Expository Preaching

At Hillcrest Church, God is calling our leadership to focus on three specific goals:

1. Getting our people into God's manifest presence.

2. Getting our people into God's Word.

3. Getting our people into God's harvest.

We pursue goal number one through emphasizing prayer and anointed worship. Prayer has long been a part of our corporate DNA, in fact, there was a 24/7 prayer center on our property before there were any church buildings. Recently, the Lord has been taking us into a new dimension of worship and we are experiencing a much greater manifestation of His presence. Lives are being profoundly impacted. We are called to be a word and spirit church so this development is essential to our future.

We are gearing up to pursue goal number three by focusing on a specific neighborhood not far from our church campus. This is the result of what we believe to be specific direction from the Lord. We believe He is leading us to target our individual and corporate Jerusalems and Samarias. We define Jerusalem as a 2 1/2 mile radius around our campus, our homes, and our workplaces. For us, Samaria represents those segments of our city's population that are geographically near to us, but either culturally, racially, socially, ethnically, linguistically, or morally far from us. Our "Samaritans" are those who live in proximity to us but that we will never reach accidentally. We must deliberately cross significant barriers to reach out to them.

I believe an important key to reaching goal number two here at Hillcrest is emphasizing expository preaching and teaching. To that end, I am about to begin my first extended series of sermons of this type, a study of the life of Christ based on the Gospel of Luke, followed by a study of the Book of Acts.

If you are unfamiliar with this type of preaching and would like to know more about it, I encourage you to check out the website, www.wacriswell.org. It is dedicated to the memory of Dr. W.A. Criswell, one of the twentieth century's greatest expositors. Several thousand of his audio and video sermons, along with written transcripts, are available there, free of charge. They include his famous address to the Southern Baptist Convention entitled, "Whether We Live or Die" and his sermon on his favorite text. I particularly enjoyed his series on the life of David.

Dr. Criswell pastored First Baptist Church here in Dallas for some fifty years. Not long after he succeeded the famed Dr. George Truett in that pulpit, Dr. Criswell announced that he was going to preach his way through the Bible, beginning with the Book of Genesis. Some of the deacons came to him telling him that he would destroy the church by preaching through the Bible, that no one was interested in simply hearing God's word, but he persevered. His plan was simple, preach on Sunday mornings out of the text that lay before him, then take up Sunday evening wherever he had left off that morning, then take up Wednesday evening wherever he left off Sunday night, etc.. As I understand, it took him eighteen years to finish the task. During that time, First Baptist Dallas grew to be the largest church in the world, with over eighteen thousand members. Few cities have been so profoundly impacted by a single congregation as Dallas.

That amazing story is certainly a tribute to Dr. Criswell's unusual giftings, but it also underscores an important principle. God's Word is more powerful than any two-edged sword. Nothing else impacts human hearts like it and we must build our lives and ministries upon it. This is particularly incumbent upon those of us who passionately pursue the manifest presence of God and appreciate the powerful, present-day work of the Holy Spirt. The Spirit is not above the Word and the Word is no hinderance to the work of the Spirit. To the contrary, the greatest release of supernatural power comes when God's Word is proclaimed in the power of the Spirit, preparing the hearts of people to personally encounter the God of the Word through the work of the Spirit. We do not have to sacrifice or neglect one in order to have the other, rather, each enhances the other and Christian maturity flows from that balance.

Let's pursue both...!