Eight Sermons on Ten Verses — Kim Joo-hwan and the Case for Ultra-Slow Expository Preaching

Pastor Kim Joo-hwan of HUB Church (an independent congregation founded in Gangnam, Seoul, in September 2014, now located in Seocho and affiliated with the Korea Association of Independent Churches and Missions) is not a name that appears in Korean homiletics scholarship or religious journalism. The church’s founding philosophy — “a hub for the gospel” — is embedded in its English name. What Kim brings to that pulpit is an unusual academic pedigree: a B.B.A. from Yonsei University (1992), an M.Div. from Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary (1996), then Harvard — an M.A. in New Testament studies (2002) and a Ph.D. in New Testament (2009), with a dissertation on the narrative-critical analysis of the Spirit’s and the Word’s cosmic expansion in Luke-Acts. Before planting HUB Church in 2014, he served nineteen years as associate pastor at Onnuri Church and held a full-time faculty position in New Testament at Torch Trinity Graduate University (2009–2017).

Still in Verse Ten — The Logic of Ultra-Slow Expository Preaching

The most immediately striking feature of Kim Joo-hwan’s preaching is the pace. In January 2025 he launched a Galatians series titled “Back to the Gospel.” He finished it in May 2026, at episode fifty-two. By the eighth sermon, he was still in Galatians 1:1–10 — and he acknowledged it from the pulpit:

“It’s our eighth week, and we’re still in verses one through ten — some of you are wondering what’s going on. The ones who aren’t wondering at all? They’re here for the first time.” — “Back to the Gospel (8),” Gal. 1:1–10 (video, March 9, 2025)

By the sixth Sunday he had already fielded the unspoken question from the week before:

“Six weeks in and we still haven’t gotten past verse five. Today is the last time. Next week we’ll actually move forward.” — “Back to the Gospel (6)” (video, February 23, 2025)

In the same sermon he gave his clearest account of why:

“The moment we think we finally understand the gospel — that is precisely when we don’t. Racing through the text to finish quickly has nothing to do with learning the gospel. What matters is that the gospel we know in our heads seeps into our lives and actually changes them.” — “Back to the Gospel (8)” (video, March 9, 2025)

The pace is not peculiar to Galatians. The Jonah series took thirteen sermons for four chapters. The Genesis “Gospel Story” covered Leah, Hagar, and Jacob across five episodes. This is not a preacher who covers ground quickly — it is a preacher who has made a theological decision about what exposition is for.

What the Translation Loses — Original-Language Exposition at the Congregational Pulpit

Harvard New Testament training rarely travels intact from the dissertation to the Sunday pulpit. In Kim Joo-hwan’s preaching it does — consistently, and in ways that change what the text is heard to say.

Of the twenty-five sermons analyzed, more than twelve contain explicit reference to the Greek or Hebrew original. The pattern appears in two distinct forms.

The first is using the original language to recover a nuance the translation flattens. In the Galatians series, Kim addresses the nature of the “faith” in Paul’s declaration that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes”:

“When you read the Greek, what Paul means here is not the act of believing at the moment you first came to Christ. He means a faith that continues — from beginning to end, persistently, without stopping.” — “Back to the Gospel (2)” (video, January 26, 2025)

In episode eight, he identifies an adverb that Korean translations omit entirely:

“The translation loses something here. The Greek original contains the adverb eti — ‘still.’ A more precise rendering would be: ‘Before I knew Christ, I worked hard to please people. But now…’” — “Back to the Gospel (8)” (video, March 9, 2025)

The second form is using etymology to redefine a theological concept from the inside. In episode fifteen, he takes up the Greek verb dikaioō (δικαιόω):

“The word ‘justify’ — dikaioō in Greek — is a term we tend to understand purely in forensic terms. To declare. To pronounce innocent. To acquit of charges…” — “Back to the Gospel (15)” (video, June 22, 2025)

The Hebrew original appears in his Old Testament series. Preaching Exodus 1, he draws attention to a textual repetition hidden by translation:

“In Korean and English translations, you see a variety of different words. But in the Hebrew original, the same verb repeats again and again, almost embarrassingly so. ʿAvodah, ʿavodah — labor, labor, labor.” — “Gospel Story: Exodus (1)” (video, July 7, 2024)

On the image behind the Spirit’s “hovering” (meraḥefet) in Genesis 1:2, from his most recent series:

“The Hebrew word translated ‘hovering’ — the image it carries is of a mother bird spreading her wings over her eggs. Generating life. Nurturing life. Giving life.” — “For Those Who Walk East of Eden (2)” (video, July 5, 2026)

A detail from the Genesis series illustrates what close reading of the Hebrew can yield for congregational preaching. The account of Jacob’s marriage in Genesis 29 introduces Leah and Rachel in adjacent verses using the Hebrew bōqer (“morning”). Kim turns the word into a sermon title, reading the sudden reversal of Jacob’s expectations in the dawn light as the emotional hinge of the whole episode. None of this arrives packaged as academic exhibition. The original-language glosses are brief, precise, and in service of a single point the sermon is building toward.

Andy Chose to Go Back — Film Illustration and Theological Argument

Kim Joo-hwan’s illustration method follows a consistent structure: open with a question, develop a cultural reference until intuitive understanding is in place, then converge on the biblical argument. The cultural reference is never decorative — it is structural.

The clearest example is his use of The Shawshank Redemption in the seventh Galatians sermon, titled “Faith in Reverse: From Freedom into Bondage.” He tells the congregation he has seen the film three or four times, describes Andy Dufresne’s escape in detail, and then poses a thought experiment:

“Imagine Andy decided to walk back into that prison. Voluntarily. Crawling back through five hundred meters of sewer pipe, spending years chipping away at a concrete wall, and then locking himself back in his cell. Every one of us would say the same thing: ‘Andy, why would you throw away your freedom to go back inside?’ That is Paul’s question in this passage.” — “Back to the Gospel (7)” (video, March 2, 2025)

Alongside film, Kim incorporates theological biography. Episode twelve opens with New York Times columnist David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues,” before pivoting to an extended account of Martin Luther’s spiritual biography — specifically, Luther’s tortured relationship with Romans 1:17, the verse he once called the one he hated most:

“I do not love God. I do not love my neighbor. If God demands righteousness of me, I am as good as dead. — Do you know how Luther read Romans 1:17? ‘If the righteousness of God means God gets to show how righteous he is, then a sinner like me is finished.’ That is why Luther was in such anguish — he knew he could never reach the standard God required.” — “Back to the Gospel (12)” (video, May 25, 2025)

Episode fifteen introduces Latin and Anglican theology in the same sermon. Luther’s simul justus et peccator is quoted in Latin, explained, and then immediately followed by Richard Hooker:

“Simul justus et peccator — do you know what that means? Simultaneously righteous, simultaneously sinner. That is the paradox at the center of the gospel.” “The English Anglican theologian Richard Hooker confesses it this way: ‘In God’s eyes we are counted as the Son of God himself. Absurd as this sounds, fantastical as it may seem — this is our comfort, and this is our wisdom.’” — “Back to the Gospel (15)” (video, June 22, 2025)

In the “East of Eden” series, Martyn Lloyd-Jones carries the argument:

“Martyn Lloyd-Jones puts it this way: ‘The gospel is not for people whose lives are going well. It is for people whose lives have fallen apart — the empty, the lost, those who are walking in the dark.’” — “For Those Who Walk East of Eden (2)” (video, July 5, 2026)

The pattern that emerges across the twenty-five sermons: a film illustration establishes an intuitive grip on the argument’s shape, and a theologian — Luther, Hooker, Lloyd-Jones — supplies the doctrinal language that names what the illustration was pointing at. Neither appears alone; each depends on the other.

“Back to the Gospel” — The Catchphrase That Carries a Series

Across all twenty-five sermons, the address yeoreobun (roughly: “all of you” / congregation) appears more than 975 times — not a verbal tic but a structural device, a continuous act of direct inclusion. In the first Galatians sermon, Kim proposed a series-wide greeting:

“From next week — for as long as we’re in Galatians — I’d like us to greet each other this way: ‘Return to the gospel.’” — “Back to the Gospel (1)” (video, January 19, 2025)

By episode two, the congregation was saying it aloud together:

“Let’s say it together, one more time. Not too loud. Back to the gospel. Now. ‘Back to the gospel.’” — “Back to the Gospel (2)” (video, January 26, 2025)

Communal Scripture reading appears across a majority of the twenty-five sermons, announced with instructions like “let’s read this together” or “in one voice, if you would.” In the Genesis Jacob sermon, the congregation reads Hebrews 12:23 aloud:

“Let’s read Hebrews 12:23 together. ‘To the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven’ — we’ll stop there.” — “Gospel Story: Genesis (Jacob)” (video, June 16, 2024)

These are small moments, but they are consistent ones. Over the course of a fifty-two-part series, a congregation that recites its own greeting week after week, reads Scripture aloud together, and hears the same thesis returned to from every angle builds something different from a congregation that receives instruction. The direction shifts from lecture to shared act — the sermon happening with the congregation rather than at them.

The Night I Lost Control — Personal Testimony as Argument

Across the twenty-five sermons, first-person sentences appear more than 931 times. A significant portion of these are not self-promotion but self-indictment: the preacher naming his own failures and using them as the first evidence for the claim the text is making.

In the fifth Galatians sermon, “Return to Grace,” a story about parenting builds from quiet comedy to something more unsettling:

“My first child was eerily obedient. I thought: ‘A praying father makes all the difference. Being a pastor gives me some kind of anointing.’ Then came my second — a son. Completely different. From the time he was three or four years old, I simply couldn’t handle him. … When I finally lost control of my emotions and lashed out, and I saw his eyes fill with tears — that disappointment in myself is something I carry to this day.” — “Back to the Gospel (5)” (video, February 16, 2025)

The story does not close on the failure. It becomes the first step in an argument about what it actually costs a person to believe that grace — not performance — is the ground of their standing before God. In episode fourteen, Kim draws on his own confusion during a stock market crash — comprehending none of the financial terminology — to explain why theological vocabulary sounds opaque at first, and why the effort to learn it is worth making. The personal disclosure is always instrumental; it serves the argument, and the argument is always the text.

Leah into Rachel — Reading the Old Testament Through a Gospel Lens

In every Old Testament series Kim Joo-hwan preaches, the same structure recurs: the story of a biblical character is developed in full — with original-language support — and then, near the close of the sermon, Christ is introduced as the figure who completes what that story was pointing toward.

The Genesis sermon on Leah is the clearest instance. After establishing from the Hebrew text that Leah was unloved — examining how the original language describes both sisters’ appearances — Kim arrives at the final turn:

“By the world’s standards — and honestly, by God’s standards too — we are all spiritually broken. Nobody chose us. But take that spiritual Leah, and if anyone believes in Jesus Christ, then in the eyes of Jesus, in the eyes of God, you and I become beautiful Rachel.” — “Gospel Story: Genesis (Leah)” (video, June 2, 2024)

In the Jacob sermon, Rebekah’s intervention — placing Jacob’s curse upon herself — is read as a type of Christ:

“Jesus came as the true Rebekah: ‘Don’t worry — every curse aimed at you, I will take. All you need to receive is blessing.’ … That is why you and I no longer need to wear someone else’s clothes.” — “Gospel Story: Genesis (Jacob)” (video, June 16, 2024)

In the Exodus series, the Greek text of the Transfiguration provides the bridge between testaments:

“The word that appears in the conversation Moses had with Jesus on the mountain — do you know what it is? The Greek word exodos. Exodus.” — “Gospel Story: Exodus (1)” (video, July 7, 2024)

The movement is consistent across Genesis, Exodus, and the “East of Eden” series: Old Testament character or event → close reading, often in Hebrew → Christ as the figure toward whom the reading was always heading. This is not allegory imposed from outside; it is a hermeneutical commitment that shapes everything from how Kim chooses his words at the outset of a series to where he places the sermon’s final turn.

“Let Me Say This Once More” — The Invariable Shape of a Sermon’s End

Across all twenty-five sermons, the closing follows the same three-part sequence:

1. Conclusion declaration: “Today’s conclusion is…” or “Let me say this once more” — the sermon’s central claim reduced to a single sentence.
2. Blessing over the congregation: “I bless you in the name of the Lord.”
3. Standing and singing: “Let’s all stand and move into worship together.”

The Galatians 7 closing is the most explicit:

“Let me say this once more. When we obey — when we read God’s Word and try to live by it — there is exactly one reason to do that. It must be a response of gratitude and love for the grace of salvation God has already given us. … I bless every member of HUB Church in the name of the Lord: may not one of you surrender the freedom God has given you and walk back into chains.” — “Back to the Gospel (7)” (video, March 2, 2025)

The ritual is not decorative. In a preaching style that resists acceleration, that circles the same verses across multiple Sundays, that refuses to treat comprehension as an event that can be declared complete, the closing sequence functions as a formal landing — the moment when the week’s installment is gathered, named, and handed to the congregation to carry out.

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For preachers working with Didymus Lab sermon preparation materials, Kim Joo-hwan’s method points toward a specific pattern of use. His preaching is built for series, not single sermons — fifty-two parts on Galatians, thirteen on Jonah. In that format, the Didymus Lab report functions best not as a self-contained weekly packet but as a running reference: flagging recurring Greek and Hebrew terms, tracking the argument’s development across passages, and marking where the same theological concept resurfaces in different textual clothing. For a preacher who handles original-language exegesis at the congregational level, the scholarly notes in a verse-by-verse commentary report offer precisely the kind of lexical and text-critical material that accelerates preparation without requiring a return to technical commentaries.

The “gospel lens” approach to Old Testament texts — Leah to Christ, Rebekah to Christ, the Hebrew exodos to the cross — corresponds most directly to the interpretive possibilities and related texts sections of the reports, where typological and redemptive-historical connections are surfaced. A preacher who already knows the direction of a christological reading will find the report useful for identifying alternative trajectories and supplementary textual evidence, not for dictating which one to take.

Know a hidden master? If you know a preacher who hasn’t made it into scholarship or press coverage but belongs there, send us a note at didymus@didymuslab.com.

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