...it is too inspiring.

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Last week I was listening to a sermon that was something like 17-18 minutes long. I cannot remember what the sermon was on or where I found it (I deleted the mp3 file), but I remember thinking that the preacher had really not done justice to the text. The fact that he had lumbered along in an utterly apathetic drone did not help.

That prompted me to tweet about it, to which Scott Schultz replied with that he thought sermons longer than that could border on distraction because there are so many other things going on in worhsip. That short discussion provides the context for this post.

First, as I mentioned in the tweet, I don't think there is a magic number for what length of time a sermon should be. I've heard Mark Driscoll before say something to the effect that he is going to preach for an hour no matter what. Part of it, I understand, is his desire to break the inattentive nature of this fast-paced culture. But I don't think he's right about mandating a length of time. In fact, it seems to border on some sort of legalism. It is also seems to be a reflection on evangelicalism's tendency to view the sermon as the only important part of worship, everything else being tangential.

Second, and related to that, I am in full agreement with Scott that there are lots of things going on in worship. Worship cannot be devoid of certain elements, nor can disproportionate weight given to one or two elements above others. The public worship of God is a unified whole, and needs to be viewed as such. Music, prayer, confession and absolution, the reading of Scripture and proclamation of the Word, partaking of the Lord's table, and the pronouncement of blessing are all integral parts of worship.

Third, although all the various elements are integral to worship, I do think there is something unique about the preaching of the Word and the sacrament of the Eucharist. There is a reversal of sorts—in our songs, prayers, and offerings it is us, the worshipers, in some sense giving those things to God. But in the preaching and in the table God gives something to us. The first chapter of the Second Helvetic Confession states, "The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful." Certainly, that is quite a loaded statement, but it gets at the significance of the proclaimed Word. Also, it is not insignificant that faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10:17), and that faith is confessed assent to the proclaimed message that Jesus is Lord (Rom. 10:8-10).

Additionally, the Lord's Supper, as a means of grace, is also something that flows from God to us. The Heidelberg Catechism speaks of it as something that reminds and assures us of Christ's sacrifice (Q&A 75) and the nourishes and refreshes us (Q&A 77). John Calvin taught that the sacrament should always accompany the preaching of the Word because there was no more fitting way to conclude the proclamation of the Gospel than to taste and see it. John Witvliet, of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, agrees: "The sacrament seals the Word proclaimed. This means that if a sermon can’t be preached before the Lord’s Supper, it probably shouldn’t be preached!"

Fourth, and this is the main point I should have made more clearly originally, I have not yet heard a sermon do justice to a text in a short time frame of 15 minutes. It would be unwise to say it is impossible. In fact, what I heard at the wedding last weekend indicated to me that it is quite possible (although the context there was a little different). The years I have spent listening to sermons, however, seem to demonstrate a pattern of taking longer than that to really unpack a text. There is a personal perspective to this as well—having prepared a few sermons myself, I could not have adequately made the points I wanted to in less time.

All that being said, I think it would be quite wrong, as I said before, to require a sermon to fit within a time frame. That goes back again to something I read in Martyn Lloyd-Jones' lectures, Preaching and Preachers, for to do so would stifle the work of the Holy Spirit in preaching. There is a lot more that can be said about that, but I think you could easily draw your own conclusions on that point even if you have not yet read the book.

This all feels relatively inconclusive, but at this point I'll turn it over to Scott and anyone else who might like to offer some thoughts...

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Hesitant as I am to raise this issue again, given the heated discussion it prompted last time, I still think it is an important one to talk about (in fact, the flurry of comments seem to indicate that). The question initially revolved around what beliefs people need to share in order to have fellowship with one another. This, in turn—and quite naturally, I think—brought the discussion around to what one needs to believe in order to be saved.

I was reading Martyn Lloyd-Jones' biography on the plane yesterday and was interested to find his perspective on the issue. In the 1950s, he dealt quite frequently with the question of whom to have fellowship with and whom to partner with in the work of the gospel. The religious climate in England in that time was, to say the least, not good, and Lloyd-Jones found evangelicals hard to come by. For this reason,

[Lloyd-Jones] was utterly opposed to making the theology which he believed to be true Calvinism a requirement for fellowship among Christians. For an 'orthodoxy' which prided itself on its exclusiveness he had not the slightest sympathy. He knew that a Christian, dependent on the death of Christ alone for salvation and trusting the Word of God, may have a very limited understanding of how God's grace came to him: 'What an impudence it is,' he says in one place, 'for any of us to expel or withdraw from a fellow sinner saved by the same grace because we believe that his deductions about how grace works are defective as compared with our deductions.' Accordingly...he was ready to give assistance to a number of agencies which did not endorse some of his most deeply held convictions. And he likewise sought to maintain friendships with Christian leaders...whose sympathies were much closer to the Arminian side of evangelicalism (194).

According to the conclusions of my previous post on this matter, you will know that I am in agreement with Lloyd-Jones here. I remain unconvinced that the conditions of Christian fellowship should be more restrictive than what he alludes to here (in light of Romans 10:9, among others). In our mission to further the gospel of Jesus Christ, there is simply too much at stake to draw the lines any sharper than this (Matt. 9:37).

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The book of Ezra does not really end on a positive note. In the last few chapters, Ezra finds himself dealing with Israel's infidelity in the form of intermarriage, something God had explicitly forbid them to do. Initially expecting he could deal with the problem in about a day (Ezra 10:13), it eventually took two months to set things right. The focus seems to shift from the problem of intermarriage itself to just how widespread the problem actually was.

While the whole tenor of the last few chapters is negative, I find Ezra 10:18-44 the most disturbing. You might find that odd considering it is just a list of the names of those who had married foreign women, but you have to do some math to discover why it is troublesome. The proportion of men who had intermarried was significantly higher among the priests and Levites—the religious leader—than among the rest of the people.

Here are the numbers—roughly 10% of the Israelite people as a whole were priests and Levites. Yet their names at the end of chapter ten account for 25% of the offenders (I owe the mathematical work here to Charles Dobbie, the pastor at Holy Trinity Lyonsdown in north London, who spelled it out in a sermon I found online). It does not take a mathematician to realize that the religious leaders were far more susceptible to falling into sin than the rest of the Israelites.

There are two things we should take from this, I think. First, this should be a sobering revelation for us who find ourselves in leadership in the Church. If the statistics are true—and I suspect few would argue that what we see in Ezra is an exception, rather than the norm—we are far more likely to fall away than the people in our churches. All of God's people are called to pursue holiness, to be sure, but the reality these statistics present should especially press upon those in leadership the need to always be seeking after the Lord. It is no secret that the challenges of ministry often greatly inhibit one's pursuit of godliness. The posture of ministry really must be the posture of prayer.

However, it should also be remembered, as someone once quipped, that "as goes the pulpit, so goes the church." Leaders in the church bear an enormous responsibility in guiding the flock in righteousness and holiness. The Old Testament is rife with examples of Israel's unfaithful leaders bringing the people down with them. In a very real sense, God places upon the leaders of the Church a responsibility not only for their own holiness, but for those whom they lead as well.

All this makes that final portion of Ezra 10 a little hard to swallow. The temptation is to look at it through a lens of discouragement. The challenge is to learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before us. The reality is that the dangers still exist for us today. The comfort is that in the power of the Spirit we can overcome.

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Martyn Lloyd-Jones made his first trip to North America in June of 1932, spending most of his nine-week trip in Toronto. While he had been invited to preach for nine Sundays at a Presbyterian Church, T. T. Shields, the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, asked to meet with him once. Shields was known for frequently engaging in polemical attacks against liberal theologians, and wondered if Lloyd-Jones did the same. From the first volume of Iain Murray's biography of Lloyd-Jones, here is a record of their conversation.

Shields came to fetch me and we had lunch. We talked on general subjects and then we went to sit in the garden. There, as we drank coffee, he suddenly turned to me and said, 'Are you a great reader of Joseph Parker?' I replied, 'No, I am not.' 'Why?' he asked. 'I get nothing from him.' 'Man!' he said, 'what's the matter with you?' 'Well,' I said, 'it's all very well to make these criticisms of the liberals but he doesn't help me spiritually.' 'Surely you are helped by the way he makes mincemeat of the liberals?' 'No, I am not,' I responded. 'You can make mincemeat of the liberals and still be in trouble in your own soul.' 'Well,' Shields said, 'I read Joseph Parker every Sunday morning. He winds me up—puts me right.' I felt my opening had come, so we began. We had a great debate. He was a very able man and we argued the issue about which I disagreed with him. In defence of his attitude he said, 'Do you know, every time I indulge in what you call one of these "dog-fights" the sales of the Gospel Witness go right up. What about that?' 'Well,' I replied, 'I have always observed that if there is a dog-fight a crowd gathers, I'm not at all surprised. People like that sort of thing.' Then he brought up another argument. He said, 'Now, you are a doctor and you are confronted by a patient who has got cancer. You know that if that cancer is not removed it is going to kill the patient. You don't want to operate but you have to do so because it is going to save the patient's life. That is my position. I don't want to be doing this kind of thing, but there is this cancer and it has got to be removed. What do you say to that?' I responded, 'What I say to that is this: I am a physician but there is such a thing as "a surgical mentality", or of becoming what is described as "knife-happy". I agree, there are some cases where you have got to operate, but the danger of the surgeon is to operate immediately. He thinks in terms of operating. Never have an operation without having a second opinion from a physician.'

At this point Shields got up, walked down the garden and then came back to re-open the conversation: 'Well,' he queried, 'what about this: you remember Paul in Galatians 2? He had to withstand Peter to the face. He did not want to do it. Peter was an older apostle, a leader and so on. Paul did it very reluctantly, but he had to do it for the sake of the truth. I am in exactly that position. What do you say to that?' 'I would say this,' I responded, 'that the effect of what Paul did was to win Peter round to his position and make him call him "our beloved brother Paul". Can you say the same about the people whom you attack?' Shields was finished...[and] I made a great appeal to him. I said, 'Dr. Shields, you used to be known as the Canadian Spurgeon...[but] you suddenly changed and became negatory and denunciatory. I feel it has ruined your ministry. Why don't you come back! Drop all this, preach the gospel to people positively and win them!' (272-273).

Sadly, polemical figures like Dr. Shields remain in the Church today, and not just in the Reformed camp (though they often seem to be especially vocal there). Time spent berating others for having different emphases on secondary or even tertiary points of doctrine will ruin our ministry, as Lloyd-Jones says. There is room for discussion on these matters, to be sure, but when they become the focus of polemical rants, we have lost sight of what is most urgent. The parable of the weeds in Matthew 13:24-30 serves as a helpful reminder, I think.

I am studying theology because I believe there is a right way of understanding the biblical revelation, but not because I want ammunition with which to attack other Christians. I'm doing so because I believe, to use John Frame's definition, that theology is the application of God's Word to all of life. I want to see people come to know Jesus Christ and to help them learn what it means to live for Him as Lord. If my focus shifts from this primary calling, I believe I have become unfaithful to the task Christ called His people to before He ascended into heaven (Matt. 28:16-20).

Jesus said it best: "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few" (Matt. 9:37). The need is urgent, and the time is short.

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Towards the end of the lectures on preaching by Martyn Lloyd-Jones recorded in his book, Preaching and Preachers, he devotes one session to discussing certain things preachers should avoid. Lloyd-Jones, as many know, was an advocate of preaching through books of the Bible as opposed to preaching a number of sermons on a specific subject. His reasoning behind this objection is that preaching according to subjects

has the tendency to isolate subjects from their context in the Scriptures; indeed ultimately it regards the Scriptures as but a collection of statements about particular subjects. So one atomises the Scripture and forgets the whole; and, surely, the whole is more important than the parts...one loses the sense of the wholeness of the biblical message (245).

Additionally, Lloyd-Jones makes the case that to preach according to certain subjects does not square with a proper understanding of preaching, which I mentioned in an earlier post. This, he argues, is an even more important point than the first.

Why are people interested in 'subjects'? The answer is that they think they know what they need, and they only want to hear about the things in which they say they are 'tremendously interested'.

You must have gathered already that it is a part of my whole contention that they are not in a position, ultimately, to know what they need; and our experience of ourselves in the past, and experience as pastors of souls, teaches that so often their idea as to what they need is quite wrong. Of course the preacher may also be wrong in this respect, but this applies much more to the congregations. It is, I repeat, a part of our whole approach to this matter not to allow the pew to decide the theme of preaching and not to encourage them at all along this line; but rather to give them the whole truth, and to bring them to see that there are vital aspects of which they are ignorant and in which they are apparently not interested at all. They should be interested in the whole truth and every aspect of it, and we must show them their need of this.

Interestingly, Lloyd-Jones remarks that features like this are the heir of nineteenth-century liberalism.

It has often amazed me to notice how churches and preachers hold on to nineteenth-century methods when they have long since bidden farewell to the great truths emphasised especially in the early part of that century. This habit and practice of announcing the subject, and of having a choir, and a children's address—all these things came in during the last century; they were not done before that time. It was all part of that pseudo-intellectualism of the Victorians; and we are now experiencing a kind of hangover from this. I am calling attention to this because I feel that the urgent need today is to break free from these bad habits, this false respectability and intellectualism that was so characteristic of the end of the last century. These things have been dominating our services; and I feel they detract from the preaching of the Gospel and the centrality of the preaching of the Gospel (246-247).

Disregarding the pot-shots he takes at choirs and children's messages, I think he again makes some very valid points for our consideration.

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Continuing on the theme of pastors and ministers, although shifting gears a little, check out this audio-only clip. You can always count on Alistair Begg to touch a nerve, and that is no different here.

This subject hits closer to home because of the number of guys I know who have been searching for months or even years for a call, and yet to find anything despite the fact that it is so evident God has set them apart to do this. A lot of the problem, as Begg says, is that so many churches are looking for the "perfect pastor" and are essentially unwilling to believe that God uses even the weakest of us for His glory.

Any thoughts?

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Continuing in Martyn Lloyd-Jones' lectures on Preaching and Preachers, I came upon this, which I was not expecting.

There is only one thing to say about [the act of preaching]; it cannot be taught. That is impossible. Preachers are born, not made. This is an absolute. You will never teach a man to be a preacher if he is not already one. All your books such as The A.B.C. of Preaching, or Preaching Made Easy should be thrown into the fire as soon as possible. But if a man is born a preacher you can help him a little—but not much. He can perhaps be improved a little here and there.

How can that be done? Here I am probably going to be somewhat controversial. I would say: Not in a sermon class, not by having a student to preach a sermon to other students who then proceed to criticise matter and manner. I would prohibit that. Why? Because the sermon in such circumstances is being preached with a wrong object in view; and the people who are listening to it are listening in a wrong way. The message of the Bible should never be listened to in that way. It is always the Word of God, and no one should ever listen to it except in a spirit of reverence and godly expectation of receiving a message.

When you come to further modern refinements of that such as television video-tapes so that a man may subsequently see his own gestures and so on—this to me is reprehensible in the extreme. The same applies to instruction in 'pulpit deportment' as it is called, or 'television deportment'. There is only one word for all this; it is sheer prostitution, it is instruction in the art of the prostitute. The preacher must always be natural and un-selfconscious; and if in your training you tend to make him become conscious of his hands, or what he does with his head, or anything else, you are doing him great harm. It should not be done, it should be prohibited! You cannot teach a preacher in these ways; and I feel that to attempt to do so is an injustice to the Word of God (119).

This is, of course, quite a different perspective from what I am told being at a seminary. I, too, have always believed that a person is born a preacher, but have always been surrounded by (and been of) the opinion that homiletics classes are important and significant in shaping a preacher's ability. His advice for those who want to learn to preach is to listen to and read sermons from the great preachers, and among the latter, especially those published before 1900. It's an interesting perspective.

To conclude his one page on homiletics, Lloyd-Jones says the following:

What then is the chief thing? I say, none of these mechanics except a bare minimum. What matters? The chief thing is the love of God, the love of souls, a knowledge of the Truth, and the Holy Spirit within you. These are the things that make a preacher. If he has the love of God in his heart, and if he has a love for God; if he has a love for the souls of men, and a concern about them; if he knows the truth of the Scriptures; and has the Spirit of God within him, that man will preach. That is the big thing. The other things can be helpful; but keep them in their right place, and never allow them to usurp any other position (120).

For the record, he does have an extensive section on recognizing the call to ministry, so he is not advocating for just anyone who has these bare essentials to take their place in the pulpit.

I'm not sure if I fully agree with Lloyd-Jones here. Any thoughts?

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Yesterday I picked up a copy of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' book, Preaching and Preachers, from the school library. It is a collection of lectures on preaching that Lloyd-Jones delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1969. Anyone who has heard of Lloyd-Jones knows of his reputation as a powerful and faithful preacher of the Gospel, and so his insight on preaching is worth reading.

I've hardly been able to put the book down; on almost every page I feel as if there is something worth posting here. Naturally, I won't do so, but instead will offer just a few of the many good things worth thinking about. Consider this (rather lengthy) passage:

Any true definition of preaching must say that [the preacher] is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is 'an ambassador for Christ'. That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person, and he is standing there as the mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address these people. In other words, he is not there merely to talk to them, he is not there to entertain them. He is there—and I want to emphasise this—to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds, he is there to influence people. He is not merely to influence a part of them; he is not only to influence their minds, or only their emotions, or merely to bring the pressure to bear upon their wills and to induce them to some kind of activity. He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the soul of man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical manner...[Preaching] is not the mere imparting of knowledge, there is something much bigger involved. The total person is engaged on both sides (53-55).

To illustrate his point, Lloyd-Jones draws an illustration from the Greek philosopher, Epictetus, whose insights parallel the words of Jesus in Luke 5:31-32. He says,

A young philosopher went one day to Epictetus to ask him for advice. The reply Epictetus gave him is very good advice also for preachers. He said, 'The philosopher's lecture room is a surgery. When you go away you ought to have felt not pleasure but pain, for when you come in something is wrong with you. One man has put his shoulder out, another has an abscess, another a headache. Am I the surgeon then to sit down and give you a string of fine sentences that you may praise me and then go away—the man with the dislocated arm, the man with the abscess, the man with the headache—just as you came? Is it for this that young men come away from home and leave their parents and their kinsmen and their property to say, "Bravo to you for your fine moral conclusions"? Is this what Socrates did or Zeno or Cleanthes?'...

[The people of a church] do not come just as minds or as intellects, they come as total persons in the midst of life, with all its attendant circumstances and its problems, and its difficulties and trials; and the business of the preacher is not only to remember that but to preach accordingly. He is dealing with living persons, people who are in need and in trouble, sometimes not consciously; and he is to make them aware of that, and to deal with it...

If people can listen to us without becoming anxious about themselves or reflecting on themselves we have not been preaching...that is what preaching is meant to do. It addresses us in such a manner as to bring us under judgment; and it deals with us in such a way that we feel our whole life is involved, and we go out saying, 'I can never go back and live just as I did before. This has done something to me, it has made a difference to me. I am a different person as the result of listening to this...

Preaching is that which deals with the total person, the hearer becomes involved and knows that he has been dealt with and addressed by God through this preacher. Something has taken place in him and in his experience, and it is going to affect the whole of his life (55-56).

Just recently I finished reading James K. A. Smith's book, The Devil Reads Derrida, in which he pointed out that in the book of Acts, public disturbances would arise and whole cities would riot when the Gospel was preached. The poignant question, of course, is whether or not we still preach the same Gospel. Our preaching of the Gospel must radically transform hearts and minds, such that people are constantly challenged to surrender their whole lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

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Just a couple weeks remain before I begin my final year of study at Reformed Theological Seminary. It’s hard to believe it’s gone by so quickly. Among other things, this means I have had to start giving some serious thought to what will happen in May of 2010 after I graduate.

Initially, my plans were to immediately transition into a doctoral program in historical theology, looking at ecclesiological developments in the Reformation or post-Reformation period. However, over these last few months as I have been doing some reading and research to try and figure out more specifically what I would like to study within that broad field, I have found myself overwhelmed by the amount of material out there. This, along with a number of other factors, has led me to realize that at this point I am rather unprepared to go on to this level of study. I need some more time to do some focused reading and research in preparation, and so am postponing going this route for a few years.

What does that mean for now, then? I will be looking for work in the interim. More specifically, I’m looking to do some sort of vocational ministry work for the next few years. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, before I decided to go the academic route, I had planned on going into pastoral ministry. In the past while, however, based on the advice of others and plenty of thought on my part, I have come to think that perhaps I should spend some time doing ministry in a church context before I make a definitive decision not to pursue that long-term. Additionally, many students of theology will tell you that the best teachers they had were pastors at one point.

Second, I have been involved in the educational ministry at our local church and have thoroughly enjoyed serving in that role. So much so, in fact, that if I could find a position with a title like “Pastor of Educational Ministries,” I would probably jump at the chance. Except for the fact that I am not from a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, this position sounds like it would be absolutely ideal for me. I might tweak one or two things, but I could see myself fitting very comfortably into a role like that.

And so that’s where we stand right now. While Robin and I like the idea of having things planned out and everything set in place, we are a bit adventurous at the same time and seem to thrive when things are uncertain. Although we don’t have any idea right now where we’ll be headed next year, we are confident that God will again show us the path He would have us go down, and we’re excited to see where it will lead. We are not committed to any city or country, and want to make ourselves available to wherever He would use us. To that end, we are open to going almost anywhere.

That being said, I’ve begun to keep my eyes and ears open for any possibilities and opportunities that are out there, although I am really venturing into uncharted territory here. Nonetheless, it will be exciting to see what unfolds this year. Over the next few months I’ll begin compiling a resume/CV, which I will post here along with some more information about me. Also (and perhaps this is more for those of you who know me), if you happen to hear of anything you think might interest me, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

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