Expository Preaching with Word Pictures
In writing Expository Preaching with Word Pictures, Jack Hughes has provided an invaluable aid to committed expository preachers. His main purpose is to help expository preachers deliver their expositions in a way that impacts their hearers and results in life transformation. Expository preaching can be done in many ways, but in every way that it can be done it contains the three non-negotiable elements: sound hermeneutics manifested in exegesis, a biblical focus, and exposing biblical truth from its scriptural context.
Expository preaching is a verbal conveyor belt that digs gold from the Scriptures and transports the nuggets of God’s word to the hearts and minds of people. How to deliver the gold most effectively is the field of homiletics (p. 20).
After a brief introduction to the preaching and pastoral ministry of the Puritan divine, Thomas Watson, Hughes presents Watson as a model preacher who mastered the art of illustrating his sermons by using powerful, vivid word pictures. A word picture is “any word, phrase, story, analogy, illustration, metaphor, figure of speech, trope, allegory, graphic quotation, historical reference, cross-reference, or comparison used to help the listener, see, imagine, experience, sense, understand, remember and/or relate to abstract facts” (p. 33). Word pictures are helpful to both hearer and preacher because they engage the imagination and help people to understand and remember truth.
God has commanded you to preach the word; but the command, ‘Be thou difficult to understand,’ does not exist. ‘Expository preaching’ and ‘obscurity’ are not synonyms, though in some churches you would think they were. Your goal in preaching is to permanently fix the truth of God’s words in the minds and hearts of your listeners. Your effectiveness as a herald is not determined by your ability to know what you are saying, but your ability to get the people to whom you are preaching to know and understand what you are saying (p. 65).
The three-fold homiletic task before each preacher is to grasp and hold the attention of his hearers, give them clear understanding of his message, and cause them to remember what has been said. Hughes’ main point is that word pictures are invaluable aids to the preacher in fulfilling each aspect of this task. Furthermore, scattered on almost every page are examples of how word pictures were used in the sermons of Thomas Watson. Due to the brief nature of this review, one example will have to suffice to whet the reader’s appetite to read Watson for himself.
There is a great deal of difference between a stake in the hedge and a tree in the garden. A stake rots and moulders, but a tree, having life in it, abides to eternity; ‘His seed remaineth in him’ (1 John 3:9). Godliness being engraved in the heart by the Holy Ghost, as with the point of a diamond, can never be erased (p. 33).
The next section of the book is the chapter entitled, “An Encyclopedia of Word Pictures.” In this section of his work, Hughes helps the reader to learn how to recognize and understand “word pictures” that occur in every section of the Scriptures from the narrative portions through the poetic and prophetic portions. Not only does he point out the different word pictures that occur in the Scriptural text itself, frequently he provides additional illustrative material from a relevant sermon by Watson. For example, in his section dealing with word pictures found in the Mosaic law, Hughes includes this helpful illustration to show the reader how Watson used such pictures from a New Testament narrative to apply the truth to the heart of his hearers.
Let me tell you, all you who are yet in your natural estate, your souls are mortgaged. If your land were mortgaged, you would endeavor to redeem it. Your souls are mortgaged: sin has mortgaged them, and has laid your souls to pawn, and where do you think your souls are? The pawn is in the devil’s hand, there fore a man in the state of nature is said to be ‘under the power of Satan’ (Acts 26:18). Now there are but two ways to fetch home the pawn, and both are set down in Acts 20:21; ‘Repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Unravel all your works of sin by repentance, honor Christ’s merits by believing: divines call it saving faith, because upon this wing the soul flies to the ark of Christ, and is secured from danger (p. 112).
Perhaps the most helpful section of the book for me personally was the final section in which Hughes presents many practical suggestions for developing and using word pictures in preaching as well as warning of common traps to avoid. Two of the more helpful suggestions were ones that were unexpectedly simple and yet so strikingly absent from my own life; namely, reading and listening for word pictures in the sermons of others, and simply praying and asking God to help me think of simple and effective ways to express and communicate the spiritual truth from His Word I am preaching that week. Perhaps the simplicity of these suggestions made their absence that much more convicting, but I must admit that while I have often asked the Lord for insight into a passage, I have rarely, if ever, prayed that He would give me an appropriate word picture or illustration to communicate that insight to the audience. This is a book that will be of great practical help to most preachers and one that should find a place on your bookshelf!
Jack Hughes, Expository Preaching with Word Pictures With Illustrations from the Sermons of Thomas Watson (Ross-Shire, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2001)
