Preacher Profile

Lee Ho-sang's Preaching Style — Tracing the Narrative of Acts with Embedded Word Studies

Series · Preaching Styles of Korean Pastors
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Pastor Lee Ho-sang has served as senior pastor of Ulsan Church (Korea Presbyterian Church — Kosin) since March 2020. A graduate of Kosin University’s Department of Theology and Kosin Theological Seminary, he served as a military chaplain before taking up the Ulsan pulpit. His preaching has not been the subject of academic study or press coverage. What exists is a channel of 262 uploaded sermons — a working record of how one Kosin pastor has built a congregation through sustained biblical exposition.

”Momentum and Reversal” — A Hermeneutical Key Linking Acts to Isaiah

A recurring interpretive frame in Lee Ho-sang’s preaching is the contrast between momentum — the trend everyone expects to continue — and reversal. In the March 1 sermon on Acts 2:42-47 (“Praising God and Having the Goodwill of All the People”), he states the principle directly: everything has a momentum, a trend people use to predict the future, but a reversal — a trend suddenly overturned — is not the ordinary case; it happens only when an irresistible force intervenes. He applies this single frame to two texts from different eras: Acts 2, where disciples who had been scattering and fleeing become bold witnesses once filled with the Spirit, and Isaiah 6, where a prophet paralyzed by despair over King Uzziah’s death rises to say “Here am I, send me” the moment God’s presence appears. The two texts, otherwise unconnected by author, era, or genre, are bound together by one shared structure: reversal caused by the Spirit’s presence.

The same frame reappears as a chain within a single passage in the sermon on Acts 5:17-42. Deception blocked, revival granted, the Sadducees jail the apostles, an angel frees them, the council convenes and has them flogged, the apostles leave rejoicing — Lee narrates this sequence as “the situation keeps changing, reversal after reversal happens,” and draws the conclusion: “reversal after reversal keeps happening, but… a living church does not waver before that trouble and hardship.” The Acts 6 sermon extends the same lens to the congregation’s own history: “the early church, which began at Pentecost with the descent of the Spirit, has been built up while experiencing reversal after reversal.” The theological center of gravity is not the roller coaster of individual events but the steadiness that survives them — offered as evidence of a Spirit-filled community.

A Consistent Opening and Three-Point Structure

Lee Ho-sang’s sermons begin with nearly identical words every week: “Centered on the passage we read today, I want to share in the grace of this word together under the title [sermon title].” The phrase is plain and self-effacing. The preacher does not assert his arrival on the platform; he extends an invitation.

The body typically develops two or three explicitly numbered points — “first… second… third…” — stated with equal plainness. The May 3 sermon on Acts 6:1-7 (“A Person Full of Faith and the Holy Spirit”) follows this structure transparently: first, the community’s problem must be resolved by the grace that overwhelms the problem, not by focusing on the problem itself; second, problems are resolved through being, not through activity; third, Stephen is the embodied example of this resolution. Each point advances from the previous one, and each is anchored in specific verses read aloud with the congregation. “Let’s read this together. Begin.” — the congregation reads, then the preacher unpacks.

This structure is deliberate and unhurried. The labeled points do not slice a sermon into three separate mini-talks; they mark movements in a single sustained argument.

Word Studies Inside the Exposition

The most technically distinctive feature of Lee Ho-sang’s preaching is the placement of Greek and Hebrew etymology directly inside the expository flow — not as a separate “original language” segment, but woven into the sentence where the word appears.

In the May 17 sermon on Acts 7:38 (“The Church in the Wilderness”), he introduces the word ἐκκλησία (ekklesía) by tracing its compound structure — ek (from) and kaleō (to call) — and notes that Stephen uses it with the word desert in front of it, which carries a specific theological claim: God has always built his called-out people in the wilderness. The same sermon moves to χρόνος (chronos, passing time) and καιρός (kairos, decisive time), using the contrast to explain providential timing in the exodus narrative. Then it introduces the Hebrew עָנָו (anav, meekness) with the note that its root carries the idea of poverty — specifically the poverty that suffering produces — and the plural form אֲנָוִים (anawim) as the name behind Psalm 37. The opposite term, חָזַק (hazak, hardening), is introduced as the word the Psalms use to describe the wilderness generation. Two people, same wilderness, different outcomes — the entire theological contrast turns on the etymology.

In the March 1 sermon on Acts 2:42-47, he reaches Isaiah 64:1 (“rend the heavens and come down”) and pauses on the Hebrew verb קָרַע (kara) — not “gently open” but “tear apart, split, shatter.” The choice of verb, he observes, determines the weight of the moment. In the May 31 sermon on Acts 8:1, the verb κηρύσσω (keryssō, to proclaim) is linked to its noun κήρυγμα (kérygma, sermon/proclamation): the gospel is not explained but declared.

What holds these moments together is consistency of purpose. Etymology appears when the English or Korean translation softens or misses what the original word is actually doing. The preacher’s goal is precision, not erudition.

Weaving etymology this seamlessly into the body of a sermon, week after week, requires cross-checking a lexicon and commentaries verse by verse in advance. A resource like Didymus Lab’s sourcebook, which compiles original-language notes for each verse ahead of time, could make it considerably faster and more accurate to prepare the kind of embedded word study — ekklesía, chronos and kairos, anav, kara, keryssō — that Lee Ho-sang folds so naturally into the flow of exposition.

Two Theological Anchors

Two theological frames appear across the sermon series with enough regularity to function as interpretive anchors.

The first is the contrast between theocentrism and anthropocentrism — rendered in Korean as 신본주의 (sinbunjuui) and 인본주의 (inbunjuui). In the Acts 6 sermon, Lee Ho-sang develops this contrast through the Hellenistic Jewish complaint about food distribution. The surface problem is fairness; the underlying problem is that self-assertion has entered a community shaped by self-denial. He places John Locke’s theory of property rights alongside the Marxist logic of class struggle as two expressions of anthropocentrism that both resolve, in the end, into conflict. The theocentric alternative is not a more enlightened form of self-interest; it is “realizing one’s value through self-denial and sacrifice rather than assertion and struggle.” This frame reappears across the series whenever the church faces internal conflict or external pressure.

The second anchor is the treatment of Spirit-fullness as ongoing orientation rather than episodic experience. He consistently returns to Ephesians 5:18 and notes that the literal sense of the original is “keep on being filled by the Spirit” — continuous, not completed. Spirit-fullness in this reading is not a credential or a peak event but a posture: the daily reorientation of attention toward the living God. This shapes how he reads the early church’s resilience in Acts: they did not survive because of organizational capacity or political savvy, but because of what was filling them.

Illustrations from the Floor of the Congregation

Lee Ho-sang’s illustrations draw from two territories: the known world of his congregation in Ulsan, and the wider world rendered concrete.

From the congregation: a deacon who arrives before everyone on Sunday mornings to clean the grounds; a member who has handled parking ministry for over ten years without anyone asking; the people who clean the restrooms. These are the “workers” of the church, he says — not people who do what they’re assigned, but people who sacrifice what others won’t. The examples are specific enough to be recognizable to those in the room.

From the wider world: he places a Korean Bible priced at 30,000 won alongside a North Korean Bible that could cost the owner their freedom or their life, and asks which one is worth more. He notes that the distance from Jerusalem to Damascus is about 240 kilometers — two and a half times the distance Philip walked under the Spirit’s direction to reach the Ethiopian eunuch. “The Spirit moved Philip 100 kilometers,” he observes. “Saul walked 240 in rage. The energy of anger is not less than the energy of the Spirit.”

Every sermon closes with the same form: “I pray this blessing in the name of the Lord.” It is the counterpart to the opening invitation — a warm frame that brackets the entire message.

Sermons cited (official Ulsan Church YouTube channel; all Korean auto-subtitles verified)

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