In my study of Titus 1:5-9 (see parts 1 and 2), I used one of John MacArthur’s sermons from 1992, ‘The Qualifications for a Pastor, Part 3: Teaching Skill’.

He discusses the importance of expository Preaching and the divine call of a pastor (emphases mine):

The call is to come alongside the flock, give them spiritual strength by bringing healthy divine teaching to them.

It’s a serious thing. And anybody who steps into the pulpit or anybody who steps into ministry as an elder or a pastor and doesn’t teach sound doctrine is in some serious trouble.  That’s why James said, “Stop being so many teachers, theirs is a greater condemnation” (James 3:1).  You better not teach unless you’re willing to make sure you work hard enough to teach sound doctrine because if you take the role of a teacher and you don’t teach the truth, you’re in deep trouble with God.  Hebrews 13:17 says you’re going to give an account to God for some day for what you’ve taught your people and what you’ve done as your shepherd.  Very serious.  You go back and read in the prophet Jeremiah and read how God treated those shepherds who didn’t speak the truth. 

They died:

This is a severe rebuke and a fearful judgment.

MacArthur continues:

And I’ll tell you right now, no reasonable man would choose this task, and I’m a reasonable man.  No reasonable man would choose this task.  And secondly, no reasonable, rational man, having been called to it, would underestimate the seriousness of God about the truth that must be taught and come flippantly to a pulpit to teach whatever whimsically he had decided to say.

Here is a call for biblical, theological, God-centered preaching and teaching that exposits the Scripture.  There isn’t anything else.  There isn’t anything else to do.  And if you believe in an inspired Bible and an inerrant Bible and every word is written by God, then you know exactly what you are to preach and teach – the Word of God.  Ezra had it right.  This isn’t anything new. You can go all the way back to Ezra, chapter 7 – listen to this – verse 10.  “Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it, and to teach it.”  This isn’t anything new; he knew what he was supposed to do.  You study the law of the Lord, you practice it in your own life, and then you teach it.  That’s not that difficult, is it?  And there isn’t any new approach to be quote/unquote “more relevant.”  There isn’t anything better than Scripture.  There are only things that are woefully inferior to Scripture.  And what was it that so commends to us Apollos, according to Acts 18:24?  “He was mighty in the Scriptures.”  “He was mighty in the Scriptures.”  The ultimate commendation of the preacher, “he was mighty in the Scriptures.”  What else?  What else?

Go back, just look over a page to 2 Timothy 4:2, and let me take you back to that verse, just to remind you of what its importance is.  “Preach the word,” he says.  Now right there you have the subject of the preacher’s commission.  “Preach the word.”  I mean, how hard is that?  How difficult is that to figure out?  “Preach the word.”  Preaching God’s Word is the mandate.  We are to retain the sound Word; we are to accurately handle the sound Word, rightly dividing it; we are to guard the sound Word; and now we are to proclaim or preach the Word.

Colossians 1:25, Paul wrote very simply, “Of this church I was made a minister” – Why? – “according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit.”  I was given a duty from God.  What was it?  “That I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God.”  That’s it.

People have asked me through the years, “Why is it that you exposit the Bible. That’s all you do?”  And my answer is, “Because that’s what I’ve been told to do, to fully preach the Word of God.  What else is there to do?”  And I am also told that I am a minister of the New Covenant, and the New Covenant is the New Testament and that’s the emphasis. And that the Old Testament is given to us as examples. And so we preach the New Testament, the New Covenant, using the Old Testament as exemplary material to enrich the New and fulfill the mandate God has given us.  That’s why we talk about expository preaching.  That simply means we tell you what the Bible means. That’s what God intended.  God wrote the Scripture.  He wrote it because He wanted to communicate His truth.  He put His truth in here exactly the way He wanted it to be communicated.  My job is to communicate it to you the way He intended it to be communicated.  That’s my task.  Expository Preaching is expressing exactly the will of God as He wanted it said, taking the thoughts of the Holy Spirit and bringing them to you.

The second thing you see here is not only the subject of our preaching, which is the Word, but the scope of it.  “Be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction.”  What does that mean?  Well, we’re ready to preach it all the time, whether it’s seasonable or unseasonable.  That’s what that means.  It simply means whether the people want to hear it or don’t want to hear it, whether it’s popular or not popular.

I told you some weeks back, I can remember a few years ago when what we do, Bible exposition, was very, very popular.  Back in the ’70s and even the early ’80s.  I mean, what we were doing was the great new wave in the church; there was a tremendous interest in Bible exposition. And it was, it was running every place and people were saying, “How do you do this?”  And, “We want to learn how to do this.”  And it was popular.  And I was popular, sort of carried along in this wave.  And then, all of a sudden, the whole thing changed, and now Bible exposition is not popular, in general. It’s not popular; it’s not what people want; it’s not what’s the new thing.

The new thing is to be relevant.  The new thing is to be user friendly.  And the Scripture is not user friendly.  The new thing is to entertain people and make them feel comfortable and don’t offend them.  And the new thing is to sort of win people over with your cleverness and make them feel loved and accepted, no matter how they live.  The Bible doesn’t do that.

So the Bible as far as Bible exposition goes is not popular.  And with the decline in the popularity of the Scripture has come a decline in my popularity as well.  And that’s all right because we do this “in season and out of season.”  The seasons come and the seasons go, and the trends come and the trends go, and the mood of the mob shifts and changes, but what we do is never any different – “in season and out of season.”  We expose sin; we have to.  We have to reprove and rebuke and we do it patiently and with instruction.

And then he gives in verses 3 and 4 the urgency of all of this.  “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine,” and we’re in that time right now.  They just want “their ears tickled.” They want to feel good.  They want to “accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires.” They want to hear what they want to hear.  And they want to “turn their ears away from the truth” and listen to the myths that sound so good.  And the church, instead of recognizing this and staying faithful to the Word, is saying, “If that’s what they want, we’ll give it to them.”  What a prostitution!  What a compromise!  Of course sinners are intolerant of uncomfortable truth – that’s to be expected.  I mean, I suppose it’s safe to say that the preacher who brings the message people most need to hear will usually be the preacher they least like to hear.

Psychiatrist and Christian writer John White has penned some compelling words that need to be heard.  He writes, “Until about 15 years ago psychology was seen by most Christians as hostile to the gospel.  Let someone who professes the name of Jesus baptize secular psychology and present it as something compatible with Scripture truth and most Christians are happy to swallow theological hemlock in the form of psychological insights.  Over the past 15 years there has been a tendency for churches to place increasing reliance on trained pastoral counsellors.  To me it seems to suggest weakness or indifference to expository preaching within evangelical churches.  Why do we have to turn to the human sciences at all?  Why?  Because for years we have failed to expound the whole of Scripture, because from our weakened exposition and our superficial topical talks we have produced a generation of Christian sheep having no shepherd.  And now we’re damning ourselves more deeply than ever by a recourse to the wisdom of the world.  What I do as a psychiatrist and what my psychologist colleagues do in their research or their counseling is of infinitely less value to distressed Christians then what God says in His Word.  But pastoral shepherds, like the sheep they guide, are following – if I may change my metaphor for a moment – a new Pied Piper of Hamlin who is leading them into the dark caves of humanistic hedonism.  A few of us who are deeply involved in the human sciences feel like voices crying in a godless wilderness of humanism, while the churches turn to humanistic psychology as a substitute for the gospel of God’s grace,” end quote.

That’s sad.  The failure to preach expositionally – theologically – is either a failure to understand the obvious implications of an inerrant Scripture written by a holy God, or is indifference to those implications.  It is either ignorance or outright rebellion not to preach the Word of God.  And it’s hard to imagine that any pastor or elder could claim ignorance.  It must be indifference.  Oh no, it could be something else – pride.  The unacceptable assumption that what I have to say is better suited to men’s minds than what God has to say.  God gave His Word to His people; He expected it to be communicated.

So, those who are going to be elders or pastors in the church must champion the faithful Word, they must exhort with it.  John Stott understands the difficulty of that when he writes this: “Expository preaching is a most exacting discipline.  Perhaps that’s why it’s so rare.  Only those will undertake it who are prepared to follow the example of the Apostles and say it is not right that we should give up preaching the Word of God to serve tables, we will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word.  The systematic preaching of the Word is impossible without the systematic study of it.  It will not be enough to skim through a few verses in daily Bible reading, nor to study a passage only when we have to preach from it.  We must daily soak ourselves in the Scriptures.  We must not just study as through a microscope the linguistic minutiae of a few verses, but take our telescope and scan the whole expanse of God’s Word, assimilating its grand theme of divine sovereignty in the redemption of mankind.”

“It is blessed,” wrote C.H. Spurgeon, “to eat into the very soul of the Bible until at last you come to talk in scriptural language and your spirit is flavored with the words of the Lord.” That’s what we’re talking about.

In another sermon which I do not have to hand, John MacArthur says that expounding on only certain verses and not others is like reading only part of a letter, asking who would do such a thing.

Expository preaching is the only preaching. Would that pastors did away with the psychology, the poems, the novels, the films and give us the unvarnished truth — saving truth — verse by verse.