“What if your gospel-preaching pastor is not as good as one of the great orators of our day? Is it time to sell the house, pack up the family, and change churches? No, I don’t think so. But what should you do?”

Steve Burchett gives us five suggestions, and includes this observation:

“…if your pastor is (honestly) dull, but he preaches the truth faithfully, a little statement I once heard might be helpful for you to remember: ‘The mature worshiper is easily edified.’ When hearing lackluster (even if biblical) preaching, immature worshipers will typically not listen to the message because they wish the messenger was more exciting. Conversely, mature worshipers eagerly receive the truth as it is proclaimed, even if it sounds like the preacher is reading a phone book.”

When Your Preacher Is Not John Piper   HT: Albert Garlando

Knox reluctantly began his preaching ministry when he was pressed int service as a chaplain during the siege of the Castle of St. Andrews. By popular demand, the private tutorials he prepared for his “bairns” developed into public exhortations from the Word of God. As we have seen, he was, in his flesh, a timid, fearing man; “I quake, I fear, I tremble,” he said. But when he opened his mouth to preach, all timidity vanished.

The year before Knox died, James Melville, a student at St. Andrews, described what happened when the feeble old man began to preach. Knox, he wrote, was “lifted up to the pulpit, where he behovit to lean at his first entry, but ere he had done with his sermon, he was so active and vigorous, that he was likely to ding the pulpit in pieces and fly out of it.” Melville admitted that Knox’s preaching made him “so to quake and tremble that I could not hold pen to write.”

Knox knew that many took offense at his preaching and that they attributed his vigor to hatred of his enemies instead of zeal for the gospel. In one of his sermons before Mary, Queen of Scots, he offered an explanation: “Without the preaching place, I think few would have occasion to be offended at me; and there I am not master of myself, but must obey him who commands me to speak plain and to flatter no flesh on the face of the earth.” Still, there is a sense in which Knox’s preaching was motivated by hatred. As Iain Murray has it: “He passionately hated that which destroys souls. He hated the system which had blinded people to the necessity of faith and salvation by the blood of Jesus Christ.”

An ardent man, Knox was on fire when he preached, and it seemed never to occur to him to alter his message or tone when he stood before the rich and powerful in the realm:

My words are sharp, but consider, my Lords, that they are not mine but they are the threatening of the Omnipotent … The sword of God’s wrath is already drawn, which of necessity must needs strike when grace offered is obstinately refused. You have been long in bondage to the Devil, blindness, error and idolatry prevailing against the simple truth of God in your realm, in which God has made you princes and rulers. But now doth God, of His great mercy, call you to repentance before he pour forth the uttermost of His vengeance.

As sheep heed the voice of their shepherd, people from all walks of life flocked to hear this message. After his release from the French galleys, Knox was called on to preach almost daily, “if the wicked carcass would permit.” This was no small feat for a man whose health was nearly destroyed. “The pain of my head and stomach troubles me greatly; daily I find my body decay,” he wrote. “Unless my pain cease, I will become unprofitable. Your messenger found me in bed, after a sore trouble[d] and dolorous night.” In this condition, as minister of St. Giles Edinburgh, he preached sermons three or four times a week, each of which lasted up to three hours.

There was nothing shallow or therapeutic in these sermons. There was nothing manipulative to evoke an emotional response. Knox understood the condition of his hearers because he understood the condition of his own heart: “For we are so dead, so blind, and so perverse, that neither can be feel when we are pricked, see the light when it shines, nor assent to the will of God when it is revealed.” Hence, for Knox no gimmicks were needed. For his hearers to respond to the gospel in faith, they needed the transforming power of God’s sovereign grace alone. And since the Spirit of God had chosen preaching as the means for the conversion of sinners, Knox preached.

One problem with modern conservative scholarship is its reluctance to deal with types that are not explicitly described in the text. This means that a lot of what is considered interpretation is merely application.

Aside from those types which are explicitly explained, the typological nature of Biblical history is rejected. Thus most of its “bandwidth” remains unheard. The result of this severe “downsampling” is that a lot of that application is off-the-mark because a clumsy search for a moral to the story has taken the place of the typological message. The principles drawn from the histories are not universals but abstracts, because we are looking for morals, not looking at men made in the image of God.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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Years ago, when those “spiritual gift” tests were in vogue, a pastor told he didn’t like them because Christians were using them as an excuse to be slack in the areas where they were not “gifted.”

From what I have seen, spirituals gifts tend to be giftings for definite tasks. Some people are natural pastors, or natural kings (administrators). I’m not, but I have learned a great deal from watching and working with men who are.

Certainly, our gifts differ, and we should delegate what we’re not good at, but our maturity must be well-rounded. I’m more “prophet/teacher,” but that doesn’t mean my ministry doesn’t require gentleness or competent organization.

It’s easy to be harsh on a blog, (I’m much more mild mannered in person!) and everything written here is pointy for good reason. But I’ve found the harshness flows straight out of the way I often “speak” to myself. If my speech is sharp in any way, it should only be because God has broken me first. Judgment surely begins at the house of God, but within the house of God, judgment must begin with the preacher.

This is exactly what we see in Israel’s prophets. Transcendence and Hierarchy always come before Ethics. God’s prophets have tempers, but God’s prophets are tempered. He cuts them into bread and wine. These men of God knew when to be harsh and when to deal gently. Behold the goodness and severity of Jesus.

Here’s the example that got me thinking, an excerpt from Dan Braga on re-planting a church:

The tri-perspectival arena is important for [church] replanters. I have a super dominant personality. That’s the way I lead. I’m a prophet—through the roof. But this is why the Lord called me to re-plant. In many ways I mocked the priestly arena—pastoral ministry. Priests were weak and wimpy. Mercy is something to be sung about. It doesn’t really exist. That was my mentality.

But I’ll tell you that there, in the pastoral realm, the priest, there is the ministry of Jesus. It took four little grandmas to change a young arrogant guy. I had been counseled to take the building, plant the church in it, and just bowl them over. But in my candidate phase, the Lord said to me very clearly, “You will pastor them until they come to be with me.”

In a church re-plant, you cannot back away from any of the three perspectives. In sick churches, you’ve got demonic strongholds, egregious sin, structures and systems that are not only fallible but have actually promoted the failure of the gospel. And it really does take a strong prophet to say, “Look, this is black, this is white. This is what the Bible says. This is the way it is and this is the way we’re going. Throw me into the dungeon. Pin me up on a cross. Strip me down naked and spit on me, I don’t care. This is how it’s going to happen. Float with us or get off the boat. And if you drown, fine. It’s your fault.” It often takes that attitude.

By complementing that you must have a priestly attitude. The prophet just told you to get off the boat. Fine. Follow up on that. “How are you doing out there in the water? Are you ready for a life raft?”

Re-planting A Church, 2010 Phoenix Boot Camp, Acts 29 podcast, 10 Nov, 2010.

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“Let’s face it, even daytime television
is more inspiring than your sermons.”

Ray Sutton’s 5-point Covenant model is crucial when it comes to making sense of the judgments of God, both the blessings and the curses. As he says in his book That You May Prosper, “Everyone talks about the Covenant, but nobody does anything about it.”

When I was writing Totus Christus, I thought it was only natural that the 7-point Creation pattern and the 5-point Covenant pattern could be combined. Transcendence is Light. Testing and Ethics matched. The positive and negative Sanctions were quite obviously the two goats on the Day of Atonement (Ebal and Gerizim). So it was only a matter of figuring out how the 5 of Words becomes a 7 in history. [1]

I recently found that James Jordan covered this in his occasional paper, An Introduction to the Seven-fold Covenant Model with Notes on the Five-fold Covenant Model. But how many people have read that? Show of hands, please. How to get this across at a popular level?

John Piper says that pastors should be compassionate men who have backbones of steel. Doug Wilson says that some churches are doctrinally pure, but unloving. They are all backbone, all bone, no flesh. Other churches are all flesh, all gooey love, a body with no skeleton. Sin divides Law-Word from Life, but God is able to put these two together, and it takes a miracle (Ezekiel 37). It is the work of the Spirit to form and fill, to marry head and body, structure and glory.

Eric Rauch did write a great summary of Ray’s ground-breaking book a while back, [2] but Ray’s technical approach attracts the retentive among us: the lawyers. I think it was Jordan who remarked that the Bible has been in the hands of the lawyers for 1000 years — far too long. Lawyers love rules and regulations. They like to have all the boxes ticked. They are legal accountants. Their books get written and filed, just in case the IRS does an audit. (I don’t think Ray’s book is that technical, but it’s still way above the level of most Christians.)

Sure, the Lord is a lawyer, but none of His books is dusty-on-the-shelf. His laws are Bridal. He might give us a long list of Covenant conditions, but then He gives us narrative, and we see how the same pattern plays out in history. Word becomes flesh, and flesh is filled with Spirit. The lawyers rarely get beyond Word, so the saints turn to “Christian” fiction, and the surrounding post-Christian culture turns to Buffy, Harry Potter, House, People and Manga for their stories. Let’s face it, even daytime television is more inspiring than your sermons.

That’s what I want to achieve with this book: to give a detailed summary of Ray’s book, but then tie it to the Bible Matrix. After all, postmoderns love narrative. Showing how the Law is inseparably married to the narrative would have great benefits. And I pray the Spirit would use this to open more Christians’ minds to the wonders of the Torah and the foundations it lays for the rest of the Bible.

The benefits for interpretation are great: we begin to see Israel’s sins in the light of the transgressed documents, and to identify the Covenant lawsuits as what they are, an area where most evangelical scholars fail dismally. (Why do they insist on ignoring literary structure and allusion? Ah, they have the minds of lawyers. They see the letter and not the Spirit!)

And the benefits for application would be greater: Covenant obedience and postmillennialism would suddenly make sense (and not be branded as works righteousness and right-wing political fantasy respectively). Instead of being suckered by Christianised socialism (Baalism) [3], teaching a prosperity gospel (materialism), or fighting it with a poverty gospel (gnosticism), the modern evangelical church would understand “good success” as God does — spiritual and material prosperity within a transformed church and state.

If you have any thoughts on what would make this a good book (besides canning the idea altogether), please let me know. Eric has very kindly agreed to the use of his article.

Hopefully, it will be better than Matrix sequels tend to be.

Do you think THE KINGDOM KEY would be a more suitable subtitle?

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[1] See Lambs in Limbo.
[2] See A Jaw-Dropping Book.
[3] See Baal’s Stimulus Package.

“…woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.” Matthew 23:13

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.

All Creation is Covenantal, and therefore all relationships within it have a hierarchical structure. God calls a vassal (Creation), separates/sanctifies him as a delegated authority (Division). He gives him a job to do (Ascension), and a period of time to accomplish it.

This Adam, the Covenant Mediator, stands between heaven and earth (Land). The Land was raised out of the Sea, and the Man was raised out of the Land as “grain and fruit.” Then this new house, this body of broken earth, was filled with heaven, with the Spirit of God, sun moon and stars: This Adam was to be a singular prism that expands the white light of God into plural lights, a greater body, the full spectrum of colour. But he was to be a broken man. The light had to pass through him.

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[1] James B. Jordan, Slavery in Biblical Perspective, 1980.
[2] See The Significance of Adah and Zillah.
[3] See Behind Closed Doors.

The Sacred Script in the Theater of God

“Why does the world not believe? When was the last time we commanded it to? When was the last time we spoke with authority and not like the scribes?”

or listen to audio here.

“All of their sermons are about Christian truth or theology in general, and the particular text they read ahead of time merely prompts their memory or calls their attention to one of Christianity’s important realities (insofar as they perceive it). Their reading does not stimulate them to rethink anything, and since the text doesn’t stimulate them particularly (but serves merely as a reminder of what they already know), their sermon is not particularly stimulating to their hearers.

Further, since they read only for the overt content, they often actually misunderstand the text, thinking it is “about” something that it really isn’t about. Many of you are aware of the book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23; and if not, you’ve heard sermons suggesting that the Twenty-Third Psalm is in some way “about” God’s being a shepherd. This view is actually fairly wrong-headed. Shepherd is obviously a figure of speech, and as with other such figures, we should attempt to understand it as its own culture did. In the ancient Near Eastern culture, monarchs were commonly referred to by this image of a shepherd, and ancient Israel was no exception. But the Twenty Third Psalm is not an agricultural psalm, and it begins with a profound irony: King David, Israel’s ‘shepherd,’ acknowledges that Yahweh is his shepherd, his king. The psalm goes on to demonstrate that just as Israel’s royal shepherd celebrates and rest in God’s royal reign, so Israel should trust the royal Yahweh also.[1] Anyone with any literary sensibility, reading the psalm as a whole in its literary and historical context, sees this: but most ministers don’t, because their literary sensibilities are undeveloped. Or, as another example, they will puzzle over the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, concerned about its apparent blunders in labor relations, without noticing that the text is perhaps “about” something that is never overtly stated: either God’s free grace or, even more acutely, his grace in including in his redemptive work Gentiles in addition to Jews.

Reading texts demands a very close and intentional reading. One cannot omit a single line of a given Shakespearean sonnet; each of the fourteen lines plays a crucial role. Those who are accustomed to reading such texts read each line for what it contributes to the whole and how it does so. But those not accustomed to reading texts closely just look for what they judge to be the important words, and the concepts to which they ostensibly point, and then give a lecture on that concept – ordinarily without making any effort to explain the passage as a whole, to demonstrate how each clause contributes to some basic overall unity. A handful of great expository preachers do not read literature, but these exceptions are almost always people who have studied a good deal more than the ordinary amount of Greek or Hebrew, and they became close readers of the texts through this discipline of read verse or literature. Ancient, inflected languages require remarkable attentiveness to the smallest details; and thorough study of such languages cultivates a close reading of texts just as the study of verse does.

Culturally, then, we are no longer careful, close readers of texts, sacred or secular. We scan for information, but we do not appreciate literary craftsmanship. Exposition is therefore virtually a lost art. We don’t really read texts to enter the world of the author and perceive reality through his vantage point; we read texts to see how they confirm what we already believe about reality. Texts are mirrors that reflect ourselves; they are not pictures that are appreciated in themselves. This explains, in part, the phenomenon that many Christians will read their Bibles daily for fifty years, and not have one opinion that changes in the entire fifty-year span. Texts do not change or alter or skew their perspective; texts do not move them or shape them; they merely use them as mnemonic devices to recall what they already know. They have no capacity to expound a text, or to describe what another has said and how he has said it; and they retain only the capacity to notice when something in the language of another appears to concur with their own opinions. To employ C. S. Lewis’s way of stating the matter, they ‘use’ texts but do not ‘receive’ them.”

You can listen to a panel interview with T. David Gordon here, in which he has as much to say to the preacher’s audience as he does to the preacher.

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1. In his recent Worship lectures, Jordan takes this even further. Psalm 23 is actually a warrior psalm, and he likens the Lord’s preparing of David’s table before his enemies to the Lord’s command to Joshua to circumcise the Israelite army in full sight of the city of Jericho. In other words (my words), “I am incapacitated but you are still no match for my God,” or “I am at leisure, because the Lord can kill you with my thumb.” The creator of the universe is my king. I think Paul’s celebration of communion in Gentile churches was a similar provocation (Romans 11:11).

“If you’re a pastor and you want your people to hear the hard things you have to say, you’ve got to give them your flesh and your blood. Jesus gave His to earn the right to a hearing. People will hear what you have to say when they see that you bleed for them and that you give them yourself.”

–James B. Jordan, The Bible as Literature, Basilean Lectures 1990.

“…we face a situation today in most evangelical and Reformed churches in which the reading and preaching of Scripture is the only way in which the Word is made manifest in the lives of the saints. This is a real loss for the people of God. The result is the primacy of the preacher. The preacher not only does the only really important thing in the service (preach), he also composes (if he even does that) the prayers that are prayed, and he prays them by himself. It boils down very often to worship by proxy, exactly what the Reformation fought against. Only in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches is there more than a minimum of congregational participation, because of the use of prayer books.

Since all that is left is preaching, the act of preaching takes on dimensions foreign to the Bible. Preaching has become a great rhetorical event. Sermons ought to open with a stunning introduction, proceed through three alliterating points, and conclude with a gripping application. People should be stirred, moved, etc. The full-orbed worship of Scripture, with congregational prayer, singing, and the Supper has been lost, and this leaves the people psychologically starved, so the preaching must make up for it.

The history of the church becomes the history of preachers. People leave one church and seek another on the basis of who is preaching. If one is in a church with bad preaching, there is nothing else to look forward to in going to church: no worship, no real singing of the Word, no sacrament. Everything hangs on a man, and that man is not the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is a story of a certain young preacher who was not very effective at his task. One Sunday he ascended into the pulpit to find a note that read, “Sir, we would see Jesus .“ After several weeks of this, the young man broke down and began to preach Christ in earnest. Doubtless the young man needed some such exhortation, but the request to see Jesus was erroneously directed to the pulpit. The reading and preaching of the Word is that we might hear Jesus. The Bible emphasizes the hearing of the Master’s voice, not the seeing of His face. Jesus Himself was so ordinary looking that He could, at times, disappear into the crowds. After arguing with Him for three years, the Pharisees could still not remember what He looked like — He looked like everybody else — so they had to hire Judas to lead them to Him. On the road to Emmaus, His disciples did not recognize His face, but their hearts burned when He taught them the Word. It was when He broke bread (the Lord’s Supper) that they had the experience of recognition, that they “saw” Him (Luke 24:13-32). If we would see Jesus, we need to restore the visible Word as the complement to the audible Word.

What about preaching? In the New Testament and in the early church, preaching (heralding) was something done to outsiders, persuading them to repent and believe the gospel. Preaching is recorded for us in the book of Acts, for instance. Within the church, however, what went on was teaching. The teaching elder did not stand to teach, though all stood for the reading of the Word. Rather, the teacher sat enthroned while he explained the text in simple language, without rhetoric, and made some applications. It was a family meeting. (See, for instance, Luke 4:16, 20. ) When the Gospel became established in the Roman world, the influence of Greek rhetoric began to be felt, and ministers began standing to “preach” to God’s people, delivering polished oratory for edification of the saints. Augustine, for instance, initially went to hear Ambrose preach not because he wanted to learn about the Bible, but because he wanted to improve his rhetoric and Ambrose was greatly remarked as an orator.

Because so much of the Reformation occurred within state churches, the Reformers and preachers treated the churchmembers as if they were unsaved people in need of the new birth. This was doubtless necessary at that time, but it is not the normal Biblical way to view the church. The Baptist churches to this day continue to treat their churchmembers as if they were unsaved, and so they preach to them. If the churches are healthy, however, with good doctrine and sound discipline, the elders should not treat the people as goats-in-disguise but as true sheep, and teach them. Those who are not truly converted will eventually rebel against the teaching of the Word, There is no need for rhetoric and flamboyance, for “preaching.” What is needed is simple, direct teaching. The notion that there must always be “a word to the unconverted” during a worship service is unbiblical rubbish.

All this is to say that of course the Word must be read and expounded in worship, whether the minister stands or sits enthroned. Such exposition should, however, be direct and simple, not rhetorical. Spurgeon must not be our model in this respect. Let the preacher keep the people’s noses in the Book, not their eyes on his posturing. Many of us enjoy listening to good rhetoric and brilliant “preaching,” but as often as not this kind of thing only gets in the way of simple Bible exposition and application. The Word, not the preacher, must be paramount.

James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church, p. 225-227.
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