Panel - Session 7 | 2025 LA Preachers' Conference

The Beauty of God's Word in Preaching

It's so encouraging, brother. All you're doing is highlighting the text in your own style, which is good and excellent. We come away with the impact of how beautiful that moment is in the midst of the betrayal of Christ. The emotional response to that is tremendously good. Thank you for that; it was wonderful.

God help us if we bore people with the Bible. It's just the most amazing, unimaginably amazing story ever told. And then there's Jesus, how he preaches—all his metaphors, all his allusions, how captivating it all is. Those who heard him even said, "No one has preached like this before." It's just amazing. Part of us telling that story, that's got to come through.

That's right. So on that note, the Bible isn't just a bulleted list of systematic facts. We have the task of bringing God's word to his people. What things have you guys implemented in your own preaching to be able to display the beauty of God's word? I think what Thomas just did is somehow, when you're preaching, you've got to capture the ethos of the text. If you're preaching about hell, you can't be smiling. Or if you're preaching about the wonders of heaven, you should be beaming with joy. So somehow, just being conscious of the fact that how I'm preaching shouldn't be contradicting what the text is doing. You need to experience it yourself, and then prayerfully, that will just come through as you're preaching.

The Significance of Every Word

Part of it is how we're approaching the wording of Scripture. Over the years, as I've had the privilege of looking at God's word devotionally, I read in bulk—chapters at a time in a day—because I just want large swaths. But when you're digging down, one of the excellent things we saw Thomas do was he focused on just that word. You ask yourself sometimes in a passage of Scripture, "Why would the Lord choose that word?" He could have said, "Man, she's doing something that's really nice, really kind," and all of that would be true. But he chooses the word "beautiful." If you slow down enough to take in and believe in the verbal inspiration, that every single word matters, then you ask, "Why would the Lord choose that?" And I think sometimes that reveals in our study something that we connect with in a way that makes us go, "Lord, that's amazing."

Another story that was springing up in my mind was the hemorrhaging woman. She had spent all her fortune trying to get healing, and she just thought, "Man, if I just reach out to touch Jesus's outer clothing, I'll be healed." And she is healed. Then Jesus says, "Okay, power's gone out from me. Who touched me?" And the disciples are like, "Man, the entire crowd is busting in on you. Well, who do you mean, 'who touched you?'" And when she comes forward to confess it, do you remember what he calls her? He says, "Daughter?" She had not heard anyone call her "Daughter" in probably the decades she'd been trying to be healed of this. Because while she is hemorrhaging, while whatever this bleeding is, she's unclean and cannot live in her family, cannot be at the temple. She has to call out "unclean" if people come near her. You know what I mean? Certain things like that. There's beauty in the way that the Lord has inspired his Scriptures. If we just drill down into, "Lord, why would you choose that term? Why did you do that thing? Why does the Scripture describe it this way?" I think we unearth stuff that is so helpful to us, far beyond just, "Hey, this is the syntax. This is what it means generally. This is what it's saying. Let's just move on." It's not just stuff; it's not just for our intellect. It is for our whole being. And the Lord is just wonderful that way.

Preaching the True, Good, and Beautiful

I love that. One of the things I try to—and I'm learning to do this—is to approach texts that I'm preaching using C.S. Lewis's motif: the true, good, and beautiful. So, what is true? That's the exegetical side. I want to make sure I'm saying the right things. Good. I would consider that the pastoral application for the people: "This is good for my people." And then, what is beautiful? Again, when you're reading and you're looking at the word placements, you tend to just see it that way. Some people are just more naturally able to see beauty; for some, it's a fight. But my encouragement is wherever you are on that spectrum, in every way, Jesus is beautiful. So, it's not even this woman's act; it's how Jesus interprets it and how Jesus is working it providentially. Jesus is always beautiful. And part of our job as preachers is to just show the glory and the beauty of Jesus before our people so that their affections are moved appropriately by the truth that they've heard. So, yes, doxology and doctrine, they work hand in hand.

Cultivating a Vision for Beauty in the Text

I love that example because you so effectively showed how the alabaster jar in speech serves the beauty of Christ, actually exalts him as opposed to distracting from the beauty of Christ. Well, brothers, this is the last time that we have for questions. If you have a question, go ahead, raise your hand and either David or Sam will bring a microphone to you.

**Miguel from First Baptist Norwalk:** When you're prepping sermons, what are those—let's say you are oriented towards beauty? We always say, "I know something beautiful when I see it," but what are elements you're looking for? What are you digging around for when you're preparing your sermons?

I think if Jesus is always beautiful—and he is—if you're preaching biblical theology, you'll always be able to find beauty in the text. What is most profoundly beautiful is that Christ died for humanity, that in every way had hearts that were bent against him. So there's this great rescue. There's nothing more beautiful than God condescending to rescue humans that hated him. And if you're preaching Christ crucified, you're going to get to that beauty. If you're preaching biblical theology, you're going to get to that beauty. So, it's not hard; it's just asking the Lord to give you the eyes. And I think when you're studying a text, as these brothers talked about today, the text should be lording over you and impacting your own heart. That in itself is beautiful. And then the outworking of that for your people is beautiful. So I just think it's a matter of not trying to manufacture it, but just simply revealing what is already there. And Jesus is always beautiful.

**David from Crossway Baptist Bakersfield:** If you guys are preparing a message and you're struggling to see the beauty in the text, what would you recommend as a response to the person preaching the message?

That's an interesting question. I don't know if it's just me, but I find that if I'm struggling in my studies early, I'm struggling in that first part, trying to figure out what exactly the Scriptures are saying. And as we unpack that, I think the beauty is just there. It's almost like if I'm understanding the passage well, and I'm working through it prayerfully seeking this out, I feel like that's easier to see who the Lord is, what this speaks about him, and why this is so glorious. Like, if you're just expositionally preaching through a book, there's going to be times when you look at the passage ahead this week and you go, "I don't know what I'm going to do with this passage." But usually, those are, at least to me, the best part. I didn't know what it was going to be, and by the time you unearth it, I think there's a subjective connection to it that's so much deeper because you didn't expect that. So I don't know if that's just predominantly me, but I feel like if I'm struggling with the text, it's with the understanding of it. But the deeper and the better I understand what the Lord is trying to say, I think it just opens up. It's brilliant, not just a statement of truth. It's not brute facts I discover; I discover who God is and how brilliant and wonderful he is in it.

I'm constantly making a practice, brother, of even before I approach the text: "Help me to feel the text. Help me to have a grander vision of Jesus in the text. Would you by your Spirit sufficiently move my affections for him?" Because if I'm not moved, then what's the point? I'm just throwing data points around the room, and that doesn't—you can even throw data points around beautifully—but that doesn't, it's not going to have any effect. So, beg God. I beg God when I don't understand or when I don't feel sufficiently moved, and he usually meets you in that moment. I think one thing that encourages me is that if Christ is beautiful—and he is, in his word—and I don't see it, then it's there. The problem's me. So, I could just keep digging and trusting that the Lord will do a work as I keep laboring, even when I know my own heart is hard or there are struggles there.

Advice for Young Preachers

I think if you guys are okay with going overtime, we have time for two more questions. Someone has something that they would like to ask.

**Jeff from Emanuel Church, Orange County:** Any advice from you guys for young preachers in the room, particularly young preachers?

I do have one good thought that might be helpful for you guys. I find with young preachers, you naturally have—and I did when I was a young preacher—you're more fixated on the style and delivery, in terms of how you sound, how you come off. Let me encourage you with this: if the Lord grants you years of ministry, you'll just get better. You don't get worse, unless you're just sinful. You will get better. Just be—I think Bobby and I were talking about it—in terms of, you're not trying to be something you're not. I think in the pulpit, you should be just a slightly more amplified version of yourself. Early on in ministry, my wife would say, "Well, you sounded kind of like John MacArthur, but you sound like you now." You might sound differently up there than here. You need to recognize you're just trying to be you, and it's just a slightly more amplified version of you. You're going to get better, so don't fixate on how you come off, the delivery part. That stuff you'll get better at just from the repetition of it. Fixate on how to understand God's word and what that does and how that transforms you, and what it is that—what are you excited to try to share from this passage? Because if you get that across, then man, you're doing a good job.

As young preachers, you're going to get better. Don't overly fixate on the delivery and just be yourself, and concentrate on what God wants to teach you so that you can teach others. I've had the privilege of working with the guys we've trained and sent out, and some of them were just amazing right from jump street, right from the start. Most of us aren't like that, and we could be discouraged, so just keep preaching. What I would encourage young preachers to do is—I think maybe I said in the sermon—what are you doing? You want to know God? God sent his Son. And he gave his life so that I could have life. What kind of life is that? Life now reconciled to God. So, you're building a relationship as you are reading the Word, and you just want to, five years from now, know God better. Moses said he had seen the glory of God, and it made him want to see more of it, like, "Show me your ways so I can know you." So you're just trying that—you're seeing the glory of God, you're being enthralled by it, and you want to know more of the glory of God and experience more of the glory of God. So you're studying and studying, and when that's not happening in your heart, you really wrestle with God like you just don't let go, like, "God, I'm not letting go until you really show me your glory in this text." You're wrestling, and you're wanting to know God, and God isn't having a cheap relationship; he's hard to know. You've got to really seek him earnestly. If you're content just to know a little bit of God, then that'll just come out a little bit in your relationship and your experiencing what you're seeing from him in his word. But just be praying, "God, just give me a heart that just wants you, and you know my desire is for you," and all the like the end of Psalm 84 and Psalm 73, that you just want to know God and want to delight in God. And so when you preach that, your relationship with God will give you, because you know him, you can preach confidently because, "I know God. I know he loves this. I know he hates that. I know this is beautiful to him." And you're just preaching with confidence because you're not preaching about a stranger; you just spent the whole week with him. And now you get the chance to say to your congregation—and they haven't spent all the—prayerfully we spent the week with them and not doing all kinds of administrative stuff. We're Acts 6; we're praying and we're spending time with God, and we just get to tell the joy, we get to tell our saints what God is like.

As a young preacher, there are things people—and I'm not—again, don't imitate this, don't—this is a "Bob-ism," don't try to do this. I know young preachers, they read books about preaching, they go to conferences about preaching and homiletics. When the Lord saved me, called me to ministry, I was like, "I just want to know you." I don't read books about preaching, I don't go to—I just, I want to know God, and I'm praying that that comes out for my, for the folks God has called me to serve. So, I would just say, yeah, read books on preaching. I don't, but do that, it helps. And then, I can't do this either, but listen to your sermons and have people critique them. I know some of you guys in the room will have people critique your sermons. I don't do that, but I do have my accountability: "Bobby, are you growing in your intimacy and knowledge and relationship with God?" That's just—and I so I have no, I'm not trying to be some homiletician, and I don't care about none of that stuff. I just want to know God, and I want to preach who God is well, and we can know him through Christ and the work of the Spirit as he illumines our mind from the word.

One thing I would say, and I'm still learning—I'm in many ways still a young preacher—but I think one thing that really helped me was spending more time with the saints. The more you know your people and the more your people know you, the more awkward it's going to be if you're trying to preach like someone you're not, because they'll know it, and you'll feel uncomfortable. So God will have, he'll use that as a means to sandpaper off your attempts to be like this person. And then knowing your people is going to help you to preach to your people and not to a podcast or something. And that's just going to make you better.

Structuring Your Sermon Points

**Felix from Grace Rancho:** Any advice with how to clearly and concisely articulate your points? One of the struggles sometimes that I have is I study the text, I know what the main point that I want to drive home is. I know how to articulate my argument, but how do I, like, coming up with the points for the sermon? Like, do I phrase it in questions? Is it going to be do's or don'ts? And that's something that I often struggle with where I'm like, and I wish I could just like not preach with points and just lay out my argument. So any advice when you have like that struggle of articulating points for the sermon?

Well, that's like another hour, right? So, yeah, I can send you just some examples of what I do. I like to diagram. So I'll diagram my text. Everybody's not a diagrammer; my co-pastor doesn't diagram, but I'm real visual. So if it's an epistle, something like that, I'll diagram it. When I say diagram it, when we communicate in complete thoughts, that's a sentence. When you develop a central idea, that's a paragraph. So the paragraph is going to have a central idea. You don't know what you've read if you can't say what the paragraph has said. And you can't say what the paragraph has said the way the paragraph says it if you can't say how the main ideas connect to that. So that's your work, that's your exegesis. It's going to take a lot of work to get that clear. So you—I want to do that. I want to say, "This is what the text is saying, and this is how the text is saying that." So I'll diagram it to make sure if there are three main points, that's because my diagram had three main sentences. And there's flexibility with diagramming. But the syntax is going to drive my sermon structure. Expository preaching is when not only the main point of a sermon is the main point of the text, but I would say the main way the text is making its point is the main way I'm going to make the point in my sermon. So, learning how to diagram helps. Everybody's not a diagrammer. You can watch like John Piper has this thing. What does he call it, where he's circling words? Look at the book with John Piper. And he'll walk through how he syntactically comes to how he's going to approach the text. It's really helpful. So I would say do that, and at that point, you just know what the author is saying to his original audience. And then you've got to sermonize that. You've got to—how does that apply? And you've got to know your people, know your congregation. But how does that apply? How do these three, four points—and it's four points because there are four points in the text. I'm not making up four points because I want four points or three. My diagram will have four main points, and then I can say what the text is saying, what Paul said to Timothy, or whatever. And then I'm asking the question, I'm wrestling like, "Okay, now how does this communicate? How do you want me to communicate this to your people?" And so, like I said, I'll change that when I'm walking to the pulpit. I won't stop thinking about that. At that point, I'm driving down the road thinking about it. I'm in a shower thinking about it. I'm eating dinner thinking about it. I'm just thinking about the text. Now that I know what it says and how it says it, I won't let myself stop thinking about it, and it will just get clearer and clearer. If you spend a little bit of time meditating, then you get like maybe one little diamond. If you spend a lot of time meditating on the text, oh, you have diamonds and gold and pearls and jewels. You'll just have almost too much for your saints. But you want to do the early in the week—I do my exegesis—so I can now think rightly about the text the rest of the week. And I don't land my planes, so I won't write my sermon until Saturday because I want as much time to think about the text as I can. And then I'll write it like Saturday, and then I'll almost rework it on Sunday morning. So I just want to think about the text as much as I can. So I would just say, in terms of the structure, let the structure of the text structure your sermon and then think deeply, prayerfully deeply, about how to take what Paul said to Timothy with that structure. How do I say that to my congregation? And God will illumine your mind. God will help you. You're not alone in this process. He's the one who wants to communicate to his sheep. He's the shepherd, and he wants to lead us, and so he will lead them through preaching of his word.

Simeon Trust course.

Yes, you got one for free, man. You got one free. They're really awful. Simeon Trust is really awful. It basically sustained, right?

Yeah. Bobby, do you have to land the plane when you preach, or can you parachute out of it?

I like what you did. I've done what you've done. I've changed my sermon Sunday morning. I hate it when conferences want my sermon outline, because then I'm like weeks before. Yeah. I've sent stuff to people, "I'm going to preach something like this." Yeah, brother. Just in terms of points and stuff, I think a lot of that is just the way that God has wired you. So I think Bobby's right in that you should know what the main point of the text is. It can't mean something that the text isn't meaning. And how you structure that is one way. Some people are going to use points, and those points are going to be questions. In my context, I try to preach with a lot of scenes rather than questions or punchy statements. And that's just because I'm more of a Bible storyteller. So I try to break it up into scenes. I'm always thinking about, "How do I create some mile markers for my congregation?" Like, "Okay, I know what that idea is. Now I can rest at this mile marker for a second. Now we're going to go to the next mile marker." And it's all kind of driving to the main point, but scenes are helpful. Points, questions, all of those things. But it's true, the longer you ruminate on the text... Oh, and here's a good resource that might be helpful. There's a book called *Small Preaching*. Have you guys heard of that book? Super helpful. It's about getting the main idea, what Bobby's talking about, and then snack—there's a chapter in there called "snack preaching," and it's basically just letting the text throughout the week inform your ideas about the text. So you're not just sitting in a block of like 10 hours, "I got to figure this out in 10 hours." You start on your Monday or your Tuesday. You get your structure, and then you're just praying throughout it the whole week, snacking on it, building the idea. I have found that that's been a lot more helpful for me to kind of distill my ideas down. So *Small Preaching*, good resource, small book, super helpful.

Two things that I do. One is I just experiment. So I'll try different things. I won't tell people because I don't want to call attention to it. But I'll just try doing things slightly out of my box of where I'm comfortable and see how it feels. So, I notice different preachers formulate their points different ways, and they have their own reasons for doing that. And so, I'm an early preacher, I'm still trying to figure it out, but if I don't kind of push myself to do things that are deliberately uncomfortable, I'm not sure if I'll find what actually works best for me. Yeah, and I forgot my second point, but thank you guys for being here.

Concluding Remarks and Resources

A couple things for us before we get going. First, can we just thank these brothers for serving us well today? Second, I just want to thank Brian Lee in the back who's currently grading papers. He's a deacon at our church who's been faithfully serving us and leading us in singing. He's the reason why there's been no feedback this whole day, and yesterday, because Brian's been faithfully serving us. And David and Sam and James are in the back doing something. The interns. They've been faithfully serving you guys, taking out the trash and moving books. So, can we just thank them for their service to us?

Okay, couple points before we stand and sing the doxology. Number one, we are a small church. Please grab your trash and throw it away because we have church tomorrow. So that would love us well and serve us well. Number two, I just want to remind you, in light of us talking about the Simeon Trust: if you use the code LACST25, you will be able to get a free online course. If you've never done a Simeon Trust course, I would recommend you start with First Principles. It's super helpful and will kind of give you the general overview, and you can look into other courses if they interest you. So, it's LACST25.

Number three, in the back, you'll see a copy of J.C. Ryle's second volume on his *Expository Thoughts on the Gospel*, specifically the Gospel of John. If you were here last year, you got volume one. If you come next year, you'll probably get volume three. So, that is a gift for you. Number four, we do have extra copies of the books we gave away. Now, before you start slobbering, I just want you to think if there are specific people that come to mind that you think would be helped by those resources, whether you read them together at your church or whether it's another pastor in your area, please take them. We would love for you to be able to take those and deploy them for the encouragement of you and yours and other ministries. So, that's it for me on that. Let's stand and sing the doxology together. Praise God. Praise him, all creatures here. Praise him. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.