Why God Chose To Preach

Romans 10:14-17 | 1 Corinthians 1:21 | 2 Timothy 4:1-2
There is a question every congregation must eventually answer, and it is a question most congregations have never seriously asked. What exactly is happening when a man stands behind a pulpit, opens a Bible, and begins to preach?
For many in the modern church, the functional answer is this: a man is sharing his thoughts about religion. A teacher is offering helpful ideas. A communicator is delivering content. And if that is what preaching is, then the response to it is entirely reasonable — evaluate the speaker, weigh his ideas, take what is useful, dismiss what is not, and go home essentially the same person you were when you arrived.
But that is not what preaching is. That is not what preaching has ever been. And if Scripture is to be believed, something far greater is happening when the Word of God is preached than the modern church has imagined.
Three texts bring this into focus: Romans 10:14-17, 1 Corinthians 1:21, and 2 Timothy 4:1-2. Together they reveal three non-negotiable realities about preaching that the church must recover — its necessity, its sovereignty, and its gravity.
The Necessity of Preaching (Romans 10:14-17)
The great Reformed preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones once wrote that the most urgent need in the Christian church is true preaching, and that as it is the greatest need in the church, it is obviously the greatest need of the world also. Romans 10 shows us why he was right.
Paul builds a chain in verses 14 and 15, link by link, with iron logic, working backwards from the goal to the beginning. No calling without believing. No believing without hearing. No hearing without a preacher. No preacher without being sent. And then comes verse 17: "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ."
This is not a list of spiritual preferences. This is a logical sequence in which every link is structurally necessary to the one before it. Paul is not saying preaching is helpful. He is not saying preaching is one good option among many. He is declaring that preaching is structurally necessary to the entire economy of salvation as God has ordained it. Pull out any link and the chain collapses. Pull out preaching, and the ordinary mechanism by which God saves sinners has been disabled.
But there is something here that the soul cannot afford to miss. The word "hearing" in verse 17 is the Greek word akoē, and it does not mean what most people assume. It does not mean that because you showed up, because you sat in a seat, because sound waves entered your ears, you have therefore heard in the sense Paul intends. There is a hearing of the ears and a hearing of the soul, and only one of them produces faith. The Pharisees heard Jesus with their ears for three years and hardened. The Bereans heard Paul with their souls for one afternoon and believed. Same words. Same volume. Entirely different spiritual reception.
The preached Word is the only ordinary means God has appointed to bring dead souls to life. That is not an overstatement. That is the architecture God designed. And it means that every time a congregation gathers beneath the preached Word, the stakes are higher than most people in the room realize.
The Sovereignty of Preaching (1 Corinthians 1:21)
First Corinthians 1:21 is one of the most important verses in Scripture on the subject of preaching: "For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe."
The entire verse turns on a single Greek verb — eudokēsen — translated "was well-pleased." And the weight of that word changes everything. Eudokēsen does not mean God settled for preaching. It does not mean God reluctantly accepted preaching as the best option available. The verb carries the full force of divine sovereign delight. It means God, from eternity past, looked upon the act of one man standing up and declaring His Word to other men, and was pleased. This is sovereign election applied to a method.
This is precisely why the modern church's instinct to replace or supplement preaching with something more impressive is such a serious theological error. When a church loses confidence in preaching, it has not simply made a pragmatic miscalculation. It has lost confidence in the God who ordained it. If preaching is merely a man speaking, then the reach for drama, production, technology, entertainment, and whatever the current cultural moment finds compelling is inevitable and understandable. But if preaching is God's sovereignly chosen instrument, then nothing on earth carries the authority to replace it.
Notice also what Paul says in verse 29: God chose this instrument so that "no flesh should glory in His presence." The apparent foolishness of preaching is not a liability God overlooked. It is a feature God designed. He designed it so that when sinners are saved through the proclaimed Word, no one — not the preacher, not the strategist, not the program director — can say, "Look what we have accomplished." The very weakness of preaching is the seal of God's sovereignty over it.
And here is the implication that should reach every hearer: if God sovereignly chose preaching as His instrument, then every sermon preached is a sovereign act of divine mercy toward those who sit beneath it. You do not wander into a faithful church by accident. The same God who chose preaching before the foundation of the world ordains the circumstances that place people under the sound of it.
The Gravity of Preaching (2 Timothy 4:1-2)
Paul's final charge to Timothy is among the most solemn passages in the New Testament: "I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction."
The word translated "solemnly charge" is diamartyromai — a legally binding oath given under witness. Paul is not urging Timothy. He is not encouraging him. He is issuing a solemn charge in the most majestic court in the universe, with God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ as witnesses, against the backdrop of the final judgment and the consummation of the kingdom. Every man God has called to preach receives his commission in that same court, under those same witnesses, for the same eternal purposes.
That means every sermon preached on the face of the earth is delivered beneath the watchful presence of God Himself. The preacher stands between two eternities — the eternal authority of the God who sent him, and the eternal destiny of the souls before him. Richard Baxter captured it rightly: "I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men."
But the gravity of preaching is not the preacher's burden alone. The congregation bears it equally. The Word preached is, in the language of 2 Corinthians 2:16, either the fragrance of life unto life or death unto death. No one leaves a sermon unchanged. That is not an exaggeration — it is apostolic doctrine. Every sermon either softens the heart or hardens it. Every sermon either draws the soul toward Christ or drives it further from Him. There is no neutral hearing of the preached Word.
This means that the congregation's posture beneath the preached Word is itself a matter of spiritual life and death. A believer who has grown comfortable under preaching — who can sit beneath the declared Word of God week after week and leave unmoved, unexamined, unchanged — has not understood what preaching is. He has been present at a divine encounter and mistaken it for a religious lecture.
Three responses belong to every believer who grasps the gravity of preaching. Pray for your pastor before he preaches. He carries what no man can carry alone. Come expectantly, not asking whether you will be entertained, but asking what God will say to you. And obey what you hear. The sermon is not finished when the benediction is pronounced. It is finished when the Word has worked its full work in your life.
Conclusion
These three truths are not three opinions. They are three pillars of the doctrine of preaching as God Himself has revealed it.
If preaching is necessary, then no Christian can afford to be casual about it. If preaching is sovereign, then no church has the authority to replace it with something more culturally impressive. If preaching is grave, then every Sunday is a divine appointment, and every hearer leaves either softened or hardened — and there are no exceptions.
One day the preaching will stop. A Sunday will come when you hear your last sermon. The question that will matter on that day is not whether the preacher was gifted. It is whether you received the Word he preached.
God had one Son, and He made Him a preacher. God chose to preach. God chooses to preach still. The only remaining question is what you will do with what you have heard.

This post is adapted from a sermon preached at
Grace Community Church South Bay on May 10, 2026.