The Church Benefits when the Pastor Preaches

Tim Challies has been live-blogging the T4G Conference. There have been many interesting posts (from many interesting messages), but this one from John MacArthur caught my eye. John, in his message, was discussing 40 years of gospel ministry at his church. He identifies several benefits from expository preaching in the church:

Having discussed the benefit of expository preaching, he turned to the benefits to the church in this type of consistent, Bible-focused ministry:

1) A church full of genuine Christians who think biblically. "I go to church at a real church." We can go to a real church with real believers. It is the real deal!

2) People develop conviction where they have clarity. Conviction makes strength and strength has impact.

3) When you exposit the Word of God, everyone's belief is tested at every text. "Everything I've ever taught has had to survive the scrutiny of the text."

When the word is faithfully exposited and taught week-in and week-out the people learn (oftentimes without even knowing it) how to exposit the word on their own as they read. I've got lots of friends in various ministry roles and often they complain about the general ignorance of the average church-goer.

I have no such complaint about people in our church.

That is not bragging. I think it is simply evidence of the truthfulness of what MacArthur has noted above. Faithful Bible teaching bears fruit in the lives of individual Christians who come to know their Bibles better and are apply to learn from it and apply it to their lives on their own.

Maybe the problem with Church (and the Christians who make up church) isn't the Christians, but the leadership who have not been faithful to preach the word expositionally.