One preacher said to a group of preachers who were visiting together, “I preach and teach the Bible as it should be taught, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book.”

I know his intentions were pure, but his statement was misguided. He mistook the method for the message. The unintended result is that people begin to equate the two. Then, people think that when you change the method, you are also changing the message.

Through the years, I have encountered numerous people who have come to hear me preach and check out our Church. Afterward, they will tell someone, occasionally me, that they enjoyed the program but wanted to attend a Church that did more “Bible teaching.” When I ask questions about this statement, they inevitably respond with, “We need someone who preaches straight through Bible books.” When they say that, they are mistaking the method and the message.

More than once, I have irritated a colleague who boasts about their style of preaching by saying, “Oh, you preach straight through Bible books, just like Jesus and Paul did.”

Then, I share this information with them. There is a sermon from Jesus in Luke 4 where he reads two Bible verses from Isaiah 61, and then he uses a story from the life of Elijah and one from the life of Elisha. It is a topical sermon about God’s grace to everyone. In Acts 17, Paul is in Athens, and he preaches using their own statues and philosophers before telling them about the resurrection of Jesus. We have zero examples of them taking a Bible book and walking through it page by page.

I firmly believe my sermons are full of well-thought-out and correctly interpreted Bible and theology. In fact, I spend hours reading, praying, and preparing for each sermon. I attempt to give strong Biblical sermons every week, but I rarely preach straight through a book in the Bible.

The issue is that the message remains consistent with the word of God and not how it is presented. The message is far more important than the method, and the moment we cannot differentiate the two, we are setting ourselves up for ungodly attachment to a particular style as being better.

The most essential part of any Church is preaching the Bible as truth that reveals God to us and Jesus as our resurrected savior. If the way we present it aligns with the Biblical story, the method doesn’t matter. In fact, the method will keep changing from generation to generation – and that is completely acceptable.