Preaching God’s Word, by Terry G. Carter, J. Scott Duvall, and J. Daniel Hays, is a companion volume to Grasping God’s Word. The trio of authors explain how to preach exegetical sermons that are deeply rooted in sound exegetical techniques outlined in their earlier book.

On the positive side, Carter and company do a solid job covering a variety of practical details about preaching including discussions on the value of manuscripts v. notes and the importance of developing a clear preaching voice that maintains a conversational tone.

Unfortunately, if you’ve read Grasping, you don’t gain much with Preaching. Although only one of the chapters explicitly recapitulate the context of the earlier book, all of the chapters revisit Grasping in some way. Most frustrating for me was the final almost half of the book that dealt with preaching various Old Testament and New Testament genres. This section was little more than a repackaging of their earlier work.

If you’ve read Grasping God’s Word, you don’t really need to read Preaching—choose one of the other many fine preaching texts. If you haven’t read Grasping God’s Word, the context of Preaching will be new to you and it might be a challenge to catch up to the idiosyncratic language of Duvall and Hays’ exegetical process. In the end, there are better options to read!

Carter, Terry G., et al. Preaching God’s Word: A Hands-On Approach to Preparing, Developing, and Delivering the Sermon. 2nd ed. Zondervan, 2018.