Doctrinal Preaching

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The Certificate track answers the multiple choice. The Associate adds the fill-in-the-blank questions; M.Div. and Th.M. add those and the short-answer questions. 90% of each part is required to pass.

Day 1 — Why Preach Revelation First?

With Unit 3 the course turns from method to the doctrines themselves, and it begins where theology itself begins: with revelation. This order is deliberate. Before a preacher can say anything about who God is (Unit 4), he must settle how anyone can know — and the answer is that God has spoken. Revelation is the doctrine that makes every other sermon possible.

So the preacher’s aim in this unit is pastoral before it is academic. The sermon on revelation must move the hearer from religion as a human search — man reaching up, guessing, hoping — to faith as a response to a God who has already spoken. The good news is not that we have found God; it is that God has made Himself known.

"God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son." — Hebrews 1:1–2 (NKJV)

Day 2 — The Doctrinal Backbone (lean; full version in Systematic Theology Unit 1)

Hold the doctrine clearly before shaping it into a sermon. Keep it compressed — point students to ST Unit 1 for the full treatment — but they cannot preach what they cannot summarize:

God must take the initiative. The starting point of all theology is not man’s search for God but God’s decision to make Himself known. The finite cannot reach the Infinite; if God had stayed silent, He could not be known. General and special revelation. General revelation, through nature, history, and conscience, shows that God exists, that He is powerful, and that man is accountable — but it cannot save. So God gave special revelation: His direct, redemptive self-disclosure in the history of Israel, in Jesus Christ, and in the Bible. Scripture as Absolute Authority. Rather than only defending what the Bible is not (not errant, not fallible), we affirm what it is: the final, supreme standard for all faith and practice. Inspiration is God causing Scripture through human authors; illumination is the Spirit opening it to the believer; transmission is God preserving it through the centuries.

Day 3 — The Homiletical Move

Now turn the doctrine into a sermon by the method of Unit 2. Subject: the Word of God. Interrogative: “In what forms does God speak His Word?” Keyword: forms (a plural noun — the outline grows from it). The keyword yields five points, and — this is the whole thesis of the course — each one stands on its own text:

Point (keyword: forms)	Anchor text
1. The Living Word — Jesus Christ	John 1:14
2. The Preached (Prophetic) Word — proclamation	Romans 10:14–17
3. The Natural Word — creation	Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:19–20
4. The Written Word — the Bible	2 Timothy 3:16–17
5. The Enacted Word — baptism and the Lord’s Supper	1 Corinthians 11:26

Five points, five texts, one subject. The preacher arranged them (topical, deductive), yet not one floats free of Scripture — which is exactly the answer to the charge that topical preaching is “just the preacher’s ideas.”

Before fleshing out one point as a sermon, let each form be understood for what it is. These are not five competing words but five ways the one God makes Himself known.

1. The Living Word — Jesus Christ (John 1:14). Jesus is the living Word, the greatest revelation God ever gave of Himself. He is not one prophet among others but God’s own self-expression made flesh. Jesus said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and “I and My Father are one” (John 10:30). So the most perfect representation of God came into the world in the person of Jesus, the very Son of God. Every other form of the Word points to Him; He is the Word the others are about.

2. The Preached (Prophetic) Word — proclamation (Romans 10:14–17). God has chosen to make His Word travel through human voices. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” and “how shall they hear without a preacher?” The preacher does not invent the message; he carries it. When the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed, it is not merely a man speaking — God speaks through the proclamation, and faith is born in the hearer.

3. The Natural Word — creation (Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:19–20). “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Creation itself is a form of God’s Word, telling every person in every language that God is real, powerful, and worthy. This natural revelation is enough to leave the whole world without excuse, but it is not enough to save — it can show that God is, but it cannot, by itself, show the way to Christ. It raises the question that only special revelation answers.

4. The Written Word — the Bible (2 Timothy 3:16–17). “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” Here the revelation is fixed, permanent, and reliable; what God spoke through prophets and apostles is preserved so that every generation can return to it and find the same truth. The written Word is where we go to test every other claim, including our own preaching; it is the standard that does not move.

5. The Enacted Word — baptism and the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:26). God also speaks in actions He commanded the church to perform. In baptism the gospel is pictured in water — death, burial, and resurrection; in the Lord’s Supper, “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.” These are the Word made visible, preaching the same gospel to the eye that the other forms preach to the ear.

Day 4 — Developing a Point (E-A-I) and an Illustration Bank

A skeleton is not yet a sermon. Each point is fleshed out with Explanation, Application, and Illustration. Here is Point 1 (the Living Word, John 1:14) developed in full:

Explanation of the text. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” A word is how a mind expresses itself; to hear God’s Word is to meet God’s mind. And the highest form of that Word is not ink on a page but a Person: in Jesus, God’s self-expression became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.

Application of the text. So if you want to know what God is like, you look at Jesus. The hearer who finds God distant or frightening is invited to look at the face of Christ, for “he who has seen Me has seen the Father.” God is not hiding; He has come near.

Illustration. A letter can tell you a great deal about someone, but it is not the same as the person walking through the door. The other forms of the Word are God’s letters; the Living Word is God Himself walking in.

The remaining four points are developed the same way. And revelation is unusually rich in illustration — use the bank:

💡 The Hotel Room: A traveler checks into a room at night; under the dim lamp it looks clean. Morning sunlight reveals the stains and dust. The room did not change — only the light did. God’s revelation does not create the truth about us; it shows what was always there. (From ST Unit 1.)

💡 The Letter and the Visit: see the Living-Word illustration above — the written word about a person versus the person arriving in the flesh.

💡 The Power of a Fragment — Dr. Nikolai Alexandrenko: At Louisiana College there was a professor I came to know, Dr. Nikolai Alexandrenko. He had grown up an atheist in the Soviet Union and served as a paratroop officer in the Russian Army in the Second World War. Captured, he was held in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp near Munich — and it was there, in the suffering and isolation of that camp, that he came upon a scrap of paper with a passage of Scripture on it. That fragment was not enough, by itself, to make him a Christian then and there; but it was enough to move an atheist to start searching, and that search did not end until he found Christ. He gave the rest of his life to the Word that had found him — earning his doctorates, teaching Scripture for decades, and helping found a seminary in Odessa to carry it back to his own people. A single fragment of God’s Word, found in a prison camp, was enough to set a man on the road from atheism to salvation. That is the power of the Word — which is why even a portion of it must never be despised, and why the searching heart is finally satisfied only by the full revelation of God in Christ.

Day 5 — Craft Notes and Summary

Three cautions specific to preaching revelation. Do not preach a lecture on bibliology. The temptation is to spend the sermon on canon, manuscripts, and inspiration theories. Those belong in the lesson; the sermon aims at trust and obedience. Preach toward response. Let the doctrine’s own logic carry the arc: because God has spoken, He can be known; because He can be known, He can be trusted; because He can be trusted, He must be obeyed. That chain is the natural movement of the sermon toward the invitation. Preach it pictorially. Revelation is about a God who speaks and shows; the hotel room and the letter-versus-visit carry the truth into memory, which is the bridge to the narrative course.

So Unit 3 has taken the first doctrine and run the whole method on it: a lean backbone from Systematic Theology, a subject and interrogative and keyword, five points each anchored to a text, one point developed by E-A-I, and an arc toward response. Unit 4 does the same with the doctrine of God.

"The entrance of Your words gives light." — Psalm 119:130 (NKJV)

Unit 3 Final Exam

Certificate track: the 20 multiple-choice questions. Associate: multiple choice and the 10 fill-in-the-blank questions. M.Div. and Th.M.: multiple choice, fill-ins and the 10 short-answer questions. 90% of each part is required to pass. If you do not pass, the exam waits a short time before you can try again.

📖 Course Readings — Required and Honors

Certificate and Associate: honors is optional. Read any three of the five selections for honors; no separate required-reading exam is needed.

M.Div. and Th.M.: all five assigned readings are part of the course. Their separate exam is required after activation; see its page for the current rule. Honors remains optional and does not replace the exam.

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