Have you ever heard of Jean Cauvin? Perhaps you know him better as John Calvin. He was the great French/Swiss Reformer, pastor, town leader, exegete and Bible teacher in Geneva during the sixteenth century. Two of his greatest surviving works are, The Institutes of Christian Religion and his Commentaries on every book of the Bible except Revelation. He was highly educated, had a brilliant mind and only preached straight from the Hebrew OT or the Greek NT sans notes! He believed in verse by verse expository preaching covering as few as a couple and as many as twelve verses at a time. If Martin Luther was the voice of the Reformation, John Calvin was the intellect. Over the past several days I just finished reading a new book on Calvin by Steven Lawson, The Expository Genius of John Calvin. For me, reading this book almost took my spiritual and homiletical breath away. It encouraged me, motivated me, rebuked me, challenged me and made me reevaluate my current attitude towards preaching. Perhaps a better way to say it is that it caused me to go back to my roots. Calvin was the first in church history to advocate and practice the historical-grammatical-literal approach to preaching. He wanted to know what the text meant to the original speaker/writer as well as what it meant to the original audience before he drew any contemporary conclusions. He made sure he understood the grammar of the text well enough to know what exactly it was that the Holy Spirit was communicating from that text. And finally, he wanted to make sure that he gave the biblical sense of the passage, not some allegorical or spiritualized interpretation. Just, what did the text say? Finally, what did it mean by what it said. That is, how should Calvin’s audience understand what it meant to them—how were they to live out its meaning in their lives. He accomplished this by spending massive amounts of time in study. He would preach two to three times on Sunday; lecture at least three times a week and conduct a school for young pastors all while meeting the pastoral needs of his congregation. Just to think of his schedule exhausts me! But then I realized that what John Calvin was doing was living out II Timothy 2:15: Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth. Would you please join together in praying for me that God would renew Calvin-like, biblical-like standards in my life in the ministry of the Word? Thank you.