Importance of Preaching
Text: Romans 10:14
Series: Restoration Sermons
Date:
Speaker: Ed Rangel
Location: Waupaca Church of Christ
Bible Version: NASB 1995
Sermon Type: Expository
Learning Objectives
By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:
- Explain why preaching is identified as a method of teaching rather than a substitute for it.
- State why the Sunday school cannot replace preaching and what the historical evidence for this claim is.
- Describe the importance of the preacher as distinct from the importance of preaching — what makes the person as important as the method.
- Name the weakness of preaching identified in the outline's era and explain how more preaching can produce more biblical ignorance.
- Explain the commission structure in II Tim. 2:2 and what it implies about the preacher's relationship to the next generation.
Thesis
Preaching is not one method of Christian communication among others — it is the method that God ordained for the propagation of the gospel, that every generation of the church has required, and without which no generation can hear. Its weakness in any era is not a function of the method but of the messenger and the message — specifically, the preacher who has lost the message and replaced it with talk.
Burden
The outline opens with a comparative claim: "No other religion has so many preachers." Christianity's investment in preaching is unparalleled. The burden of the sermon is to establish why — to ground the importance of preaching in the history of God's communication with humanity, in the structure of the commission, and in the inescapable logic of Romans 10:14. And then to diagnose the weakness: more preaching, more ignorance — which can only happen when preaching has been replaced by something that looks like preaching but isn't.
Introduction
"How will they hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14). The question is rhetorical — the outline implied answer is that they will not. The gospel does not spread by osmosis; it does not reach people through cultural proximity or institutional presence. It reaches people through the spoken proclamation of a messenger who knows the message and delivers it faithfully. This is the design. It has been the design since the prophets; it remains the design now.
"All great causes propagated by preaching. Christianity is no exception." the opening observation is sociological before it is theological: the movements that have changed history have done so through public proclamation — through people who stood up and said something specific that demanded a response. Christianity is in this category. It spread from Jerusalem to the empire not through armies or legislation but through preachers.
I. Preaching a Method of Teaching
Preaching is categorized as a method — one method, not the only one, but the central one.
The idea of God kept alive by preaching. In every generation, the living memory of what God has done and who God is requires transmission. That transmission is fundamentally verbal and personal — one person who knows telling another who does not. When preaching ceases in a generation, the knowledge of God ceases with it, not immediately but inevitably.
The prophets were preachers. The Old Testament prophets did not primarily write — they spoke. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos — they stood and delivered a word from God to an audience that was often resistant. The writing that came later was the preservation of what was first preached. Preaching is not a New Testament innovation; it is the continuation of the oldest method of divine communication to human beings.
John the Baptist a preacher. "In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea" (Matt. 3:1). John's preaching prepared the way — it was the hinge between the prophetic tradition and the gospel announcement. He preached repentance before Jesus preached the kingdom.
Christ a preacher and teacher. "Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom" (Matt. 4:23). The distinction between teaching and preaching is maintained by the outline — preaching announces, teaching explains — but both are forms of verbal proclamation, and both are identified as Christ's primary activity. The church's method follows the Lord's method.
II. No Substitute for Preaching
Preaching belongs to each generation. Every generation that has lived has required preaching; none has been born with the gospel already known. The generation that stops preaching stops transmitting the gospel, and the next generation inherits ignorance regardless of how sound the previous generation was.
Church 1700 years old before Sunday school. The Sunday school did not exist until 1780 (Robert Raikes, Gloucester, England). The church had survived and grown for seventeen centuries without it. This is not an argument against Sunday school — it is an argument that preaching does not depend on the Sunday school and cannot be replaced by it. The Sunday school supplements preaching; it does not substitute for it.
Sunday school cannot take the place of preaching. The Sunday school provides instruction in a small-group, age-graded format; preaching provides the communal proclamation of the whole congregation assembled. Both are valuable; the functions are different. The congregation that has Sunday school without preaching has instruction without proclamation; the congregation that has preaching without Sunday school has proclamation without systematic instruction. Both are needed; neither replaces the other.
Church kept alive by pulpit. The history of revival and restoration in church history is largely a history of preaching. The periods of decline correspond to periods when preaching was reduced to ritual performance or abandoned altogether. The periods of growth and return correspond to periods when someone stood up and preached the text.
"How shall they hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14). The structure of Romans 10:14-17 is a chain of dependent clauses: calling requires believing; believing requires hearing; hearing requires a preacher; the preacher requires having been sent. Remove any link in the chain and the chain fails. There is no route around preaching to faith.
Beliefs enlarge the soul. The person whose beliefs have expanded — who has come to know more about God, more about themselves, more about the redemption that Christ accomplished — is a person whose capacity has grown. Preaching is the instrument through which that expansion happens, because it carries the truths that, when received, enlarge the soul's capacity for everything else.
III. Importance of the Preacher
The preacher matters as much as preaching, because preaching does not happen without a preacher.
Preacher is important as preaching is important. The method and the person are inseparable in practice. The best message, delivered by a person whose character contradicts it, loses something that cannot be recovered by the argument alone. The principle the established in the previous sermon — "people cannot separate a man and his message" — applies here.
Preacher has a distinct mission. Not the mission of the elder, not the mission of the deacon, not the mission of the teacher in a Sunday school class — the specific mission of public proclamation to the assembled congregation and to those outside it. This mission is irreplaceable by other good things.
Messenger and message must harmonize. The preacher whose life is inconsistent with what he preaches has created a dissonance that the sermon cannot overcome. The congregation receives both the message and the evidence about whether the message has actually worked on the messenger — and when the two conflict, the evidence wins.
Christ commissioned preachers. "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations" (Matt. 28:19) — this is a commission to preach. "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation" (Mark 16:15). The commission is apostolic in its original form but universal in its implication: the church in every generation is commissioned to proclaim.
They are to pass it on to others (II Tim. 2:2). "The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also." The four-link chain — Paul to Timothy to faithful men to others — is the structure of the preaching transmission across generations. Each link is the preacher of the next; each generation's faithfulness produces the next generation's messengers.
IV. Weakness of Preaching Today
The fourth section is diagnostic — and its diagnosis is counterintuitive.
Man without a message — just a talker. The preacher who has lost the message has not lost the form of preaching. He still stands in a pulpit, still holds a Bible, still occupies thirty minutes on Sunday. But the content has been replaced. What replaces it varies: personal stories, cultural commentary, motivational content arranged around a Scripture reference, political advocacy, social programming. None of these are the gospel. The person preaching them is a talker, not a preacher.
Thousands of sermons preached on Sunday; twice as many preachers. the is writing in the mid-twentieth century, but the observation is scalable. The volume of religious communication available in any era is not evidence of its quality. More preaching is not better preaching unless the preaching is actually the gospel.
More ignorance about the Bible, both in the world and in the church. This is the diagnostic conclusion — and it is alarming. More preaching has produced more ignorance. The only possible explanation is that what is being called preaching is not producing the knowledge that actual preaching produces. The church is hearing more sermons and knowing less Scripture.
The answer — type of preaching. The problem is qualitative, not quantitative. The cure is not more preaching; it is different preaching — the kind that actually exposes the text, applies it to the hearer's condition, and calls for the response the text requires. The preacher who is an "exponent of God's truth" — who opens the text and lets it speak — is the preacher whose hearers will know the Bible.
Application
One application for the congregation, one for the preacher:
For the congregation: demand the text. The sermon that spends most of its time in human illustration and cultural observation is not a sermon — it is a talk. The congregation that accepts this in place of preaching has lowered the standard below what the commission requires. The congregation has a stake in what happens in the pulpit, and that stake includes the quality of what is preached.
For the preacher: the weakness the diagnoses is a trap set by the culture's expectations. The culture wants a preacher who is relatable, current, and emotionally engaging. These are not bad qualities; the trap is when they replace the text rather than serving it. The preacher who opens the text and stays there — who is relatable because the text is about real people, current because the text addresses the human condition that has not changed, emotionally engaging because the text is about life and death — is the preacher whose hearers will be enlarged.
Conclusion
"How shall they hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14). The question is still waiting for its answer — not a theoretical answer but a practical one. The answer is: they will not hear without a preacher. Every person in the world who does not yet know the gospel is waiting, whether they know it or not, for someone to go and preach. The chain that runs from God's commission to faith to salvation requires the preacher at its center. This is not a burden to be endured; it is the highest calling available to a person who has received the truth.
Invitation
"Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (Rom. 10:17). This is the chain's final link — faith follows hearing, and hearing follows the preached word. If you have heard the word of Christ this morning — the announcement that he died for your sins, was buried, and was raised — then you have what is needed for faith. What follows faith is the response that faith requires.
Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Repent. Confess his name. Be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38). This is the word the preacher was sent to deliver, and you have heard it.
Word Study
| English Term | Greek Term | Basic Meaning | Usage in This Sermon | Sermon Significance | Key Texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preach | kēryssō | to herald, to proclaim publicly | to herald, to proclaim publicly | the Greek kēryx was the herald in the ancient world, the person who announced official messages from the king with authority and urgency; the preacher is a herald of the King, not an entertainer or a therapist; the message is the King's message, not the herald's. | Rom. 10:14 |
| Exponent | one who sets forth, explains, or unfolds | one who sets forth, explains, or unfolds | applied to the preacher, it captures the expository responsibility: the preacher's job is not to create a message but to unfold the message that is already in the text; the text carries the content; the preacher exposes it. | the term | |
| Entrust | parathēmenos | to deposit, to place in trust | to deposit, to place in trust | the word is a banking term (same root as parathēkē — the "deposit" to be guarded in I Tim. 6:20); the gospel is not the preacher's possession; it is held in trust and must be transmitted intact to the next generation; the preacher is the custodian of what he has received. | II Tim. 2:2 |
| Enlarge | the person whose knowledge of God has expanded through preaching has more capacity than before | the person whose knowledge of God has expanded through preaching has more capacity than before | not just more information, but more soul; the capacity to receive, to serve, to love, to endure is expanded by the truth received; this is the function of preaching that no other method replicates. | the concept from "beliefs enlarge the soul" |
Scripture Interlock Table
| Theme | Boles' Outline | Supporting Scripture |
|---|---|---|
| "How shall they hear without a preacher?" — the irreplaceable link | II.6 | Rom. 10:14 |
| The prophets preached | I.2 | Isa. 6:8; Jer. 1:9 |
| John the Baptist — preaching in the wilderness | I.3 | Matt. 3:1 |
| Jesus preaching and teaching throughout Galilee | I.4 | Matt. 4:23 |
| "Go into all the world and preach the gospel" | III.4 | Mark 16:15; Matt. 28:19 |
| Four-link transmission chain | III.5 | II Tim. 2:2 |
| "Faith comes from hearing" — the chain completed | Concl. | Rom. 10:17 |
| Baptism for remission — the preached response | Invit. | Acts 2:38 |
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Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 128. Primary text: none stated explicitly; Rom. 10:14 appears as the central text of Section II. OCR corrections: "INTRODUCTI ON" → "INTRODUCTION"; "lll." → "III."; "lV." → "IV."; "Sunday school" capitalization normalized. Doctrinal audit: preaching as the ordained method of gospel transmission defended; Sunday school as supplement not substitute; the weakness of preaching diagnosed as qualitative not quantitative (type, not amount); "man without a message — just a talker" applied to the diluted preaching that produces more religious activity with less biblical knowledge; invitation retains full obedient response (Acts 2:38).
