The Journey From the Ancient Text to the Contemporary Culture

[00:00:00] Over 20 years of teaching the Bible, I've learned that becoming a good Bible teacher not only takes the gift of the Spirit of God but it takes a lot of hard work.

[00:00:11] Oh man, can I get an amen?

[00:00:15] Listen, have you been teaching the Bible for more than 20 years or less than 20 years?

[00:00:21] I know that you certainly can agree with our guest for this week, Wesley Town.

[00:00:28] This is a recording from one of our in-person preacher training events that took place back in 2023 in Temecula, California.

[00:00:39] Wesley joined us and shared about the need for the Spirit of God and the need for hard work in taking the journey from the ancient text

[00:00:51] and building relational bridges into the contemporary culture.

[00:00:57] I really enjoyed being there in the room when this took place, and I want you to be in the room for the next one.

[00:01:06] We're coming back to the great state of California, May 24th and 25th.

[00:01:14] We'll be in the Bay Area of San Francisco in a town called Pleasanton, California.

[00:01:21] You can find details and registration at our website, expositorscollective.com, or to shorten things, expositors.co, both goes to the same place.

[00:01:35] I would love for you and for your team, any up-and-coming teachers and preachers, any women's ministry leaders or youth pastors.

[00:01:46] You are all invited, and it's going to help and benefit everyone who comes along. I guarantee it.

[00:01:53] I'd love to see you there. Well, anyway, I'm gonna get out of your way, and here is the recording of Wesley Town on Journeying from the Ancient Text

[00:02:03] into contemporary culture.

[00:02:11] I've been admiring this work from afar, and been on the Expositors Collective Podcast, which is amazing work, and it's so good to be here live in person at an expositors collective event.

[00:02:24] I'm a pastor in Davis, California. Anybody heard of Davis? It's University City.

[00:02:29] I've passed her two university churches, both which I planted and the first time I planted a church, I said, I'll never plant a church again.

[00:02:37] And then I planted a church again. So it is amazing to be with you guys. Do you mind if I say a quick prayer?

[00:02:46] Lord, what a blessing. To be here in this place seeing a collection of Bible teachers being raised up to clearly and powerfully present the Bible

[00:03:00] in a way that is coherent, that has a point, but more than anything that is alive and changing people's lives.

[00:03:10] God, I pray that this event would raise up Bible teachers to reach hundreds and even thousands of people with the good news of Jesus.

[00:03:18] And I'm honored and humbled to be a part of what this work is, and what Mike and the group at Calvary Chapel have produced over the last so many years.

[00:03:29] So bless this talk in Jesus' name, and everyone said, Amen.

[00:03:38] The work that you do on the back end of preaching, I believe is the most important work.

[00:03:46] There was a Bible expositor in the early 1900s named G Campbell Morgan.

[00:03:52] And G Campbell Morgan was in London, England, pastoring the famous West Minister church.

[00:04:00] And if Charles Spurgeon was the Prince of Preachers, then G Campbell Morgan was the Prince of expository preaching.

[00:04:10] Every Friday night he would have Bible lectures where thousands of people would come and listen to him exposit for an hour plus the Bible.

[00:04:20] Well, years ago I read a story about an interaction he had with some younger preachers.

[00:04:25] They came to one of his Friday night lectures as he taught through the Bible and they were just mesmerized about how he thought through the text, how he talked the text,

[00:04:36] the exposition outline flow of his teaching.

[00:04:39] And at the end, they waited in line to talk to him.

[00:04:42] And when they got to him, they said, G Campbell Morgan, this is amazing.

[00:04:47] Look thousands of people and all the things you've written and how you communicate scripture, what is your secret?

[00:04:57] And he gave a simple and surprising answer.

[00:05:01] The secret was hard work.

[00:05:05] They were waiting for some puzzle to form or to come together, some profound answer.

[00:05:13] But he simply said, I work really hard in my expository preaching.

[00:05:19] And all of that happens on the back end of preaching.

[00:05:24] You know, as I thought through over 20 years of teaching the Bible, I started at 17 years old teaching a Bible study in my high school.

[00:05:31] And I was awful. I had no idea how to teach your Bible.

[00:05:34] And I really didn't know much about the Bible.

[00:05:37] And yet, I was teaching the Bible. I don't recommend that either.

[00:05:41] Over 20 years of teaching the Bible, I've learned that becoming a good Bible teacher not only takes the gift of the Spirit of God but it takes a lot of hard work.

[00:05:52] Bible teaching and expository preaching is both an art and a science.

[00:05:59] And it takes years to find your rhythm, it takes years to find your method and it takes years to find your voice.

[00:06:07] And I think it's a lot like basketball. I played basketball through college.

[00:06:10] And I remember when I first picked up a basketball, I was just dribbled and I didn't really dribble.

[00:06:15] I just threw the ball down on the ground and I picked it up.

[00:06:18] And then I kept practicing and one day I could dribble with one hand.

[00:06:21] And then I could dribble behind my back and threw my legs and crossover and do these little nuances that threw off defenders.

[00:06:28] But it takes years and years and years to develop that skill and also to understand how I'm wired as a basketball player.

[00:06:37] So I want to give you guys some essentials that I've learned about the back end of preaching.

[00:06:43] And I think of this, this is for me just my pathway and I feel like there's some really concrete principles, components to teaching and preaching that are relevant for all of us, although this is kind of my flow, my pathway.

[00:06:58] So four things put on your seat belts, write these down.

[00:07:01] Number one, research.

[00:07:03] And how I think of research is this from details to big picture.

[00:07:08] The way that my brain is wired, the way that I function is when I start in the study, the back end of preaching, I start with all the details.

[00:07:18] I research all the nuance of the text.

[00:07:21] I get into every key word, the flow, the structure, the history, the background.

[00:07:26] And I try to unearth as much as I can from the nuance and details of the text.

[00:07:33] For me, to see the full narrative or to understand the cohesive persuasive argument by, let's say Paul in Romans, I have to understand the details of the text and the context.

[00:07:47] So research for me includes some of the following.

[00:07:50] One, historical and cultural background.

[00:07:53] And here's some great resources. I want to just throw your way to recommend.

[00:07:58] There are some really good resources around this if you're new to teaching the Bible.

[00:08:03] First of all, IVP has an incredible series on cultural historical background.

[00:08:08] Zondorfin does as well. There's like four in the New Testament, five in the Old Testament.

[00:08:14] And then Baker has a one volume, pretty large New Testament Old Testament background where you can begin to unearth the text in its context that it was written in.

[00:08:28] Another thing that I do is I get into lexicon and word study dictionaries.

[00:08:35] I have four years of New Testament Greek. I took in undergraduate and graduate school in two years of Hebrew.

[00:08:42] And so I like to get into the nuances of the text.

[00:08:45] And there's a lot of great resources.

[00:08:48] TD and TU, theological dictionary of the New Testament is amazing, especially if you want to spend a long time researching an individual word or term.

[00:08:58] There's also other smaller resources, BDAG which is probably the most well known and well respected New Testament lexicon.

[00:09:09] It's much smaller as far as reading is concerned.

[00:09:13] Laugh Nida is another incredible New Testament word study.

[00:09:19] And so digging into the words and the phrases and the syntax of a particular passage helps you to understand the word.

[00:09:26] And so that's why the word helps you to unearth the larger narrative or theme.

[00:09:33] And then all of us for the most part know that there's commentaries.

[00:09:38] And I like to think of commentaries broken up into two parts, one expositional commentaries.

[00:09:45] That's like maybe you read Chuck Smith or Warren Wearsby.

[00:09:50] There's a lot of comments about commentaries where they're talking, they're reading a paragraph and they're explaining and they're giving some really good preaching outlines.

[00:09:58] The other type of commentaries, an exogetical commentary.

[00:10:02] Those are the commentaries that are dealing with the time and culture and history and language of a particular passage and context.

[00:10:13] And so every read Wearsby which is amazing, a lot of people just steal his outlines or repackage them into modern context.

[00:10:23] And then you're like well I really want to understand the little more detail and nuance of the text and exogetical commentaries, phenomenal.

[00:10:30] So commentaries like New International Commentary, Old Testament, New Testament absolutely gold as far as studying exegesis of the text.

[00:10:40] Acre exogetical is one of my favorite, they have both New Testament Old Testament commentaries, word biblical commentary, pillar.

[00:10:48] I could go on and on but there's just a few examples.

[00:10:52] All that to say is for me understanding the big idea comes out of the details of the text.

[00:11:02] It's always surprising people are like on Monday I come up with my full outline and I'm thinking for me personally, I can't come up with an outline until I understand what the scripture is saying from that vantage point of the author to the original audience.

[00:11:18] Second meditation from deep thinking to fresh ideas.

[00:11:24] This has been huge for me as a follower of Jesus and as a Bible teacher.

[00:11:29] As I research the text, I just meditate on it.

[00:11:33] I think about it all week long and I'm talking about biblical meditation which is essentially to think deeply about a truth or a part of the nature of God.

[00:11:44] Thinking deeply about the text helps me to see things clearly.

[00:11:49] Thinking deeply produces random sparks of fresh ideas as I'm literally, I'll just be on a walk or I'll be on a morning run or I'll be eating at the dinner table or at the lunch table and I'll just come up with an idea or an insight or a specific way that I want to communicate that particular message

[00:12:12] to the people within the context of the text that I'm teaching.

[00:12:17] And maybe in some ways this is not so much something that we emphasize in the back end of preaching but I have found this to be phenomenally helpful just walking and driving and eating and running and just thinking about the text and then having my notes app ready to write down an idea or a phrase or a way to communicate that idea.

[00:12:41] So I try to think about the text deeply all week long and then I find aha moments, random insights that just come to me and some of them may be out of the text but some of them may be.

[00:12:54] I'm feeling or sensing something about this text for the specific group that I'm speaking to that weekend does that make sense?

[00:13:03] Third research meditation and then for me the third one is paradigm.

[00:13:08] What am I trying to do? What am I trying to accomplish as I'm studying and preparing?

[00:13:14] And so my paradigm that I have found incredibly helpful is this from exegesis to theology or exegesis and theology to people in culture.

[00:13:28] When we preach it's not just about second Timothy chapter two, right?

[00:13:35] Let me tell you about the theology and the context and the exegesis of second Timothy chapter two verse 15.

[00:13:42] Do your best present yourself to God as one approved a worker who does not need to be ashamed and correctly handles the word of truth.

[00:13:51] And then he goes avoid Godless chatter. The text is so important but so are the people that the text is being taught to.

[00:14:06] When I think about preaching, I think about this we teach and preach to a people and we teach and preach to a people in a particular context.

[00:14:18] Both of those are important. Every single new testament letter was written to a people in a context because of a specific reason.

[00:14:29] The text is everything to us, right? This is the scripture, the narrative of God but we're preaching to a people in a context that God wants that text to breathe life and transformation and redemption into.

[00:14:44] And so I think a lot about the people I'm preaching to and the culture of the people that I'm preaching to.

[00:14:52] All of this is relevant to effective Bible exposition. So for me exegesis is a number of things, one exegeting the text, second exegeting the theology of the text.

[00:15:05] What is the theological thrust or argument or themes in the text, not just in that particular context but throughout the entire narrative of the Bible.

[00:15:16] And then I want to exegiate the human experience and what I mean by that is I'm thinking about when I teach this subject, what are people going to be thinking?

[00:15:29] What are people going to be feeling? What are people going to be experiencing their everyday life when they walk into that church, that talk, that conference, that seminar.

[00:15:42] That maybe God wants me to help them navigate whatever reality that is. God wants to help me pastor them through that. Maybe God wants me to help them articulate something they're feeling or sensing but they haven't quite been able to do it.

[00:15:58] I haven't quite been able to articulate that the word of God or the gospel of Jesus applies to and answers in that moment in their life.

[00:16:10] So I try to be sensitive about the human experience and also I try to be sensitive about the cultural narratives.

[00:16:18] Because every text has a theme, a big idea, a main point to it that has subpoints but within all of those points and subpoints I'm also thinking about the dominant cultural narrative that people have heard about this particular theme.

[00:16:40] What is it that I can help flesh out about that cultural narrative? Maybe that culture narrative is good. Maybe it's not good, maybe it aligns with what the scripture is saying. Maybe it's the antithesis of what the scripture is saying.

[00:16:56] So I try to think through, okay here's a group of people like in my context all of these university students that are getting PhDs and degrees in science, future doctors and then doctors in the city and professors.

[00:17:09] All of these brilliant people are walking into this room on a Sunday and they have heard so many cultural narratives around this particular idea that I'm teaching from the Bible.

[00:17:22] How do I navigate those narratives as I'm teaching this so that they see the truest narrative which is the narrative of scripture?

[00:17:33] How do I help them to filter all other narratives through the truest narrative which is the storyline of the Bible and the history of salvation.

[00:17:45] And so I try to think about that a lot because I realize that there's people that are going to walk in and listen to whatever I'm teaching that have longings and needs at a deep soul level.

[00:18:00] And maybe all of these narratives have brought confusion or consternation or just this inability to navigate a foundational sense of idea or truth around that particular narrative.

[00:18:16] And maybe on that day in a way that I can explain it to the best of my ability, I can help them to gain a foundational understanding of what's true around that particular subject.

[00:18:29] So I try to think about the people and I try to think about the cultural context of the people so I can help pastor and teach people well in their place and locale and whatever else they're processing through in that moment.

[00:18:45] And then fourth, number one, research number two, meditation number three, paradigm and then number four outline.

[00:18:53] From research, meditation, people, culture to a clear and detailed outline.

[00:19:01] So all of that is back in. I'm taking notes, I'm thinking I'm reading books, I'm studying commentaries, syntax, morphology, I'm looking at the text, I'm studying the theology of that subject in the context but outside of the context as well.

[00:19:17] And then I need to land somewhere and Brian you did a phenomenal job teaching this last session. But for me my outline looks like this intro.

[00:19:27] How can I start with the theme in the intro? How can I grab people's attention, draw them in, help them to see the big idea narrative that I want to develop or talk about throughout the sermon or teaching on that week or weekend.

[00:19:45] And then I always get into texting context before I jump into the text, I want to give people a big picture idea of here's this text, here's the context, here's why I was written, here's what's going on and let's jump into it.

[00:20:00] And then thirdly points, right? For me points are movements as you're traveling through this arc, this narrative of whatever the text is whether it's a narrative, whether it's prose discourse, whatever it is.

[00:20:15] I want to have these movements through the text that people travel along.

[00:20:21] And then within those points illustrations, right? Illustrations help to bring life or humaneness to the point. I try to tell a lot of personal stories not because I'm the hero of the story.

[00:20:32] I try never to be here as a story, right? Jesus is ultimately the hero of every story but to offer people a connection to me as a person that I'm a human, that I'm on their level, that I've walked through this, that I've processed through this, that I've dealt with this.

[00:20:47] I try to build a bridge because I never want to be above the people, I want to be with the people.

[00:20:52] And in order to pastor a people, your people want to get to know you. They're yearning and longing to understand that you're also a human as well.

[00:21:02] And so for me, the more stories that I'm able to tell about my life and what I'm walking through and thinking through or my failures or how that applies to me and what I'm trying to process in my sanctification or transformation as a follower of Jesus.

[00:21:17] I find it be helpful in building a relational bridge in teaching a people. And then finally, intro, text and context points illustration and gospel. Always in with Jesus.

[00:21:30] Back in the day, I think I was 18 or 19 years old. I read lectures to my students by CH Spurgeon. CH Spurgeon was the first biography I read, not autobiography, biography.

[00:21:45] And then I read lectures to my students, which is super dense but brilliant.

[00:21:51] And I remember in one of his lectures to his students, he said, every sermon ends with the cross.

[00:22:00] And I thought, okay, if the greatest preacher of all time did that, I should probably do that as well.

[00:22:05] And you know what I found to be so important about that is that every single person that comes into the places and spaces that we teach, ultimately are going to be most impacted.

[00:22:20] Not by my intro, not by the text and context, not by my insights, not even by my life stories.

[00:22:28] They're going to be impacted by Jesus because he is the main point of every story.

[00:22:34] The Bible is a cohesive story pointing to Jesus. And if we tell the story in our text and context as exporters, we can week out.

[00:22:46] The greatest thing that we can do at the end or somewhere within the framework of every message is to point people to the ultimate climax of the story, Jesus Christ.

[00:23:01] Always point people to Jesus. He's the one we preach. He's the person that all of the Bible points to. And thus, we should point to him in every message and preaching opportunity.

[00:23:14] Hope that's helpful. I'm going to pray and then we're going to do a two minute break. Is that right? Okay, here we go.

[00:23:21] Lord, what a blessing to be amongst these amazing leaders and teachers and future leaders and teachers.

[00:23:32] Let me just pray that all of the teachings and trainings today, including Brian's on outlining and the Christ Center preaching, that these would deeply resonate in our hearts.

[00:23:47] Not as information to learn but as something that would permeate our being so that we could teach the Bible in a way that is right

[00:24:00] and healthy and hopeful and life changing and that ultimately points to Jesus.

[00:24:07] And God, help us not just to be skilled Bible teachers, help us to be healthy committed followers of Jesus.

[00:24:15] Bless every person in here. Thank you for the honor of speaking into their lives in Jesus name. Amen.

[00:24:24] Well, hey, thanks for listening all the way to the end. Man, man, I agree you need the Spirit of God and you need hard work to do all of that right.

[00:24:33] And God supplies his Spirit and we put in the work. If you want to hear more from Wesley, well there's two things you can do.

[00:24:43] You can scroll way back because he was a guest on the show years ago.

[00:24:50] We spoke about mental health and how the preacher can look after our own brain and interior life.

[00:24:59] Or you could also wait a few weeks because it'll be back on in a few weeks.

[00:25:05] There was a panel discussion that took place and Wesley along with some of the other speakers took questions from the audience.

[00:25:15] So make sure to check the show notes for those links to the old episode or to actually make sure you're subscribed so that the next one comes automatically to your device.

[00:25:26] And you know what, hey, if you're listening, there's things that you can do that cost you nothing that help our ministry.

[00:25:32] One of the things you can do is leave a review for this podcast on the Apple Podcast app.

[00:25:40] I don't understand exactly how it works but the more written reviews that we get, the more the show is going to be put across other people's screens or algorithms.

[00:25:52] I think we got one review in 2024 so far and I would love a second or a third.

[00:26:01] If you leave a review, take a screenshot of it and send it to me and I'll mail you a packet of expositors' collective stickers.

[00:26:07] How about that? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

[00:26:11] And then another thing you can do but Mike, I don't listen on Apple Podcast app.

[00:26:15] Well that's great if you're listening on Spotify could you make sure that you are subscribed on Spotify?

[00:26:21] Once we hit a certain number of subscribers on that app, it's going to open up like an ad revenue source that is going to help us.

[00:26:28] So again, those things they cost you nothing but their ways that can help the show.

[00:26:33] If you're into this type of thing and if you wish more preachers, more youth pastors, more ministry directors were familiar with these types of concepts,

[00:26:43] those are two of the things that you can do that will help us reach more Bible teachers for free.

[00:26:49] Alright, I hope that this episode and all the video expositors' collective help you to grow in your personal study and public proclamation of God's Word.

[00:26:58] This podcast is a part of CG and Media, a podcast network that points to Christ.

[00:27:03] We are supported by listeners like you to help us create more great shows, visit cgemedia.org slash support.