn, but his ministry was not expository. As a result when he left, his church fell into the hands of the Russellites. Imagine that -- a man who was an outstanding evangelist but he preached topical sermons. He did not instruct the congregation in the truths of theology, the truths of Bible doctrine. So when he left, the Jehovah's Witnesses moved in and took over."
Verse-by-verse teaching is easy? Verse-by-verse teaching is cheating? Verse by verse teaching doesn't grow Christians? It hurts down deep to hear a pastor say that.
It is a grief indeed.
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