My view of preaching is that the preacher's job is to get a word from God through the scriptures.

Hold it up and say to people,

to people,

and then to connect it with all the other scriptures

that are relevant and life that's relevant and then

exult over it because it's so good and then by grace to bring others into the enjoyment and the obedience to it, all the

while aiming at their enjoyment, admiration, praise, obedience, worship to the greatness and beauty and

worth of Christ so that he's magnified in everything we do. And if a preacher is

not exulting over what he sees in the text he's not

preaching. Therefore preaching is a happy business.

Because even if the text is hard,

and people feel devastated by it. The preacher connects the hard text with hopeful texts and gracious texts and

he catches people when they're falling. He just shot him down and he catches them with the

sweet text. So it's a happy business. Sometimes the happiness is a toe-tapping happiness and sometimes it's a tearful

happiness. But preaching is a happy business. We exalt over the goodness of the good news in

preaching. If there's no expository exultation, this is no preaching.

All of that, and why did you start that way?

All of that to say thank you for letting me do this.

For inviting me, Bob.

I owe you a debt of thanks for giving me the privilege of exulting over that text that I've

been asked to speak on which just couldn't have been better.

He's the greatest text in the Bible, along with a few others.

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