Essential-Reading-on-Preaching.pdf

ESSENTIAL READING ON

Preaching

- featurin� Preaching in a Secular Age by R. Albert Mohler Jr.

equip.sbts.edu

ESSENTIAL READING ON

Preaching

R. ALBERT MOHLER JR. HERSHAEL W. YORK DAN DUMAS DAVID E. PRINCE BRIAN CROFT TIMOTHY PAUL JONES MICHAEL A.G. HAYKIN TOM J. NETTLES JEFF ROBINSON DAVID SCHROCK MICHAEL POHLMAN

Essential Reading on Preaching

Copyright © 2017 by Southern Equip. Southern Equip c/o Communications 2825 Lexington Rd. Louisville, KY 40280 Southern Equip is a division of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States copyright law. Printed in the United States of America. Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV® Text Edition: 2011. The ESV® text has been reproduced in cooperation with and by permission of Good News Publishers. Unauthorized reproduction of this publication is prohibited. All rights reserved. ISBN-13: 978-1546928898

Contents CHAPTER ��

03 Preaching in a secular age R. Albert Mohler Jr. CHAPTER ��

CHAPTER ��

43 ‘A power to move men:’ John Broadus on preachers and preaching Tom J. Nettles

09 Why some preachers get better and others don’t Hershael W. York CHAPTER ��

CHAPTER ��

49 Should I ever break from an expository sermon series? Hershael W. York

15 Expository ministry: A comprehensive vision Dan Dumas CHAPTER ��

CHAPTER ��

53 I am a sinner preaching to sinners Jeff Robinson

21 David Brainerd: Preach for holiness by preaching the gospel David E. Prince

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57 What has preaching to do with discipleship? David Schrock

CHAPTER ��

27 5 ways to fight ‘preaching hangover’ Brian Croft

CHAPTER ��

63 The centrality of the Bible in preaching Michael Pohlman

CHAPTER ��

31 Preaching for conversions

67 Resources

Timothy Paul Jones

69 Contributors CHAPTER ��

35 ‘A poore under-rower’: The life and ministry of John Owen Michael A.G. Haykin

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Preaching in a secular age With the advance of secular pluralism, expository preaching must become the church’s strategy for survival. BY R. ALBERT MOHLER JR.

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lmost anyone seeking to carry out a faithful pulpit ministry recognizes that preachers must now ask questions and engage issues we have not had to consider in the past. I began my chapter on preaching and postmodernism in We Cannot Be Silent with these words, “A common concern seems to emerge now wherever Christians gather: The task of truth-telling is stranger than it used to be. In this age, telling the truth is tough business and not for the faint-hearted. The times are increasingly strange.” We now live, move, and have our being in a secular age. But the only authentic Christian response to the challenge of secularization is faithful, clear, and informed expository preaching. THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF BELIEF

Without the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and even without certain technological advances, secularization never would have been possible. Theorists explained the modern age would necessarily and inevitably produce a secular society because modernity provided alternative answers to the most fundamental questions of life and made God irrelevant.

ESSENTIAL READING ON PREACHING

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With great foresight in his 1965 The Secular City, Harvey Cox wrote the future of the Western world, particularly its cities, was predominantly secular. Cox further argued this coming secular city would provide a larger range of worldviews as alternatives to what had been offered before. This multiplicity of worldviews would be one of the hallmarks of the secular city. As a result, Christianity — the once ubiquitous worldview of Western society — would be displaced, giving way to a seemingly infinite number of worldview options. The renowned sociologist Peter Berger has considered why secularization achieved dominance in some parts of Western society, but has yet to do so in others. As he notes, secularization happened just as the theorists predicted with respect to Europe, a continent with almost imperceptible levels of Christian belief and no memory of a Christian heritage. Secularization happened at the same rate and to the same degree in American universities — which are, in many respects, isolated islands of Europe on American soil. Consider for instance the University of Tennessee, which recently ordered that gendered pronouns be replaced by gender-neutral pronouns like “ze.” While this administrative mandate was later overturned, the point remains that even in places such as Knoxville, Tennessee, major American universities are on the same trajectory of secularization as many of the most secularized parts of Europe. While America is not characterized by the hardline secularism and open ridicule of religion in European nations, Berger argued the United States is still largely secularized. In 20th-century America, he explained, Christianity and religion in general were transformed to something non-cognitive and optional. Consequently, many of our friends and neighbors continued to profess faith in God, but that profession was ultimately devoid of any moral authority or cognitive content. From the outside looking in, America did not appear to be secularizing at the same rate as the European continent, but in reality professions of faith in God had little real theological or spiritual content.

PREACHING IN A SECULAR AGE

Berger predicted that this collapse would result in adherents to religious principle quickly giving way to the secular agenda in the face of opposition, which is exactly what happened. When the cultural tide turned against our society’s empty religious commitments, people were happy to jettison their moral judgment on homosexuality to retain their social capital. For preachers, Berger’s observations are tremendously important. We, above all others, need to realize the culture no longer shares our worldview and the very language we use may mean something entirely different in the ears of our listeners. The meaning of words like morality, personhood, marriage, or virtually any other moral term has radically shifted for many postmodern Americans, making our job as preachers that much more difficult. Additionally, as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explains in The Secular Age, the way people hold to theological convictions and religious principles in the modern era is fundamentally different than how people believed in the past. Modernity has made religious belief provisional, optional, and far less urgent than it was in the premodern world. Taylor notes belief is now a provisional choice, an exercise of personal autonomy. When people identify as believers in Jesus Christ they are making a far more individualistic statement than was possible in years past. Furthermore, they are doing so in the face of alternative worldview options that were simply unavailable until very recently. Perhaps the central insight from Taylor’s book is his categorization of the premodern, modern, and postmodern time periods with respect to the worldview options available in a culture. As Taylor argues, Western history is categorized by three intellectual epochs: pre-Enlightenment impossibility of unbelief; post-Enlightenment possibility of unbelief; and late Modern impossibility of belief. In the pre-Enlightenment era it was impossible not to believe. No other worldviews were available to members of society other than supernatural worldviews, particularly the Christian worldview in the

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West. While society had its heretics, there were no atheists among them. Everyone believed in some form of theism, even if it was polytheism. As Taylor simply states, it was impossible not to believe. That all changed with the Enlightenment and the availability of alternative worldviews, which made it possible to reject the supernaturalism of Christianity for a naturalistic worldview. Taylor’s careful phraseology here, however, is also important to note. While it was certainly possible not to believe, it was also the case that it was not likely that people would reject the Christian worldview because the theistic explanations for life were simply more pervasive, binding, and persuasive than non-theistic worldviews. The intellectual conditions in Europe and on American university campuses have now secularized such that it is impossible for those under such conditions to believe in God. In other words, we have arrived at the third intellectual epoch of Western society: impossible to believe. As Taylor observes, to be a candidate for tenure at a major American university is to inhabit a world in which it is virtually impossible to believe in God. Under the first set of Western intellectual conditions, not everyone was a Christian, but all were accountable to a Christian worldview because there was no alternative. Secularization in American culture has reversed the conditions: not everyone is a non-Christian, but all must operate under a secular worldview that denies the legitimacy of a Christian worldview. In 300 years, Western intellectual conditions have moved from an impossibility of unbelief to an impossibility of belief. So what does this mean for us as preachers? We must recognize these intellectual conditions now prevalent in Europe and in the American universities are quickly filtering down from the elites to the general culture. The mechanisms in this process are fairly easy to trace. A number of polls reveal the greatest predictor for whether you will find yourself in an increasingly secular space comes down to whether you live near a coast, a city, or a university. Given that the future of America is increasingly defined by most

PREACHING IN A SECULAR AGE

of its population being coastal, urban, and university-educated, you can see that the future of America is also increasingly secular. We are not preaching to people who hear us in the same way as previous generations in Western societies. The question remains: What does preaching look like in the secular city? PREACHING� THE CHURCH’S MEANS OF SURVIVAL

With our cultural analysis behind us, I would like to consider the role of preaching in a secular age as a survival strategy for the church. In a secular age, preaching will be met with one of three responses. First, we will find ourselves preaching in a context of hostility. At least in the immediate future, much of this hostility will look like cultural marginalization. Those who listen to us will now do so by paying social capital, not gaining social capital — a cultural situation notably different from our grandparents or even our parents. Second, our preaching will also often be met with befuddlement. For many among the intellectual elites, Christian preachers are not an object of derision as much as they are creatures of oddity. The plausibility structures of society are so different from our own that many people simply cannot understand us. Finally, we will find that we will not only be met with hostility and befuddlement, but also indifference. Many in our society will not even care enough about our message to spend their energy attacking us. One of the problems is that our approach to preaching in relation to other theological disciplines is wrongly skewed. For years in the theological academy, homiletics has been seen as something of a finishing school for clergy. We have imagined that the true theological heavy lifting occurs in the disciplines of theology, exegesis, or church history, while homiletics was merely the practical work for those who were moving on to the professional and less theologically involved environment of the pastorate. This alienation between the classical theological disciplines and homiletics is detrimental to the life of the church. While

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there are benefits to specialization in academic disciplines, we should also recognize that segmenting theological study along the lines of specialization has come at a cost in the lives of many modern preachers. The preacher’s task is exegetical and theological. Homiletics cannot be divorced from theology and exegesis simply by virtue of the fact that what we proclaim in the pulpit is a biblical theology originating from the exegesis of God’s Word. Preachers need to be competent in many arenas of life. They need managerial competence. They need organizational competence. But above everything else, the preacher needs theological and exegetical competence. The curriculum in our seminaries and theological institutions must reflect this commitment to train preaching theologians, and not just men who are entertaining. By preaching the church expands and by preaching the church remains faithful in a hostile culture. In a secular age, we can no longer rely on the luxury of having other cultural voices do the work of instilling our people with a Christian worldview. The plausibility structures of the culture now work at crosscurrents to the message we preach on Sunday mornings. No longer does the culture indicate one “ought” to listen to preaching or one “ought” to give credence to the Christian moral tradition. Those days are behind us. Fundamentally, the survival of the church in the secular city comes down to a promise and a command given us in Scripture. Jesus promised, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18). The church’s only recourse in a secular city is to do as we have been commissioned: “Preach the Word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2). We need to remember both of these words from Scripture in order to serve faithfully in the secular city. Jesus has given his church a strategy for survival in the face of cultural hostility. That strategy, it turns out, is the apostolic call to preach.

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Why some preachers get better and others don’t No one denies that a preaching class and some coaching can help anyone become better. What we question is the possibility that someone with no natural giftedness and ability can be taught well enough that he can become really good. BY HERSHAEL W. YORK

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often have to answer the strangest question anyone could ask a preaching professor: “Do you think preaching can be taught?” I always want to respond, “No, I’m just going through the motions for the money.” Of course I never do, not only because it’s best not to say the smart aleck things I sometimes think, but because I know what they mean when they ask. It’s not really an unfair question. No one denies that a preaching class and some coaching can help anyone become better. What we question is the possibility that someone with no natural giftedness and ability can be taught well enough that he can become really good. For the last 16 years I’ve sat in a seminary classroom, listening to student sermons on an almost daily basis, and I’ve heard every kind of sermon and every level of preacher.


I’ve seen guys so nervous that they had to stop and vomit during the sermon, and I’ve been so moved by a student’s sermon that I felt I had been ushered into the presence of the risen Christ. I’ve seen guys who were no better the fifth time they preached for me than they were the first time, but I’ve seen guys whose initial sermon was depressingly awful turn it around so radically by the end of the semester that I almost couldn’t recognize them as the same preacher. On the first day of the semester, or the first time I hear a student preach, I have no way of knowing if he has what it takes or is willing to do what he must to be the preacher he needs to be, but I can usually tell by the second sermon if he does, because that is when he has to act on what I told him after his first sermon. What makes the difference? � �

�� CALLING

The most frustrated preacher is the one who has a sense of duty, but not a burning calling. Preaching is not just another helping profession, a Christian version of politics or the Peace Corps. The call to preach is a definite demand issued by the Holy Spirit that ignites a fire in one’s bones that cannot be extinguished by the hard-hearted, stiff-necked or dull of hearing. A preacher who has been called must preach what God has spoken simply because God has spoken it. The success of one’s ministry will depend on the strength of his calling. His willingness to work at his preaching will be proportional to his conviction that God has called him to preach and to be as fit a vessel for God’s use as he can be. The Holy Spirit must undergird everything else from preparation to delivery, and that will not happen apart from that calling. �� TEACHABILITY

Being a preaching professor is like getting paid to tell a mother

WHY SOME PREACHERS GET BETTER AND OTHERS DON’T

that her baby is ugly. It might be the truth, but it’s not a truth anyone wants to hear. Most guys I have taught dread my comments and cringe when I tell them they missed the point of the text or seemed unprepared. They tire of hearing me tell them they lacked energy or failed to establish a connection with the audience. Every now and then, however, someone smiles gratefully as I offer corrections and suggestions. Someone may even say, “I want you to be really tough on me. Tell me everything I’m doing wrong, because I really want to do this well.” That guy is going to be fine, because his spirit is teachable and he’s willing to pay the cost of personal discomfort in order to be effective. He understands that he is a vessel in service of the text, and his feelings are not the point. �� PASSION

Almost all my students are passionate about Christ, about reaching the lost, and about the Word of God. The problem is not that they don’t feel passionate, but rather that they do not show passion. What I feel is never the point, whether good or bad, but rather how I act. If my delivery of the Word does not convey that passion, then my audience will not be moved to be passionate about it either. The prophets were all passionate. The apostles were passionate. Jesus was passionate. Why else would farmers, fishermen, and housewives come and stand in the Galilean sun for hours just to hear him? I once heard a missionary preach at the Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference. He was dynamite, preaching a great expository sermon with incredible energy and moving the entire audience by his treatment of the Word and his testimony of baptizing tens of thousands of Africans. Astonished by his great preaching, I approached him and held out my hand to introduce myself. “Hershael,” he said, shocking me that he knew my name, “we went to seminary together.” Embarrassed, I admitted that I did

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not remember him. “You had no reason to,” he explained. “I was very quiet, never spoke in class and never went out of my way to meet anyone.” I asked him to explain what happened. “When I got on the mission field, no one would listen to my preaching of the gospel. I was putting them to sleep. When I came stateside and preached in churches, they were bored to tears. Finally, I realized that the only way to be effective was to preach the Word in the way it deserved to be preached, so I became willing to go beyond my natural personality and comfort zone and allow God to make me effective. I prayed for the Word to so grip me in the pulpit that I would never be boring again.” His teachability led him to show a passion that was not natural to his introverted personality. It was supernatural. �� RECKLESS ABANDON � �

The generation of students I now teach have grown up with the written word — on screens, smartphones, blogs, Kindles, and now iPads. Through video games they have raced cars, built civilizations, won wars, destroyed zombies, and killed hundreds. They communicate orally far less than any previous generation, and when they do so, they typically do it with less passion. Yet God still uses the preaching of his Word — an oral event — to edify the church, encourage the saints, and engage the lost. So to preach the Word, a young man has to be willing to get completely out of the comfortable cocoon he’s built in his personality and habits, and recklessly abandon himself to risk being a fool for Christ. I tell my students, “That little voice inside your head saying ‘That’s just not who I am’ is not your friend. Sanctification is the process by which the Holy Spirit overcomes ‘who I am’ and shapes me into who he wants me to be. So if I need to preach with a reckless abandon that is foreign to my natural way, I will beg the Holy Spirit to help me do it for Christ.”

WHY SOME PREACHERS GET BETTER AND OTHERS DON’T

�� PAY THE PRICE

Frankly, very few students I teach fail to get the meaning of the text. They often demonstrate an exegetical and hermeneutical sophistication that astounds me. They are serious about the Word. But they make the mistake of thinking that if they just feel that way, and if they just say the words, the preaching will take care of itself. And if they keep thinking that, if they insist on “data dump” sermons that just concentrate on the content and not also on the delivery, there’s not much I can do for them. They will be the kind of preachers they want to be. But if someone has a burning calling, a teachable spirit, a passionate heart, and a reckless abandon to pay the price to preach well, then not even the limitation of their own background, personality, or natural talents will keep them from preaching the Word of God with power. � �

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Expository ministry: A comprehensive vision When God speaks, creation obeys. When he spoke the universe into existence, it happened (Gen 1:3-26). When he speaks into the cold, dead hearts of sinners, a new creation appears (2 Cor 5:17). When preachers exposit the Word of God and announce that Jesus is the Christ, the church is built (Matt 16:16-18). BY DAN DUMAS

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hen God speaks, creation obeys. When he spoke the universe into existence, it happened (Gen 1:3-26). When he speaks into the cold, dead hearts of sinners, a new creation appears (2 Cor 5:17). When preachers exposit the Word of God and announce that Jesus is the Christ, the church is built (Matt 16:16-18). Whenever God’s Word is proclaimed, something comes into existence that wasn’t there before. Even a casual observation of the evangelical landscape reveals that much of this church-building, Christ-centered, truth-driven,


gospel-proclaiming, expository preaching has turned into, well, something else. If the church is going to flourish, then something needs to change. THE PREACHING

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If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’re familiar with expository preaching. Maybe you’ve heard it before, maybe you hear it every week or maybe you do it every week at your church. Expository preaching happens when a preacher lays open a biblical text so that its original meaning is brought to bear on the lives of contemporary listeners. Expository preaching is a call to deliver from the pulpit what has already been delivered in the Scriptures. If this happens at your church every week, then praise God. This is the kind of preaching God’s people have always needed — and nothing has changed. It’s the kind of preaching that Christ modeled when he explained to his disciples “the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27). It’s the kind of preaching commanded in the Great Commission, practiced in the early church, reinforced in Paul’s Pastoral Epistles and demonstrated throughout church history. It’s not the job of the preacher to improve upon the program God instituted in the first place. Unfortunately, many churches aren’t getting expository preaching from the pulpit. This is a primary cause for the epidemic of biblical illiteracy in the pews. Preachers aren’t teaching the Bible, and they’re not teaching their people how to read it and study it for themselves. Not surprisingly, people grow disinterested in the Bible. Faithful, expository preaching is instead being replaced with whatever scratches the itching ears of our self-centered, consumerist culture. Ironically, this pursuit of relevance has achieved just the opposite. People don’t see the immediate impact the Bible has on their lives because preachers are too busy trying to chase the bankrupt idol that is relevance. Why has expository preaching been exchanged for this pragmatism? Because it’s hard work. It takes serious commitment

EXPOSITORY MINISTRY: A COMPREHENSIVE VISION

to spend time studying week-in and week-out, praying through the text, allowing it to marinate the preacher’s own soul, spending time in the original languages, trying to place himself in the first century, and reading the insights of men past and present with more wisdom than he. If God’s people are going to be presented “mature in Christ” (Col 1:28), then biblical, expository preaching needs to return to the sacred desk of local churches. If you’re working faithfully to exposit the Scriptures, then this book will encourage you to excel still more and give you some allies along the way. If you’re wondering if the Bible is what your people really need, then this book will call you back and remind you that God provides all his people need in his Word (2 Tim 3:16). All he calls preachers to do is open the Bible, study it, and proclaim its message. THE PREACHER

Expository preaching, however, is about more than preaching. It’s about preaching and the preacher; the ministry and the man. People need preaching grounded in and guided by the Scriptures, and they need preachers grounded in and guided by the Scriptures. There’s a reason the majority of the biblical qualifications for leadership in the local church center on character (1 Tim 3:1-13; Titus 1:6-9). Such a noble calling requires noble character. The last thing the church needs is a preacher who preaches against adultery one day, and is found guilty of it the next, or a preacher who preaches self-control, but clearly lacks it in the way he uses the Web, consumes, and eats. Churchgoers know they can trust the preaching in their pulpit only as far as they can trust the preacher who steps into it every week. The fruitfulness of a man’s ministry will never exceed that of his life. God’s people need expository preaching from godly men who lead expository lives and do expository ministry. If the man is going to be an expositor in the pulpit, then he had better be an expositor in

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the study, in the home, in the prayer meeting, at the kids’ soccer games, and all the other places where he lives out God’s call on his life (i.e., everywhere). The same commitment demanded in the study lays claim on the entirety of the preacher’s life and is to be applied relentlessly, the commitment to live out God’s Word as the final authority rather than our own minds. A commitment to this kind of lifestyle is the recipe for faithful, expository preaching and faithful, expository ministry. And a funny thing happens when preachers start living faithfully and start preaching the Bible: their people start to want more of it. Your church members will begin to recognize that God’s Word is to be desired more than gold, and is sweeter than the honeycomb (Ps 19:10). They start to crave the “solid food” of God’s Word (Heb 5:12). They can’t get enough of it. They want to hear more preaching and teaching. They want to know how to get more out of the sermon. They become grateful for faithful preaching. They want to know how to read and study the Bible for themselves. They want to know what resources they can take advantage of in their personal study. And if you’re a preacher, you want this for your people, but you must remember that your church will never esteem God’s Word any higher than you do. THE PEOPLE

But we’re not just equipping and encouraging preachers here. We’re going beyond the preaching, past the preacher to his people, the recipients of the expositor’s ministry. The goal is never to have one guy in the church (the preacher) who knows how to read his Bible and how to use it to have an impact on people’s lives. Local churches should brim with people equipped to use their Bibles in their own lives and that of those around them. When Luther and the Reformers advocated for the priesthood of all believers, they were reminding Christians that individual people are ultimately responsible for the eternal state of their soul.

EXPOSITORY MINISTRY: A COMPREHENSIVE VISION

Whether you’re in a church with consistently edifying sermons or with crummy, boring preaching, you are the one who will stand before God. So it’s important for you to know how to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ (2 Pet 3:18). Fortunately, God has not left us alone in this glorious task. He has given us fellow believers, the local church, pastors, the canon of Scripture, and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, he has “granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Pet 1:3).

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David Brainerd: Preach for holiness by preaching the gospel David Brainerd was a missionary to the American Indians in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania. Brainerd’s primary method in his mission work was Christ-centered preaching. According to Brainerd, Christ was the energizing center of every sermon but he is also the mark, or the goal of every sermon. BY DAVID E. PRINCE

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avid Brainerd was a missionary to the American Indians in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania. Born in Connecticut in 1718, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 29 in the home of his friend Jonathan Edwards. Edwards preached the funeral sermon for Brainerd and published his diary. Brainerd would have a hard time being accepted by any missionary board today. His health was poor and he was expelled from Yale in 1742 for accusing some faculty member of being carnal and unconverted, which meant that he could not serve as a pastor in


the region. Brainerd was devastated and felt cut off from pursuing his calling until he began serving as a missionary to the American Indians in 1743. CHRIST IS THE CENTER AND GOAL OF EVERY SERMON

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Brainerd’s primary method in his mission work was Christ-centered preaching. He explained his approach to preaching in his journal: “I cannot but take notice, that I have, in the general, ever since my first coming among these Indians in New Jersey, been favoured with that assistance, which to me is uncommon, in preaching Christ crucified, and making him the centre and mark to which all my discourses among them were directed.” According to Brainerd, Christ was the energizing center of every sermon but he is also the mark, or the goal, of every sermon. His preaching was both Christocentric and Christotelic. He explains his homiletical method as focusing on “the being and perfections of God,” man’s “deplorable state by nature as fallen creatures,” “the utter insufficiency of any external reformations ... to open [Jesus’] all-sufficiency and willingness to save the chief of sinners,” and “thereupon to press them without delay.”

Thus, Brainerd’s normal expositional pathway was: 1. The perfections of God. 2. The fallenness of man. 3. The utter insufficiency of self-justification. 4. The utter sufficiency of Christ to save. 5. The urgent call to respond to Christ by faith without delay. CHRIST IS THE SUBSTANCE OF EVERY BIBLICAL SUBJECT

Brainerd explained that no matter the biblical subject, “I have been naturally and easily led to Christ as the substance of every subject.” He elaborated regarding his relentless Christ-focus in preaching:

DAVID BRAINERD: PREACH FOR HOLINESS BY PREACHING THE GOSPEL

If I treated on the being and glorious perfections of God, I was

thence naturally led to discourse of Christ as the only “way to the Father.”—If I attempted to open the deplorable misery of our fallen state, it was natural from thence to show the necessity of Christ to undertake for us, to atone for our sins, and to redeem

us from the power of them. If I taught the commands of God, and showed our violation of them, this brought me in the most

easy and natural way, to speak of and recommend the Lord Jesus Christ, as one who had “magnified the law” we had broken, and who was “become the end of it for righteousness, to everyone that

believes.” And never did I find so much freedom and assistance in making all the various lines of my discourses meet together, and centre in Christ, as I have frequently done among these Indians.

It is important to note that for Brainerd preaching Christ from every text did not involve personal ingenuity and hermeneutical gymnastics. He consistently uses the words “easily” and “natural” when he refers to preaching Christ from every text. He wrote, “I have been drawn in a way not only easy and natural, proper and pertinent, but almost unavoidable, to discourse of him, either in regard of his undertaking, incarnation, satisfaction, admirable fitness for the work of man’s redemption, or the infinite need that sinners stand in of an interest in him; which has opened the way for a continual strain of gospel-invitation to perishing souls, to come empty and naked, weary and heavy laden, and cast themselves upon them.” CHRIST IS THE CENTER IN WHICH ALL THE LINES OF REVELATION MEET

Brainerd was convinced that the Spirit had enabled him to preach Christ in plain speech, “with such freedom, pertinency, pathos, and application to the conscience, as, I am sure, I never could have made myself master of by the most assiduous application of mind.” He notes that formerly he read Acts 10, the Apostle Peter’s discourse

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to Cornelius, and “wondered to see him so quickly introduce the Lord Jesus Christ into his sermon, and so entirely dwell upon him through the whole of it, observing him in this point very widely to differ from many of our modern preachers: but latterly this has not seemed strange, since Christ has appeared to be the substance of the gospel, and the centre in which the several lines of divine revelation meet.” PROMOTE MORALITY BY PREACHING CHRIST

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Brainerd preached with the conviction that “morality, sobriety, and external duties” are best “promoted by preaching Christ crucified.” He believed that the external duties of Christianity flow from the internal power of genuinely embracing divine grace in Christ. The proper relationship between the gospel indicative and imperative is not to pit one against the other. Rather, it is to understand that their relationship is irreversible. The imperative rests on the foundational gospel indicative and is consequential. Brainerd explains: And God was pleased to give these divine truths such a powerful influence upon the minds of these people, and so to bless them for the effectual awakening of numbers of them, that their lives

were quickly reformed, without my insisting upon the precepts of morality, and spending time in repeated harangues upon external duties. When these truths were felt at heart, there was now no

vice unreformed,—no external duty neglected. … The reformation was general; and all springing from the internal influence of divine truths upon their hearts; and not from any external restraints, or because they had heard these vices particularly exposed, and

repeatedly spoken against.

Brainerd believed that according to Christ and his apostles, “smooth and plausible harangues upon moral virtues and external duties, at best are like to do no more than lop off the branches of

DAVID BRAINERD: PREACH FOR HOLINESS BY PREACHING THE GOSPEL

corruption, while the root of all vice remains still untouched” and the only way to get to the root of the sin problem was by the gospel of sovereign grace in Christ. Brainerd also contended that when the root of sin was severed by a focus on the gospel people naturally moved toward positive spiritual disciplines such as corporate worship and prayer. He explained that it was “not because I had driven them to the performance of these duties by a frequent inculcating of them, but because they had felt the power of God’s word upon their heart,—were made sensible of their sin and misery, and thence could not but pray, and comply with every thing they knew was duty, from what they felt within themselves.” THE SOUL�HUMBLING DOCTRINES OF GRACE BRING HOLINESS

Brainerd clarifies that he does not oppose the preaching of morality, but only insists that morality must be preached as a consequence of faith in the gospel, and not abstracted from the gospel. He summarizes his thoughts about his preaching: “That the reformation, the sobriety, and external compliance with the rules and duties of Christianity, appearing among my people, are not the effect of any mere doctrinal instruction, or merely rational view of the beauty of morality, but from the internal power and influence that divine truths (the soul-humbling doctrines of grace) have had upon their hearts.” All who preach, would do well to follow the approach to preaching taught by Jesus, modeled by his apostles, and faithfully applied by Brainerd in his mission work among the American Indians. This article originally appeared on the blog, Prince on Preaching.

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05

5 ways to fight ‘preaching hangover’ You may call it something different, but every pastor knows it well. It is the mental, emotional, and spiritual crash that takes place on Monday as a result of pouring your heart and soul out in the proclamation of God’s Word to God’s people the day before. BY BRIAN CROFT

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ou may call it something different, but every pastor knows it well. It is the mental, emotional, and spiritual crash that takes place on Monday as a result of pouring your heart and soul out in the proclamation of God’s Word to God’s people the day before. Personally, it has affectionately become known as “the preaching hangover.” There is no easy remedy, medication, or quick fix that can prevent it. There are, however, several practical efforts I make every Monday that are tremendously helpful to fight through the fog. Here are five suggestions for your consideration: �� PRAY AND READ SCRIPTURE

I know this seems like a no-brainer for a pastor. The fact is


sometimes on Monday morning ... I don’t feel like it. Yet, this is still what gives life to our weary souls and we must make ourselves continue to engage, even if we are struggling to want to think about anything, even God and his Word. I find pushing through the fog by reaching for the Bread of Life is what gives a helpful kick start as we begin the weekly grind again. �� KNOW YOUR LIMITATIONS

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Many pastors take Monday as their day off. For those of us who choose a different day off to spend with our family, we have to proceed with Mondays carefully. I am in no condition to deal with any heavy, thought-provoking, emotional counseling or conflict situations, at least until after lunch. You may be different, but the “hangover” affects us all in some way that requires discernment as we plan the day. Be careful you don’t put yourself in a position in your day that requires you to make a big decision when you are not nearly as sharp as you need to be to make it. �� EXERCISE

I exercise 4-5 times a week, but if there is a day when it is especially important to do so, it is Monday. If you only exercise one day a week, I recommend it be Monday. It hurts ... many times more than normal following a Lord’s Day, but a good 30-plus minute cardiovascular workout is exactly what I need to help shake the preaching hangover. �� ASSIGN ACHIEVABLE TASKS

The preaching hangover is by no means an excuse to be a sluggard and unproductive. Give yourself attainable tasks and make sure you push through to achieve them. If it is your day off, make sure you are working hard to perk up and engage with your family so your wife and children do not get your “sluggard day.” If you are trying to be productive in the office, but have a hard time studying

FIVE WAYS TO FIGHT “ PREACHING HANGOVER”

for very long as I do, schedule other tasks that are within your frame of mind to accomplish. For me, Monday is full of checking emails, simple administration, running errands, and meeting with folks that I know will be more light, encouraging, and less likely to be a blindside confrontation. You may be able to handle more than I typically can. Just make sure they are tasks that are reasonable for you to accomplish in the day. �� SILENCE

Do whatever you must to provide some silence and solitude for yourself. Sometimes I combine this with my exercise in the morning. I like to go to a park, run, then sit in silence for a little while away from people, just you and God. Silence can be lifegiving when we are often bombarded with words and people the day before. This has become essential for my personal soul care and my ability to work through the Monday fog. I hope in some way these suggestions will trigger ideas that will be of help to you to clear the cobwebs of the preaching hangover. Just remember, when you do have to face a long, weighty, conflictfull Monday because the needs of the congregation demand it. God’s grace is sufficient to walk through it.

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Preaching for conversions The true power of such appeals is not found in the eloquence of the speaker or in the emotions of the listener but in the faithfulness of the God who still speaks through his Word. BY TIMOTHY PAUL JONES

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n the churches where I first came to know Jesus Christ, no service was complete without an invitation — a time for the people in the pews to respond to the message by making their way down the aisle. Especially during weeklong revival services, “Just as I Am” inevitably ran out of verses before the polyesterclad preachers ran out of steam. And so, with “every head bowed, every eye closed, and no one looking around,” the preacher would call for “one more, just one more” as the pianist continued to play. As a child, I remember watching these visiting revivalists through half-closed eyes, waiting for the preacher’s furtive nod to the pianist that would bring the invitation to an end. Whatever you may think about invitations in general or about those preachers’ particular methods, one thing is clear: They weren’t afraid to preach with the expectation of conversions. Neither were the preachers and prophets whose words the Holy Spirit has preserved in the pages of the New Testament. John the Baptist heralded the coming of Christ with a call to turn


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from one way of life to another (Mark 1:3-5). When Jesus made his way back to Galilee from the desert of temptation, his proclamation to the people was, “The kingdom of God is at hand! Repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15). Repentance was an imperative in Simon Peter’s message on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:38). In a letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul put it this way: “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God!” (2 Cor 5:20). Proclamation from Southern Baptist pulpits has historically reflected this openness to preaching for conversions. John A. Broadus — second president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the pastor who baptized missionary Lottie Moon — never seemed ashamed to aim his proclamations with an expectation of conversions. An eyewitness declared that, when Broadus preached to troops during the Civil War, “Again and again would the vast congregations be melted down under the power of the great preacher, and men ‘unused to the melting mood’ would sob with uncontrollable emotion.” In a message on the resurrection, Broadus declared that Christ “rose triumphant over death and over sin and over Satan on our behalf” and then implored his hearers, “Have you experienced this new life? Have you continued in it?” Broadus ended another sermon by asking pointedly, “To which class shall we belong, to those who receive or those who reject the Light of the World, our only Savior?” In this, the practices of Broadus stood in continuity with his teachings on revival preaching: “Urge immediate decision and acceptance of the gospel terms, with public confession of Christ,” Broadus instructed his students. GOSPEL PREACHING AND POPULARITY

In a culture intoxicated with the rationalization and justification of every possible lifestyle, calls for “immediate decision and acceptance of the gospel terms” will never be particularly popular. After all, to urge such decision is to declare implicitly that the way hearers are is not the way hearers ought to be — this, in a world where

PREACHING FOR CONVERSIONS

the way people are is widely assumed to be the inescapable result of social and biological inclinations. Possibilities for popularity plummet even further when proclaimers of the Word introduce the inconvenient truth that explicit faith in Jesus represents the sole pathway for persons to become how they ought to be. Early in my ministry, there were a couple of years when I flirted with theological liberalism and found myself uncertain about the exclusivity of the gospel. During those months, I looked back on the decision-seeking preachers of my childhood with embarrassment and disdain. Convinced that I had grown beyond the need to call for conversions, I placed as many miles as possible between my pulpit and the proverbial sawdust trail. I soon realized that — without a passionate conviction that the gospel of Jesus Christ is necessary and exclusive — preaching quickly degenerates into therapeutic moralisms, denuded of power and authority. I assuaged my conscience during those months by appealing to an aphorism supposedly spoken by a popular medieval saint: “Preach the gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.” What I wasn’t willing to admit at the time is that, because the gospel includes assent to specific truths about a specific person, preaching the gospel requires words. A gospel without words is something less than the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ. WHAT I LEARNED AT A FUNERAL

Oddly enough, it was at a funeral that I glimpsed the full folly of my false wisdom. A drug overdose had claimed a young woman’s life, and the funeral director asked me to officiate at a memorial service. When I arrived at the funeral home, I wasn’t certain whether I was at a memorial service or a rock concert. The family had littered the front lawn with beer bottles, and a few family members had clustered near the corners of the building, smoking something stronger than tobacco. Moments before the service, the sister of the deceased woman slipped into the chapel, bypassing the activities outside. She asked

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if she might share a few words with the mourners after my message, and I agreed. After an opening hymn, I proceeded to present the well-polished platitudes that I had prepared for the service. When I stepped aside, the sister stepped to the microphone. Roughly and without the slightest rhetorical flourish, she shared how Jesus Christ had saved her and how other members of their family would likely suffer the same fate as her sister unless they turned from their present way of life. Sitting beside that casket, I watched as God used this woman’s words to transform the hearts of some of her hearers. At first, I watched the scene with condescending smugness. Then, God began to break me. This woman, plainspoken and only recently converted, was speaking the truth that I should have proclaimed with clear and shameless confidence. I, who had been called and trained to preach the gospel, had bartered that calling for a fleeting sense of inclusivity. That moment represented far more than my recognition of the utter bankruptcy of theological liberalism. The conviction that I felt in that moment also marked the beginning of a journey back to boldness in my preaching. I can’t claim that my preaching has been perfect ever since that moment. I can say this, however: From that moment onward, my preaching has centered on the cross of Christ, and I have never hesitated to preach with the expectation of conversions. There may have been times when those old-time evangelists leaned too hard on emotional appeals as we sang one more verse of “Just as I Am.” But this I know: It is equally dangerous to err in the other extreme. As long as there are persons who have yet to embrace the gospel, there is a need for preaching — and not just any preaching. What is needed is gospel-centered preaching that boldly appeals to lost men and women to turn to Jesus Christ. The true power of such appeals is not found in the eloquence of the speaker or in the emotions of the listener but in the faithfulness of the God who still speaks through his Word.

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‘A poore under-rower’: The life and ministry of John Owen Owen’s love and concern for the preaching of the Word reveals a man who was Puritan to the core. BY MICHAEL A.G. HAYKIN

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harles II once asked one of the most learned scholars that he knew why any intelligent person should waste time listening to the sermons of an uneducated tinker and Baptist preacher by the name of John Bunyan. “Could I possess the tinker’s abilities for preaching, please your majesty,” replied the scholar, “I would gladly relinquish all my learning.” The name of the scholar was John Owen, and this small story — apparently true and not apocryphal — says a good deal about the man and his Christian character. His love of and concern for the preaching of the Word reveals a man who was Puritan to the core. And the fragrant humility of his reply to the king was a virtue that permeated all of his writings, in which he sought to glorify the triune God and help God’s people find the maturity that was theirs in Christ. A NONCONFORMIST HERITAGE

John Owen was born in 1616 and grew up in a Christian home in a small village now known as Stadhampton, about five miles southeast


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of Oxford. His father, Henry Owen, was the minister of the parish church there and a Puritan. The names of three of his brothers have also come down to us: William, who became the Puritan minister at Remenham, just north of Henley-on-Thames; Henry who fought as a major in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army; and Philemon, who was killed fighting under Cromwell in Ireland in 1649. Of Owen’s childhood years only one reference has been recorded. “I was bred up from my infancy,” he remarked in 1657, “under the care of my father, who was a nonconformist all his days, and a painful labourer [diligent worker] in the vineyard of the Lord.” At 12 years of age, Owen was sent by his father to Queen’s College, the University of Oxford. Here he obtained his B.A. on June 11, 1632, and immediately went on to study for the M.A., which he was awarded on April 27, 1635. Everything seemed to be set for Owen to pursue an academic career. It was not, however, a good time to launch out into the world of academia. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, had set out to suppress the Puritan movement, and to that end had begun a purge of the churches and universities. By 1637 Owen had no alternative but to leave Oxford and to become — along with many other Puritans who refused to conform to the Established Church — a private chaplain. He eventually found employ in the house of Lord Lovelace, a nobleman sympathetic to the Puritan cause. However, when the English Civil War broke out in 1642 and Lord Lovelace decided to support the king, Owen left his service and moved to London. A “CLEAR SHINING FROM GOD”

The move to London led to an experience that Owen would never forget. By 1642 Owen was convinced that the final source of truth in religion was to be found in the Holy Scriptures. But he had yet to personally experience the Holy Spirit bearing witness to his spirit and giving him the assurance that he was a child of God. Owen found this assurance one Sunday when he decided to go with a cousin to hear Edmund Calamy the Elder, a famous

‘A POORE UNDER-ROWER’: THE LIFE AND MINISTRY OF JOHN OWEN

Presbyterian preacher, at St. Mary’s Church, Aldermanbury. On arriving at this church, they were informed that the well-known Presbyterian was not going to preach that morning. Instead a country preacher (whose name Owen never did discover) was going to fill in for the Presbyterian divine. The preacher took as his text that morning Matthew 8:26: “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” It proved to be a message that Owen needed to hear and embrace. Through the words of a preacher whose identity is unknown God spoke to Owen and removed once and for all his doubts and fears as to whether he was truly regenerate or not. He now knew himself to be born of the Spirit. The impact of this spiritual experience cannot be overestimated. It gave to Owen the deep, inner conviction that he was indeed a child of God and chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, that God loved him and had a loving purpose for his life, and that this God was the true and living God. In practical terms, it meant a lifelong interest in the work of God the Holy Spirit that would issue 30 years later in his monumental study A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit . As he later wrote: “Clear shining from God must be at the bottom of deep labouring with God.” PREACHING BEFORE PARLIAMENT

In 1643 Owen was offered the pastorate in the village of Fordham, six miles or so northwest of Colchester in Essex. Owen was here until 1646 when he became the minister of the church at the market town of Coggeshall, some five miles to the south. Here, as many as 2,000 people would crowd into the church each Lord’s Day to hear Owen preach. Thus, although Owen would later speak slightingly of his preaching to King Charles II — as seen in the anecdote with which this article began — it is evident that he was no mean preacher. The backdrop for these early years of Owen’s pastoral ministry was the English Civil War when England knew the horrors of bloody fields of battle, and father was ranged against son and neighbor against neighbor on

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the battlefield. Well has this period been described as “the world turned upside down.” During these tumultuous days Owen clearly identified himself with the Parliamentary cause. He developed a friendship with the rising military figure Oliver Cromwell and was frequently invited to preach before Parliament. By late 1648 some of the Parliamentary army officers had begun to urge that Charles I be brought to trial on charges of treason since he had fought against his own people and Parliament. Charles I was accordingly put on trial in January 1649, and by the end of that month a small group of powerful Puritan leaders had found him guilty and sentenced their king to death. On Jan. 31, the day following the public execution of the king, Owen was asked to preach before Parliament. Owen used the occasion to urge upon the members of Parliament that for them, now the rulers of England, to obtain God’s favor in the future they must remove from the nation all traces of false worship and superstition and wholeheartedly establish a religion based on Scripture alone. Owen based his sermon on Jeremiah 15. He made no direct reference to the events of the previous day nor did he mention, at least in the version of his sermon that has come down to us, the name of the king. Nevertheless, his hearers and later readers would have been easily able to deduce from his use of the Old Testament how he viewed the religious policy and end of Charles. From the story of wicked King Manasseh that is recorded in 2 Kings 21 and with cross-references to Jeremiah 15, he argued that the leading cause for God’s judgments upon the Jewish people had been such abominations as idolatry and superstition, tyranny and cruelty. He then pointed to various similarities between the conditions of ancient Judah and the England of his day. At the heart of the sermon was a call to Parliament to establish a reformed style of worship, disseminate biblical Christianity, uphold national righteousness, and avoid oppression.


IRELAND AND OXFORD

Later that same year, Owen accompanied Cromwell on a military campaign in Ireland, where Owen stayed from August 1649 to February 1650. Though ill much of this time, he preached frequently to numerous multitudes of men and women hungry to hear the gospel. When Owen returned to England the following year, he confessed that “the tears and cries of the inhabitants of Dublin after the manifestations of Christ are ever in my view.” Accordingly, he sought to convince Parliament of the spiritual need of this land and asked: How is it that Jesus Christ is in Ireland only as a lion staining all

his garments with the blood of his enemies; and none to hold him out as a lamb sprinkled with his own blood to his friends? Is it the sovereignty and interest of England that is alone to be there transacted? For my part … I could heartily rejoice, that … the Irish might enjoy Ireland so long as the moon endureth, so that Jesus Christ might possess the Irish. … If they were in the dark, and loved to have it so, it might something close a door upon the bowels of our compassion; but they cry out of their darkness, and are ready to follow every one whosoever, to have a candle. If their being gospelless move not our hearts, it is hoped their importunate cries

will disquiet our rest, and wrest help as a beggar doth an alms.

Although Owen’s pleas were heeded and this period saw the establishment of a number of Puritan congregations — both Congregationalist and Baptist — in Ireland, the inability of the Puritans in Ireland to work together with likeminded brethren for the larger cause of the Kingdom of Christ hindered their witness. Cromwell appointed Owen to the oversight of Oxford University in 1652 as its vice chancellor. From this position Owen helped to reassemble the faculty, who had been dispersed by the war, and sought to put the university back on its feet. He also had numerous opportunities to preach to the students at Oxford. An important

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work on holiness came out of his preaching during this period. The Mortification of Sin in Believers is in some ways the richest of all of Owen’s treatises on this subject. It is based on Romans 8:13 and lays out a strategy for fighting indwelling sin and warding off temptation. Owen emphasizes that in the fight against sin the Holy Spirit employs all of our human powers. In sanctifying us, Owen insists, the Spirit works “in us and upon us, as we are fit to be wrought in and upon; that is, so as to preserve our own liberty and free obedience. … he works in us and with us, not against us or without us; so that his assistance is an encouragement as to the facilitating of the work, and no occasion of neglect as to the work itself.” “THE CHURCH IN A STORM”

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Oliver Cromwell died in September 1658 and the “rule of the saints,” as some called it, began to fall apart. Two years later a number of Cromwell’s fellow Puritan leaders, fearful that Britain was slipping into full-fledged anarchy, asked Charles I’s son, also called Charles and who was then living in exile on the continent, to return to England as her monarch. However, those who came to power with this monarch, Charles II, were determined that the Puritans would never again hold the reins of political authority. During Charles’ reign and that of his brother James II, the Puritan cause was thus savagely persecuted. A number of Owen’s close friends, including John Bunyan, suffered fines and imprisonment for not heeding these laws. Although Owen was shielded from actual imprisonment by some powerful friends, he led at best a precarious existence until his death. He was once nearly attacked by a mob, who surrounded his carriage. At one point he was tempted to accept the offer of a safe haven in America when the Puritan leaders in Massachusetts offered him the presidency of Harvard. Owen, though, recognized where he was needed most. Despite the attacks on the Puritans, these years were also ones of great literary fruitfulness for Owen. His exhaustive commentary on


Hebrews appeared between 1668 and 1684. A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit came out in 1674 and an influential work on justification, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith , in 1677. Owen’s Meditations and Discourses on The Glory of Christ (1684; 2nd ed. 1696), which English historian Robert Oliver has rightly termed “incomparable,” was written under the shadow of death in 1683 and represents Owen’s dying testimony to the unsurpassable value and joy of living a life for the glory of Christ. He fell asleep in Christ on Aug. 24, 1683. He was buried on Sept. 4 in Bunhill Fields in London, where the bodies of so many of his fellow Puritans were laid to rest until that tremendous Day when they — and all the faithful in Christ — shall be raised to glory. His final literary work is a letter to a close friend, Charles Fleetwood, written two days before his death. In it, he told his friend: “I am leaving the ship of the church in a storm, but whilst the great Pilot is in it the loss of a poore under-rower will be inconsiderable. Live and pray and hope and waite patiently and doe not despair; the promise stands invincible that he will never leave thee nor forsake thee.”

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‘A power to move men’ The legacy of SBTS co-founder John A. Broadus: renowned preacher who was a teacher of preachers. BY TOM J. NETTLES

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hen John A. Broadus died in 1895, his colleague William H. Whitsitt remarked, “Unrivaled genius and usefulness, exquisite learning, peerless eloquence, iron industry, apostolic piety, have all been scattered here by the touch of death. It would seem that a man of such endowments and achievements should be formed to live a thousand years.” Broadus served on the first faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as professor of New Testament, Greek, and homiletics. He also served, following the death of James Petigru Boyce, as the second president of the seminary, 18881895. The praises poured out at his death merely gave intense summary to judgments stated throughout his life. The variety of contributions he made to Baptist life, the worldwide conversation he maintained, the global attainments of his students, and the ageless impact of his diversified scholarly contributions give him an ongoing witness even among those who will never know they have benefited from him. Though his accomplishments were of Renaissance proportions, we remember him particularly as a preacher, a teacher of preachers, and a theoretician of preaching. When theological education was seen as barely tolerable if not undesirable, Broadus’ preaching made it just the thing that everyone should pursue. In an 1892


article titled “Educating a Preacher,” the editor of the Baptist Record wrote: Education has done for Dr. Broadus just what it ought to do for every preacher who has the advantage of the schools. Not that

all of them can come up to him, but they should try to be just as simple and as natural as possible. … We fear that many prefer pomposity to simplicity as they regard it as a work of greatness.

The writer then clinched his analysis through anecdote: A Virginia planter, having heard Broadus preach, rose to make a

public observation. “Brother Moderator, I am a plain, uneducated man. I’ve heard a great deal said about the scholar who spoke just now, and I listened carefully to what he had to say and I did not � �

hear him say a single word that I did not understand. Now, sir, if

educating a preacher makes him talk that way, I want to help.”

Though his talent in public declamation clearly exceeded most of his peers, he often labored to minimize the tactics of his apt delivery. Preaching in Fredericksburg in 1853, he gave special attention to simplicity of content and delivery. “The sermon was rather languid, and certainly one of the most commonplace that even I have ever preached,” he wrote his wife, Maria, about his sermon on Colossians 1:28. Even though the church was crowded and overflowing, he “felt no disposition to rise above a mere unpretending repetition of what they have been hearing from their childhood.” The effects of the sermon rose far beyond the languid or commonplace as Broadus “soon perceived that many in the congregation were deeply moved, and as I spoke of Jesus the Saviour, the all-sufficient, the loving, the only Saviour, and warned then not to reject him, not to put off, warned them to flee the wrath to come, many wept.” Among those moved to weeping like children, were “strong men, they say, and near to the door where the atmosphere is often so chill.”

‘A POWER TO MOVE MEN’

Ten years later, preaching in the Confederate camps, he remarked again on the difficulty of matching delivery to the grandeur of the subject. “How difficult we find it to preach well.” Musing if anyone had really preached, he lamented, “Oh, it is so hard to preach as one ought to do! I long for the opportunity, yet do not rise to meet it with whole-souled earnestness and living faith, and afterwards I feel sad and ashamed.” Knowing the difficulty of preaching well and the serious stewardship that lay on the lives of those called to preach, Broadus did all he could to help men be “Mighty in the Scriptures.” His Lectures on the History of Preaching , while admittedly a bare survey, nevertheless show Broadus’ massive knowledge of the whole field of homiletics. He used this knowledge to point to both flaws and powers of the expositors of the past. Augustine, for instance, was “a great preacher” and a “richly gifted man,” but “unsafe as an interpreter.” His sermons, nevertheless, are “full of power.” If not always correctly, Augustine carefully “explains his text, and repeats many times, in different ways, its substantial meaning.” Augustine’s effective use of dramatic question and answer, apostrophe, digression, and direct address evoked Broadus’ exclamation, “Away with our prim and starch formalities and uniformities!” At the same time, such freedom must be controlled; and in Augustine it “is controlled, by sound judgment, right feeling and good taste.” His analysis of Reformation preaching allowed him to make several strong points about one of the premier aspects of proclamation. “The methods of preaching are, after all, not half so important as the materials,” he observed. “Protestantism was born of the doctrines of grace, and in the proclamation of these the Reformation preaching found its truest and highest power.” None of this, in fact, should change, for until “human nature changes and Jesus Christ changes, the power of the gospel will still reside in the great truth of salvation by sovereign grace.” Others may go their way, but the faithful preacher must “boldly and warmly

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proclaim the truths … so new to every needy heart, of sovereignty and atonement, of spiritual regeneration and justification by faith.” His commentary on Matthew always presents “Homiletical and Practical” suggestions at the end of a major exegetical section. For example, in his homiletical suggestions on the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:18-23, Broadus noted, “Even if preaching were in itself perfect, it would have a very different effect upon different classes of hearers. Our work cannot be fairly tested by its actual results, but rather by its tendencies, aims, and adaptation. Yet a religious teacher should earnestly seek for tangible results, both in winning and building up.” In A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, his homiletical tour de force, Broadus showed himself a master of preaching, not only in practice but in highly articulated theory. In the introduction, Broadus set his discussion in a framework that explained how he could remain so deeply connected to the plain, simple, and earnest people of local congregations, while instructing both aspiring and highly trained theologians worldwide in the craft of sermon building. In the context of a defense of the conscientious use of the principles involved in effective communication — rhetoric, that is, “thoughtful observation of the way in which men do speak, when they speak really well” — he pointed to four things essential for good preaching: piety, natural gifts, knowledge, and skill. Buried in that discussion are words that reflected Broadus’ endearment to the masses: Now the things which ought most to be thought of by the preacher, are piety and knowledge, and the blessing of God. Skill, however valuable, is far less important than these; and there is danger that rhetorical studies will cause men to forget that such is the case. It is lamentable to see how often the remarks upon preaching made by preachers themselves … are confined to a discussion of the performance and the performer. Unsympathizing listeners or readers have, in such cases, too much ground for

‘A POWER TO MOVE MEN’

concluding that preachers are anxious only to display skill, and

gain oratorical reputation.

In a veiled autobiographical depiction of the power of preaching, Broadus portrayed a scenario of a man “who is apt in teaching, whose soul is on fire with the truth which he trusts has saved him and hopes will save others” involved in preaching. The herald engages his fellow-men, “face to face, eye to eye” and in this living interchange “electric sympathies flash to and fro between him and his hearers, till they lift each other up, higher and higher, into the intensest thought, and the most impassioned emotion.” The sympathies continue to surge “higher and yet higher, till they are borne as on chariots of fire above the world.” In this, the greatest of any human endeavor, “there is a power to move men, to influence character, life, destiny, such as no printed page can ever possess.” � �

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Should I ever break from an expository sermon series? I am a shepherd who preaches, not a preacher who shepherds. In other words, I am not merely a Bible teacher exegeting the text, but a pastor walking through life with the people I serve and applying the texts I exegete. BY HERSHAEL W. YORK

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reaching through books of the Bible is my jam. I love to take months and work through a book, as I did recently in Hebrews over the course of 44 sermons. I am convinced and see persistent evidence that the best way Christians learn the Word of God is through the systematic and regular study of its books. Only careful exposition that builds line upon line, precept upon precept, truth upon truth, will give those in my care a strategic grasp of biblical truth over a span of years. Since the Bible has 66 books and two testaments but I only have one life to preach it, I may change the lens from one book to another so that I’m looking more or less closely at its treasures. While I have to decide whether to take months or weeks in any one book, my standard method of preaching and teaching is systematic exposition.


But I am a shepherd who preaches, not a preacher who shepherds. In other words, I am not merely a Bible teacher exegeting the text, but a pastor walking through life with the people I serve and applying the texts I exegete. Every so often a life event occurs that requires — even demands — that I deviate from my schedule, that I park the plan for a while to preach to a specific need that occupies the minds and troubles the hearts of my people. To ignore it would be spiritual malpractice. A doctor might have a patient on a healthy diet and particular pharmaceutical regimen for a heart issue, but if a kidney stone suddenly lodges somewhere in the patient, the doctor has to treat that . Pastors, too, must keep their eyes on the acute as well as the chronic. THINGS HAPPEN � �

Imagine a pastor is preaching through Romans, and he’s preparing a message for the following Sunday from Romans 13:1-7 on submitting to government authorities. That Friday night at a church-sponsored soccer league, one of his members gets in his car to leave the game early and doesn’t see the toddler that has run away from her parents, and he tragically runs over and kills the little girl. I can hardly imagine a greater heartbreak in a church family or one needing more skillful and loving attention. If that pastor stubbornly sticks to his schedule and preaches on the Christian’s responsibility to government, he will miss his people’s acute need to hear biblical truth and know God really is in control. He will fail to seize the unique teaching moment borne out of desperation and pain. Maintaining a preaching calendar can hardly be thought more virtuous than seizing a moment to glorify Christ in suffering. Many times I’ve been preaching through a book when a massive event occurred in our community or nation and I found that, amazingly, the very passage I was scheduled to preach directly

SHOULD I EVER BREAK FROM AN EXPOSITORY SERMON SERIES?

applied to the situation. I’ve often been stunned that a sovereign God planned my preaching schedule to work in confluence with particular incidents and experiences. Those moments encourage the pastor’s heart since they bear witness not only to the providence of the Lord but also to his leadership of the pastor. At other times, however, there’s a need to address something in our corporate or national life that has no real relationship to my intended text. I neither want to twist the meaning of the text nor ignore the life event that stands like an elephant in the room. If what I had planned doesn’t address the questions tearing at everyone’s mind, I will step aside from my schedule and choose a text that provides a biblical perspective people need to hear. A GENERATIONAL TRAGEDY

No Sunday in my lifetime illustrates this point better than Sept. 16, 2001 — the Sunday after the Twin Towers crumbled. Planes had just begun to fly again. Airports were still empty. No one knew if another attack was imminent or how the United States might retaliate. Were we heading for war? How should Christians think about Muslims? How do we process the anger we feel? Why would God let this happen? What should a faithful pastor do? John MacArthur preached “A Biblical Perspective on Death, Terrorism, and the Middle East” from James 4. John Piper preached “A Service of Sorrow, SelfHumbling, and Steady Hope in Our Savior and King, Jesus Christ” from Romans 8:35–39. Tim Keller, preaching in the city where the attacks occurred and to many who had lost friends and loved ones, preached “Truth, Tears, Anger, and Grace” from John 11. These men are noted expositors, and though their sermons could certainly be considered faithful expositions of the text, none slavishly stuck with the original plan. Because they were all pastors first , they laid aside their plan in order to shepherd the hearts of their people who were hurting, angry, frightened, and searching for divine wisdom.

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SHEPHERDING IN A FALLEN WORLD

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My methodology is not my goal, but the tool by which I accomplish my goal. My great ambition is to see Christ formed in his people through his Word planted in their lives. And sometimes, when local, national, or world events break our hearts and captivate our consciences — when they seize our minds or rob our peace, when they threaten to divide us or to lead some astray — the most faithful thing I can do is preach a fitting Word from “another” text. The people who weekly sit under my preaching are accustomed to the system I use. If I depart from it for a Sunday, the deviation itself both comforts and informs them. They know their pastor is living in their same world. I highlight the sufficiency of the Word not only by systematic study, but also by demonstrating its ability to speak to every situation. Not only do I teach them the content of the Word, but also its comfort of the Word. I am committed to exposition every time I stand in the pulpit. I have nothing to give my listeners besides God’s Word. That is inviolate. But even though the best way to teach the Word is systematically and sequentially, life doesn’t always happen systematically and sequentially. The faithful shepherd knows when to step out of the routine because a large shadow has been cast across his flock, and he knows where to lead them to find the illumination and help they need. This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition.

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I am a sinner preaching to sinners I am not worthy to be a minister, but Christ was worthy for me. I do not and will not measure up, but Jesus perfectly measured up for me. The gospel is true for God’s people in the pew and it is true for me, his herald, as well. BY JEFF ROBINSON

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have served as a pastor around six years now, and one reality I still cannot reconcile is the notion of preaching to other people the myriad texts (all of them, so far) I find exceedingly difficult to obey myself. I preach about slaying the deadly viper of pride, but then I am proud of the way I exposited and communicated the text. I tell my people that they should pray without ceasing, and yet my prayer life is too often as inconsistent as summer rainfall in Kentucky. I preach about seeking God’s grace to lower the thermostat on our tempers after I have fired angry darts at my wife and children on the way to church, “Shut up, we’re going to worship!” You get my drift. For a man called to preach God’s Word each Lord’s Day, this creates an existential crisis. A particular Sunday presented a prime example of the tension that grips me when preaching God’s Word, a tension that always morphs into a full-blown fear that each week behind the sacred


desk I am a trafficker in unlived truth. The text was Matthew 5:9 from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” Great verse. Great opportunity to talk about selflessness in relating to others, displaying both love to God and love to neighbor and the like. I made this application point: “When we are in conflict with others, we must talk less and listen more. We must learn to turn the other cheek in the way we respond verbally to others.” Ouch. I was getting paid to talk. And in conflict with others, sometimes I still struggle mightily to be like my Lord to turn the other cheek. On the way home that particular Sunday I kept thinking, I just preached on peacemaking and my own pastor (that would be me) falls miserably short of God’s glory in this area. DYING MEN PREACHING TO DYING MEN � �

How are God’s undershepherds to come to grips with this daunting reality? How do we reconcile the all-too obvious truth that we are sinners preaching to sinners? How do we get some in our congregations over the notion that we are popes, we are monastics who descend from the cloister each week where we’ve been holed up all week, dodging the world, the flesh, and the devil? Sin dwells even in monasteries because sinners live there. But many of the people to whom we are called to minister don’t really believe this about us, and when we sin — and we will — some of them write us off as phonies or Pharisees or worse. In the early months of my first pastoral ministry, a man told me I wasn’t qualified to be a pastor because I sinned. He seemed a bit stunned when I admitted that, though I believed his case for ministerial perfectionism unbiblical, I acutely felt the tension of my standing as a saved-by-grace-sinner calling other sinners to walk God’s inspired line. I told him, “If you think that one thing you just mentioned is the worst weakness I have, you don’t know the half of it!” Veteran pastor and counselor Paul Tripp, in his excellent book Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of

I AM A SINNER PREACHING TO SINNERS

Pastoral Ministry, rode to my rescue by reminding me again that I am, in the words of the great Puritan Richard Baxter, a dying man called to preach to dying men. I must sit under my own preaching and teaching. My weekly preparation must never be less than devotional. And for any pastor to survive this sanctifying meat-grinder known as the pastoral ministry, it must never become clinical. Pastors differ from garden-variety pew-sitters only in this fact: we have the unique privilege — and profound advantage — of being called to study in significant depth God’s chosen sin-killing, heart-renewing, image-restoring agent: the Bible. Yes, we are our own pastors, and we must listen to our preaching each week, which is to say, we must do far more than “handle” God’s Word: it must handle us as well. Thus, we must ask difficult questions about canceled sin that still clings to our hearts like barnacles on an old shrimp boat. We must ask God to use his Word to expose our besetting sins and hidden weaknesses so that we become more and more like Christ . PASTORS ARE PAPER PLATES

And we must remind our people that, despite popular misconceptions about the perfections inherent in God’s ministers, the inspired witness says we are mere clay pots, Walmart crockery, weak men in the midst of our own sanctification — just like the hearers of the sermons we preach. We stand in desperate need of wave upon wave of grace to wash upon the shores of our lives every moment, and we must not hide that face from our people behind a mask of subtle perfectionism. Best of all, I do not have to be paralyzed by the expectation of perfection — whether it arises from my mind or the congregation’s — because Jesus was perfect for me. I am not worthy to be a minister, but Christ was worthy for me. I do not and will not measure up, but Jesus perfectly measured up for me. The gospel is true for God’s people in the pew and it is true for me, his herald, as well. May God grant his ministers grace to hear and heed their own preaching.

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What has preaching to do with discipleship? Following Jesus means obeying the Great Commission, with its command to make disciples of all the nations. But what does that mean? And how do we do it? BY DAVID SCHROCK

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iscipleship programs. Discipleship pastors. Discipleship pressure. So much talk about discipleship in the church today. And rightly so. Following Jesus means obeying the Great Commission, with its command to make disciples of all the nations. But what does that mean? And how do we do it? In a few other articles I’ve answered what it means to be a disciple and who makes disciples. But today, I want to begin to address the question: How do we disciple? A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Many helpful books have been written on discipleship. My (old) favorite is Robert Coleman’s Master Plan of Evangelism; my (new) favorite might be Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus by Mark Dever. Both are simple reads. The former tracing Jesus’ pattern of discipleship; the latter giving practical instructions on “helping others follow Jesus,” which is Dever’s simple definition


of discipling. If you have never read a book on discipleship, I’d recommend you pick up one of these two — then read the other. In the meantime, let’s try to put a few how-tos in place, with or without any prerequisite reading. Without limiting or listing the number of ways discipleship can be carried out, here are three ways we might conceive of discipleship.

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Discipleship by preaching — All discipleship begins with this core spiritual discipline. While preaching by itself is inadequate for maturing a disciple; it is not nothing. Therefore, biblically and practically, it is the place to begin. Discipleship by association — The fundamental means of discipleship is initiating a relationship (formal or informal) that helps another follow Jesus. Such association may come through adoption (a Christian man reaching out and “adopting” a younger Christian man), enlistment (a younger Christian woman prayerfully seeking an older Christian woman), or conversion (a man receives Christ, whereby the Christian witness is now responsible to give this baby Christian spiritual milk) Discipleship logistics — In any trade, a skillful apprentice needs good tools. The same is true with disciple-making. Thus, (1) the local church, (2) intentional conversations, (3) scheduled appointments, and (4) good biblical resources are four ways discipleship can and should be implemented. Truly, these elements only scratch the surface of disciple-making, but in the next few weeks I hope to return to them to outline somewhat of a basic “how-to” for biblical discipleship. Today, let’s just consider the first aspect of discipleship by preaching. DISCIPLESHIP BY PREACHING

Biblical discipleship begins with a biblical pulpit. For example, Acts 14:21–22 reads, “When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to

WHAT HAS PREACHING TO DO WITH DISC IPLESHIP?

Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.” From these two verses we find two principles for discipleship. First, all disciples are made through preaching — in one form or another. Because faith comes by hearing the gospel (Rom 10:17), Christcentered, gospel-rich preaching is the starting point. For no matter how good a “discipleship program” a church has; it’s disciplemaking won’t rise above its preaching. Why? Because pastors are the lead exemplar for sharing the gospel, reading the Scripture, and applying the Bible to all of life. By implication, a gospel-centered pulpit (shorthand for the weekly preaching of any local church) should result in gospelcentered members who are motivated and equipped to “preach” the gospel. In this way, the pulpit is not set against the pews, but rather the clear preaching of the gospel on Sunday empowers church members to proclaim the gospel through the week — hence, increasing the decibel level of the gospel. A disciplemaking church, therefore, is centered on and sent out by a gospel-centered pulpit. “Disciple-making,” therefore, as a church-wide passion will rise or fall with its emphasis (or the lack thereof) from the pulpit. In Paul’s ministry, his preaching called for conversion — i.e., repentance and faith (Acts 20:21) — and conformity to the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27). As someone who modeled personal discipleship, Paul’s preaching was the starting point for disciple-making. In our day, conversion may come in a Sunday service or a Tuesday lunch meeting. But the abiding truth remains: disciples are born by the preaching of the Word. So, we ask: What is the church making who has a complex system for “discipleship,” but little emphasis on the Word of God? Discipleship does not end with gospel preaching, but it must begin with it.

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Second, all disciples need the Word to strengthen and encourage them. Because the Great Commission calls for making disciples who obey all that Jesus’ commanded, not converts who merely “pray a prayer,” ongoing teaching is necessary. More exactly, disciples need to be strengthened by the Word and encouraged by people who know them. As Paul and Barnabas returned to the churches in Galatia in Acts 14, they did both. When they traveled to be with the churches they had planted in Galatia, Luke records how they were “strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (v. 22). Later, Paul would write the Galatians a whole letter to strengthen them in their faith and to make sure that false teachers did not lead them astray. He did this with many of his churches, and hence so much of our disciple-making efforts today depend on his churchdirected letters. Indeed, Christ’s disciples always need the Word of God and they need faithful teachers to help them understand what it means and how it applies. Every local church should have these gifted teachers — they are called elders. But local churches should also have other non-elders (godly, mature men and women) who give themselves to imparting biblical truth to others. A DISCIPLE�MAKING CHURCH

While every church has its own idiosyncrasies, a disciple-making church is marked by a committed group of disciples meeting regularly to hear the word of God, so that from the overflow of their hearts they might “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). Indeed, disciple-making is not complex. It just takes consistency and enduring focus on the Christ-centered, gospel-rich message of

WHAT HAS PREACHING TO DO WITH DISC IPLESHIP?

the Bible. For this reason, preaching and hearing the gospel (from one of the pastors and from one another) is the starting point for all disciple-making in the local church. May God fill our hearts with the riches of Christ’s Word, so that we might be a church of disciples who make disciples.

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The centrality of the Bible in preaching In a chaotic culture, pastors must rely on the power of God’s Word alone to break through the noise. BY MICHAEL POHLMAN

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ountry music artist Kenny Chesney sums up the current cultural milieu facing the Christian preacher in his new song “Noise,” as he laments the chaotic world of countless competing “voices” vying for our allegiance: Twenty-four hour television, gets so loud that no one listens Sex and money and politicians talk, talk, talk But there really ain’t no conversation Ain’t nothing left to the imagination Trapped in our phones and we can’t make it stop, stop

So, in our noisy world, how is a preacher to be heard? What hope do we have that our words won’t fall on deaf ears? How can we be confident that our sermons will cut through the noise? WHAT THE BIBLE IS

If the preacher is going to be heard in our day, then his words must be of a qualitatively different nature than all of the other words offered today. The preacher’s words must be more powerful, more beautiful, more winsome, and more compelling than the world’s


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words. And these we have in the Bible. Indeed, because of what the Bible is, the preacher must make it central to his sermon if he would be heard in all this noise. I love to remind my students that in addition to the doctrine of God, the doctrine of Scripture is the most important doctrine for the preacher. What we believe about the Bible authorizes our sermons and assures us that things of eternal significance are happening when we expound a given text of Scripture. Take, for example, one aspect of our doctrine of Scripture: its inspiration. When we say the Scripture is “inspired,” we mean it is “God breathed” — that is, a product of God’s Spirit. This is what the Apostle Paul teaches when he says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). The word translated “breathed out by God” is theopneustos. This word is formed from two words theos (God) and pneo (to blow, breathe on). Therefore, what we have in the Scriptures is “God’s breath” in written form. The Apostle Peter likewise identifies the words of Scripture with God’s words when he explains the supernatural origin of the Bible: “For no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:20-21). In these verses Peter captures the breathtaking reality of God’s activity of breathing the Scriptures and the human activity of writing. Indeed, “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” The author of Hebrews, in discussing the divine nature of Scripture, makes this astonishing claim: “For the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). The Bible, as God’s Word, is qualitatively different than any other word in the world.

THE CENTRALITY OF THE BIBLE IN PREACHING

WHAT THE BIBLE DOES

If the preacher is going to be heard in our day, then his words must have the power to hold and move people Godward. When the preacher declares what the Bible says, he is proclaiming the very words of God. And God’s words have power. In the opening pages of the Bible we read, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen 1:3). When God speaks, things like light come into being — and oceans and mountains and skies and plants and animals. God’s Word has a creative power to make something from nothing. Even more astounding is what God’s Word does in salvation. Consider how the Apostle Paul compares God’s power in creation to his creative power in awakening sinners: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). Indeed, a Christian is one who has been “born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet 1:23). We must keep the Bible central in preaching because we know that the Bible alone has the power to create faith: “Faith comes through hearing and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom 10:14). But we would be woefully shortsighted if we stopped here. For God not only uses his Word to convert sinners, but to sanctify saints as well. Jesus made it clear when he gave his Great Commission that God’s people will grow in discipleship as they are taught the Scriptures: “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age’” (Matt 28:18-20). We will labor to keep the Bible central in preaching because God’s people are built up in the faith by teaching them the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27).

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GOD’S WORD ALONE

We must keep the Bible central in our preaching. Every preacher worthy of the name loves the response of Peter to the question Jesus asked him as the crowds were leaving in droves: “Do you want to go as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:67-68). Our world is a chaotic concert of noise. The countless siren songs of the world are powerful and dangerously alluring. The noise of our day has made millions of people deaf to the truth of God. Knowing this, preachers are desperate to cut through the noise. The temptation to part from the Bible and adopt other means of reaching people is real. But to do so would be a tragic mistake, for God’s Word alone has the power to overwhelm the world’s noise.

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Resources FURTHER READING

On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, John A. Broadus He is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World, R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, Mark Dever A Guide to Expository Ministry, Dan Dumas, ed. Preaching With Bold Assurance, Hershael York and Bert Decker Encountering God Through Expository Preaching , Jim Orrick, Brian Payne, and Ryan Fullerton Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today, John Stott Preaching and Preachers, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones The Supremacy of God in Preaching , John Piper Rediscovering Expository Preaching , John MacArthur Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching , Don Kistler, ed.

The Center for Christian Preaching The Center for Christian Preaching is an international center that is unapologetically committed to modeling and promoting expository preaching. Details at sbts.edu/preaching


DOCTORAL DEGREES IN PREACHING OFFERED BY THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Doctor of Ministry in Expository Preaching Designed to equip pastors and other church leaders in the skills of sermon preparation and public exposition of the Scriptures, the Doctor of Ministry in Expository Preaching is founded upon the belief that the health of the local church is grounded in the preaching of the Word of God.

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Doctor of Philosophy in Christian Preaching The Ph.D. in Christian Preaching prepares pastor-theologians to not only develop and deliver Christ-centered sermons but also equip the next generation of ministers to do the same. This degree is offered in a modular format and trains students in the biblical, historical, theological, and homiletical components of preaching. More details at sbts.edu/degrees.

Contributors Brian Croft is senior pastor of Auburndale Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the founder of Practical Shepherding, Inc. He is also senior fellow for the Mathena Center for Church Revitalization and an adjunct professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books including The Pastor’s Ministry and Ministry and Biblical Church Revitalization. Revitalization . He is the husband of Cara and father of four children. Dan Dumas is special assistant to the President at Southern Seminary. He is a church planter and pastor-teacher at Crossing Church in Louisville. He is the author of Live Smart , the co-author of A of A Guide of A Guide Guide to Biblical Biblical Manhood Manhood,, and the editor of A Guide to Expositor Expositoryy Ministry. Dan is married to Jane and has two children. Michael A.G. Haykin serves as professor of church history and biblical biblical spirituality spirituality and as director director of The Andrew Fuller Fuller Center Center for Baptist Studies. Haykin is the author of numerous books including Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church and Eight Women of Faith. Haykin and his wife, Alison, have have two grown children. children. Timothy Paul Jones is Jones is C. Edwin Gheens Professor of Christian Family Ministry, associate vice president for the Global Campus, and pastor at Sojourn Midtown. Midtown . Jones has authored or contributed PROOF, Conspiracies Conspiracie s and to more than a dozen books, including PROOF, the Cross, Cross, Perspectives on Family Ministry, Ministry , and Christian History Made Easy. Easy. He is married to Rayann and they have three daughters. Michael Pohlman is assistant professor and department chair of Christian preaching at Southern Seminary. He is also pastor of Cedar Creek Baptist Church in Louisville. He is married to Anna and they have four children.


David E. Prince is Prince is assistant professor of preaching at Southern Seminary and is pastor of Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. He is the author of In the Arena: The Promise of Sports for Christian Discipleship and The Church with Jesus as the Hero . He is married to Judi and they have eight children.

R. Albert Mohler Jr. serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and as Joseph Emerson Brown Professor of Christian Theology. Mohler hosts two programs: “The Briefing,” a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview; and “Thinking in Public,” conversations with today’s leading thinkers. He is the author of several books, including He Is Not Silent, The Conviction and We Cannot Be Silent . He is married to Mary, and they have to Lead, and We two grown children. � �

Tom J. Nettles is Nettles is senior professor of historical theology at Southern Seminary. Among his books are By His Grace and For His Glory and Baptists and the Bible, co-authored with Dr. Russ Bush; and Why I Am a Baptist , co-edited with Russell D. Moore. He is married to Margaret and they have three grown children.

Jeff Robinson is editor of Southern Equip, Equip, pastor of Christ Fellowship Church in Louisville, L ouisville, senior editor for The Gospel Coalition, adjunct professor of church history at Southern, and senior research and teaching associate for the Andrew Fuller Center. He is co-author with Michael A. G. Haykin of To the Ends of the Earth: Calvin’s Missional Vision and Legacy and Legacy and co-editor with D. A. Carson of Coming Home: Essays on the New Heaven and New Earth. Jeff and his wife, Lisa, have four children. David Schrock serves as preaching pastor at Occoquan Bible Church in Woodbridge, Virginia, and adjunct professor of systematic theology for Boyce College and Southern Seminary. David and wife, Wendy, have three sons.

CONTRIBUTORS

Hershael W. York serves as Victor and Louise Lester Professor of Christian Preaching at Southern Seminary. He is also senior pastor at Buck Run Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky. He is the co-author of Preaching with Bold Assurance. He is married to Tanya and they have two grown sons.

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A growing collection of resources for the growing challenges of ministry

FIND THESE RESOURCES AND MORE AT EQUIP.SBTS.EDU

Preach holiness for we are not frightened enough Jeff Robinson

Staying at the church for the long haul Hershael York

What elements should family worship include? John Divito

Essential-Reading-on-Preaching.pdf

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