Why Expositional Exaltation Is Particularly Glorifying to God

From John Piper's Message at "Together for the Gospel 06"

Which, by the way, is why so many people say so many minimizing and foolish things about preaching...They have never heard it. They don't know what it is. They have not basis for judgement as they belittle it and call for alternatives that are more effective.

Oh that God would raise up in this room, and across this country and the world, young preachers who would leave their hearers with a spiritual sense of shock at the sense of God. Some sense of the infinite weight of the glory of God. That's my longing, that's my prayer, for this conference and for you. That God would raise up thousands of broken-hearted, Bible-saturated preachers who are dominated by a sense of the greatness, and the majesty and the holiness of God as He has been decisively revealed in Jesus Christ through the gospel of Christ crucified, risen and reigning today over all nations, all armies, all cancer cells, and all politics and all churches and all false religions. That there would be a gripping of pastors today of the amazing weight of the absolute claims of the Lordship of Christ over the nations...and over everybody in your city. They will bow or they will burn. There is no doubt about it, Jesus Christ lays absolute claim on planet earth. Everybody in your city must bow their knee. That must grip pastors.

God did not ordain the cross of Christ, or create the Lake of Fire in order to communicate the insignificance of belittling His glory. The death of the Son of God, and the damnation of unrepentant human beings are the loudest shouts conceivable under heaven that God is infinitely holy, that sin is infinitely offensive, that wrath is infinitely just, and that grace is infinitely precious. And that the brief little life that you and I live, and that everybody in our churches live, is going to issue very quickly, either in everlasting joy or everlasting pain.

What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of preaching is soaked in the blood of Jesus and singed in the fire of hell.

[Video of quote available here.]T4G06 was the greatest conference I've ever been to for equipping and encouraging a pastor to preach faithfully, and I'm sure this year will as well. I encourage you to sign up while registration is still available, or ask [suggest strongly to] your pastor if he is going.