My main problem with defining good expository preaching as communicating what the Bible says “verse by verse” is that the Bible wasn’t written in verses. Or chapters, for that matter. Fidelity to the text can’t be measured by a standard foreign to the text itself & imposed on it.

Every word, every jot & tittle, matters. All is to be opened up & announced in a way that reveals the Person to whom it all points - Christ. Yet there are many approaches that can do this, and not all passages weigh the same as another. There are matters of “First Importance”

So I believe in expository preaching that is proclaiming Christ as he is revealed to us in the whole Bible, standing with John on the banks of the Jordan and crying, 'Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!'

Sometimes that will look like sentence by sentence, and at other times song by song. In other moments, word by word, noting voices and tenses and other matters of grammar. It may be at 30,000 feet flying along in visions with Ezekiel by the River Chebar...

... and on other Sundays in the subterranean depths of Near-Eastern cave-tomb with Abraham or the sweat-drenched brow of a Samaritan woman who came to a well at a time she thought no one else would be there only to be met by the one person she most needed to see.

It'll be story by story, & pastoral theology by pastoral theology, with some stories & theologies bigger and wilder than others. Romans isn't in there first among the Epistles because it was written first, after all. The whole OT points ahead to the Gospels and the whole NT flows

from them as well. We do well to heed that built-in counsel without ignoring the gigantic figures and highlighted emblems along the road to the apocalypse. And 2 Thessalonians deserves some more attention. So does 2 Timothy. No one can find Jude anymore. And it shows.

So let's be expositors of the whole rather than pundits on the passing rage du jour, listening for the still small voice so we can shout from housetops. The Lion has roared. Who cannot but tell what we heard in the thunder.