I don’t plan to make a habit of this but from time to time I thought it might be helpful to others and to myself to post an exposition I have recently been engaged with and encourage comments and input from others. At Harper Memorial Baptist Church, Glasgow, where I am on the preaching team, we are working through 1 Peter on Sunday evenings and shortly before Christmas it fell to me to preach on 1 Peter 3vv17-22, one of the most disputed passages of Scripture. I have preached through 1 Peter myself before but in a 5 day conference where you don’t have the chance to get into too much detail, and when I looked up my notes for that I realised that I had only given a cursory glance at these verses.

One of my main concerns was how to be honest about the numerous areas of uncertainty that surround this passage without undermining my hearers’ confidence in the reliability of Scripture or in their own ability to read and interpret it for themselves. Allied to that was the question of how to deal with that aspect of things without becoming totally sidetracked and missing the pastoral application of the passage itself. What good would it be even if I managed to carefully exegete the text and work through the minefields without concentrating on the spiritual nd pastoral application to those God would bring under his word on this occasion.

As I considered how to approach these verses I decided I would do so in a somewhat different way from normal.

1. I decided to take the issues head on and use them as an opportunity, albeit brief, to teach the congregation about the nature of the original biblical text - all in upper case, no word, let alone verse, divisions and no punctuation - and how this afforded plenty of opportunities for differences of interpretation and understanding.

2. I would also take pains to assure them that though such differences existed they affected, in reality, a very few portions of God’s Word and never in an area that was crucial for salvation, essential doctrine or godly living.

3. All of the above would take up no more than five minutes of my preaching time which averages at about 50 minutes.

4. I would on this occasion share my fairly detailed exegesis with the congregation - something I don’t believe we should normally do. I would work through the passage, highlighting the key points and textual difficulties and giving my convictions about the text.

5. On this occasion I would use PowerPoint in my preaching - again something I almost never do. I decided this for various reasons. Almost certainly in the congregation there would be at least half a dozen different English language translations in use, and I wanted them to see the text I was working through - the ESV. I have recently moved over to the ESV for my preaching and teaching and anyway, for this passage of Scripture, I believe the ESV has made the right call on most of the disputed issues. I would put the text on PowerPoint and highlight each phrase or word in turn as I dealt with it.

6. I reckoned that this part of my preaching would take up another 10-15 minutes which, with the 5 minutes for tackling the issue of textual differences and another 5 for setting the pasaage in the context of our current series and recapping on last week’s ministry, would leave me the best part of 25 minutes for my exposition and application.

Tomorrow I’ll post my exegetical discoveries and then the next day my outline and application. If you can’t wait and want to hear the mp3 of the message, you can find it here.