Now Steve, our Pastor, is going to...what?

It’s a safe bet that at a significant number of evangelical churches last Sunday, the service leader said something like:

“Now Sue’s going to come and read from the Bible, and then our pastor Steve is going to explain the passage to us.”

When I lead, that seems to be my default for explaining what a sermon is: I usually find myself saying that Steve (in our case) is “going to explain the passage to us”.

But I’m not sure that’s a good thing to say—certainly not a good thing to almost always say. A couple of reasons why:

• We don’t need the preacher’s explanation in order to understand the Bible. If someone outside the evangelical tradition said to me: “I love to hear the Bible read in church, and then have the priest explain to me what it says”, alarm bells would ring. I would try to explain to them that God has already given his people all they need to understand the Bible - the Holy Spirit. Of course, He may work through the words of another (a preacher, a friend, a small-group leader): but He doesn’t have to. Every individual has the ability to understand God's word for themselves.
• Preaching isn’t only (or even, arguably, primarily) explanation. If I leave church with nothing more than a firmer grasp of what a passage means… knowing what the Greek word in verse 13 is literally means… able to impress you with the Leviticus cross-reference underlying verse 26… in other words, if a sermon simply increases my intellectual understanding of the Bible, then it’s useless. Bible teaching is not a lecture; it is about showing me Christ, exciting me about Him, motivating and challenging me to respond to His grace by giving up my idols and worshipping Him, and so on. And you can “explain the passage” perfectly well without doing any of those things.

So I don’t want to say “Steve is going to explain the passage to us” anymore. I don’t want, in a drip-drip Sunday-by-Sunday way, to suggest to myself and my church family that if we don't have Steve (great speaker though he is) we won't understand the Bible; and that all Steve is doing is increasing our intellectual grasp of a particular Bible section.

But here’s my problem: what can I say instead? What is a good one-sentence way to, erm, explain what the preacher is about to do?

Answers below, please!