Bible Bridges: Part 16 "Verse by Verse?"

If you do a Google search for the phrase "verse by verse Bible study," you will find it returns over 11 millions results. It would seem that verse by verse Bible study and preaching is fairly popular. Now, in my experience verse by verse preaching is not really so common. Topical sermons are in vogue. In the name of relevance, nearly any topic seems to take center stage--from better marital intimacy, to retirement planning, to child-rearing. I will admit the Bible speaks to the day-to-day life we live, but sometimes modern preaching seeks to come off more like reality television than Scripture.

I have also heard sermons that use a single verse from which to launch into whatever the pastor felt was his hobby horse. For that matter, some preachers will hold the Bible in their hand and never bother to open it! Such preaching abuses are appalling. The klaxon has been sounded by many who decry the sad state of the pulpit in America today. I have to agree that there is a real cause for concern.

Thus, expository preaching has been promoted as the remedy. For instance, Mark Dever has published 9 Marks of a Healthy Church. As the 9Marks website site puts it: "An expositional sermon takes the main point of a passage of Scripture, makes it the main point of the sermon, and applies it to life today." All I can say to that is AMEN. Such an approach frees us from mundane or maligned agendas. Allowing the Bible to speak clearly today in our churches is a vital component of revival. Indeed, what might the church in America look like if we returned in earnest to digging deep into Scripture?

However, I will challenge an assumption that expository preaching equals the so-called verse-by-verse preaching method. I am not saying that a preacher should skip verses. Moreover, I am not saying that a pastor should ignore tough passages. What I am suggesting is that larger portions of Scripture are better preached than one verse at a time. Why is this?

In my previous installment of Bible Bridges, we looked at verb priority. Examining how verbs drive a passage only makes sense in a larger setting. That might be a paragraph or even a whole chapter (that depends on the context). I have really come to appreciate how our pastor covers several paragraphs (sometimes called a pericope [pronounced pe-ri-ko-pay]). A pericope is a unit of text that is essentially self-contained. It can be larger than a paragraph, but it is not excessively large.

The point is that it is of sufficient size not to lose the overall context. This is vitally important for our Bible study and for sermons. Many theological errors have occurred due to someone ripping a verse out of context. It is frankly one of the worst things that Christians do, and yet so very common. This is the primary reason that verse-by-verse preaching is unwise. The answer is to preach unified sections and unpack the main message of the pericope. It safeguards from over-analyzing a particular word, and it keeps the main point the main point.

Now, if your pastor preaches verse-by-verse, do not run up to him and blast him with this blog. Criticizing a pastor can be so devastating. I am simply encouraging us to be careful with our own study. And if you are budding preacher I encourage you to preach the Bible in sequence and in a large enough context to maintain the big idea (as Haddon Robinson puts it). Let us prayerfully guard against missing the big idea and/or ripping concepts from the Bible that are out of context.