My pastor told me to put the Bible down.

Greetings,

I remember the first time I sat under expositional preaching.

I had come from a church where the sermons were built around topics. The pastor would choose a theme — breakthrough, favour, abundance — and then find verses to support it. The messages were engaging. They were relevant. They made me feel good on a Sunday. But looking back, what I was hearing was largely the pastor’s thinking, decorated with scripture. God’s word was the garnish, not the meal.

I was talking recently with a brother who had been through something similar. His pastor had looked at him and said — put the Bible down. You’re reading too much. Just let the Spirit move in you. He was a young believer genuinely hungry for God’s word, and he was being told the problem was that he was in it too much. The church I attended years ago never used those words — but the culture said the same thing.

When I walked into a church that preached verse by verse through the Bible — taking one passage, staying in it, asking what the author meant, who he was writing to, and what God was actually saying through it — something happened that I didn’t expect.

I felt convicted. But not condemned. There was hope underneath it. The word was doing something I couldn’t control or anticipate. It was getting into places I hadn’t invited it. And for the first time in years, I left a Sunday service not just feeling stirred — but genuinely changed by what I had heard.

Expositional preaching doesn’t let the preacher decide what you need to hear. It lets God decide.

The principle underneath it is called authorial intent. The question isn’t what does this verse mean to me — it’s what did God intend to communicate when he inspired this passage, to this audience, in this context? That question changes everything. Because when you stop reading yourself into the text and start reading yourself out of it, scripture stops confirming what you already believe and starts confronting what you need to change.

There are two ways to read scripture.

The first — eisegesis — starts with a conclusion and finds verses to support it. You strip context, cherry-pick, and make the text say what you need. The second — exegesis — starts with a question: what is God actually saying here? You look at the surrounding passages, the author, the audience, the problem being addressed. You let the text set the agenda.

The first approach always confirms what you already believe. The second regularly confronts it. And confrontation from God’s word is one of the primary ways a man grows.

The problem with topical preaching as a primary diet is that a preacher naturally gravitates toward what his congregation responds to, what produces the best atmosphere. And over time — not through dishonesty but omission — whole categories of scripture go untouched. Suffering. Sovereignty. Election. Church discipline. The warnings of Jesus in Matthew 7. Expositional preaching removes that temptation. It forces the preacher and congregation into passages they would never have chosen. That is exactly where growth happens.

I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.

I can trace my own growth in this directly. After years of sitting under faithful, verse-by-verse preaching, something had been built in me that wasn’t there before. Not just information. Roots. The kind that hold when the wind comes. The kind that make it possible to say, with Paul, that I have learned in whatever state I am to be content — because I understand now what that verse actually means, who wrote it, and what he was going through when he wrote it.

That is what faithful preaching produces over time. Not a congregation that feels good on Sundays. A people who can stand on Monday.

If you are in a church where the word is being faithfully preached — treasure it. But if week after week your emotions are stirred but your soul is unmoved, your circumstances validated but your sin unchallenged — it may be time to ask honestly whether what you are in is what God designed.

Start looking. A sound, Bible-believing church that preaches the whole counsel of God and does the hard work of community is worth searching for and worth the sacrifice of convenience to find.

And if you want a framework for what to look for, Mark Dever’s Nine Marks of a Healthy Church is the place to start. It is not a long book. But it may be one of the most practically useful things you read this year.