Peter, do you love me? Feed my sheep.

I would like to finish the impromptu series on preaching with a quote. I believe that others are able to answer questions better than me, so I will leave this to a professional on the topic of preaching. If any are interested in further study on the topic of preaching and what preaching looks like in the scriptures, I would recommend, Feed My Sheep edited by Don Kistler. The need is so great for preaching to be founded in the scriptures, and the need is even greater for the people who are called by the name of God to reclaim the book of the Bible and to devour it and to fall in love with it. Preaching is the means by which men and women of God are able to eat the Words of the Lord.

"Perhaps that is why [expository preaching] is so rare. Only those will undertake it who are prepared to follow the example of the Apostles and say, " It is not right that we should give up preaching the Word of God and serve tables...We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the Ministry of the Word (Acts 6.2,4). The systematic preaching of the Word is impossible without the systematic study of it. It will not be enough to skim through a few verses in daily Bible reading, or only study a passage when we have to preach from it. No. We must daily soak ourselves in the Scriptures. We must not just study, as through a microscope, the linguistic minutiae of a few verses, but take out our telescope and scan the wide expanses of God's Word, assimilating its grand theme of Divine sovereignty in the redemption of mankind. "It is blessed," wrote CH Spurgeon, "to eat into the very soul of the Bible until, at last, you come to talk in Scriptural language, and your spirit is flavored with the words of the Lord, so that your blood is Bibline and the very essence of the Bible flows from you.'"

John RW Stott, The Preacher's Portrait, pp30-31