Author Archives: deekdubberly

The Alpha and Omega of Expository Preaching

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Alpha Omega 300x284 The Alpha and Omega of Expository Preaching

Steve Lawson is an excellent quoter.  Read any of his books and you’ll find wonderful gems like this one from Merrill Unger on expository preaching:

No matter what the length of the portion explained may be, if it is handled in such a way that its real and essential meaning as it existed in the mind of the particular Biblical writer and in the light of the over-all context of Scripture is made plain and applied to the present-day needs of the hearers, it may properly be said to be expository preaching.  It is emphatically not preaching about the Bible, but preaching the Bible.  ’What saith the Lord’ is the alpha and the omega of expository preaching.  It begins in the Bible and ends in the Bible and all that intervenes springs from the Bible.*

*The quote is included in Lawson’s, Famine in the Land: A Passionate Call for Expository Preaching (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003), 97.  Lawson provides the endnote: Merrill F.  Unger, “Expository Preaching,” Bibliotecha Sacra 111 (October-December 1954): 333-334.

John MacArthur and the Cost of Being a Servant of the Word of God

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In discussing a preacher’s commitment to the truth of God, Peter Adam offers this insightful and moving quotation from John MacArthur:

Fling him into his office. Tear the “Office” sign from the door and nail on the sign, “Study.” Take him off the mailing list. Lock him up with his books and his typewriter and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts and broken hearts and the flock of lives of a superficial flock and a holy God.

Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. And let him come out only when he’s bruised and beaten into being a blessing.

Shut his mouth forever spouting remarks, and stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley.

Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry for God. And make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets.

Put water in his gas tank. Give him a Bible and tie him to the pulpit. And make him preach the Word of the living God!

Test him. Quiz him. Examine him. Humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good comprehension of finances, batting averages, and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day-”Sir, we would see Jesus.”

When at long last he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God. If he does not, then dismiss him. Tell him you can read the morning paper and digest the television commentaries, and think through the day’s superficial problems, and manage the community’s weary drives, and bless the sordid baked potatoes and green beans, ad infinitum, better than he can.

Command him not to come back until he’s read and reread, written and rewritten, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and say, “Thus saith the Lord.”

Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with demands for celestial wisdom. And give him no escape until he’s back against the wall of the Word.

And sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left-God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down-street gossip, but give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward, until all he says about it rings with the truth of eternity.

And when he’s burned out by the flaming Word, when he’s consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, and when he’s privileged to translate the truth of God to man, finally transferred from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently and blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly. Place a two-edged sword in his coffin, and raise the tomb triumphant. For he was a brave soldier of the Word. And ere he died, he had become a man of God.*

*Quoted in Peter Adam’s, Speaking God’s Words: A Practical Theology of Preaching (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 1996), 161-162.  Taken from John MacArthur’s, Rediscovering Expository Preaching: Balancing the Science and Art of Biblical Exposition (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 1992), 348.

How About Some Real St. Patrick for Your St. Patrick’s Day?

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St. Patrick How About Some Real St. Patrick for Your St. Patricks Day?

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated each year in honor of a man that many know very little about.  Here’s a brief biographical sketch of the man behind the holiday.

Contrary to popular belief, and unfortunately irrelevant to many who use St. Patrick’s Day as an opportunity to pontificate about their supposed Irish heritage and an excuse to inebriate themselves upon kelly-greened beverages, St. Patrick was not natively Irish and there is very little reason to believe he was ever drunk or enjoyed pinching his friends.

Patrick was born in Britain to a nominally Christian home. He was reared as the kind of person who probably would have went to church from time to time, but his relationship with the Lord was not something of pressing concern to him as a youth.

Irish slave-trading pirates invaded Patrick’s homeland when he was around the age of sixteen.  Being a healthy young man, the raiders figured Patrick would make for a good, hardworking slave.  He was trafficked away from his friends and family and hauled off to Ireland.  Once there he would be sold as a slave to a powerful war chief.

Patrick served his Irish master as a pig herder.  It was only then, when all of his earthly comforts had been taken away—his home, his family, his friends, his freedom, his dignity—that Patrick began to call out on the God of his youth.  In his suffering he found solace in the solitude of prayer.  It is said that Patrick’s prayer life grew and matured until he was praying nearly 100 times a day and 100 times each night.

One day, after six years of involuntary servitude, Patrick heard the voice of the Lord telling him to escape bondage and return to his homeland.  So he fled.  He walked 200 miles to the coast and convinced a trader ship to allow him safe passage back to Britain.

Once home Patrick joyfully reunited with his family.  He was now a devout Christian man. One night he had a dream in which an Irishman came to him bearing many letters from the Irish people.  The unconverted Irish were pleading with Patrick to return to Ireland and share the gospel with them.  Patrick sensed from this dream that God was calling him to take the gospel to the poor souls of Ireland.  At the time Ireland was an incredibly pagan country.  Its main religion involved various manifestations of Druidism.

Following God’s call upon his life, Patrick prepared for and was eventually ordained into the Christian ministry.  In time he would become a bishop and was sent on mission to Ireland.

Patrick’s Christian message was not easily received among the pagans of Ireland.  It is said that he had many confrontations with Druid priests and was in constant fear of danger for his life.  He wrote, “Daily I expect murder, fraud, or captivity, but I fear none of these things because of the promises of heaven”  (from Mark Galli’s, 131 Christians Everyone Should Know, p. 230).

One thing Patrick is not well-known for but should be is his strong stand against slavery. He is one of the first Christians in recorded history to take a clear and bold stand against this dreadful, inhumane practice.  He had been a slave himself.  He knew the horrors of the practice!

Patrick died in 493 AD.  By that time it is believed that he had been used by God to start over 300 churches and baptize more than 120,000 people. His victorious, yet humble life can be seen in these numbers and in the fact that to his dying day he did not feel he deserved the title of “bishop.”  He preferred to be known simply as a sinner in the gracious hands of God.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE LIFE OF ST. PATRICK?

  1. Love those who mistreat you
    Patrick had every reason in the world to hate the Irish.  They had kidnapped him and forced him into slavery.  Yet he still loved them enough to bring them the good news of Jesus Christ.  There is no one who has wronged us enough to justify our not sharing the gospel with them by our words and our actions.
  2. Listen to the voice of the Lord
    He was not only sensitive to God’s leadership in his life, but he was also obedient to it.  He left Ireland when God told him to.  He went back to Ireland when God told him to do that.  That’s a pretty good track record.  We’d do well to follow Patrick’s  example of sensitivity, trust, and obedience.
  3. Let go of earthly comforts for the sake of the gospel
    Even though he had been reunited with his family afters years of agonizing separation in slavery, he was still willing to lay all those things aside when God called him to go back to Ireland.  What might God be asking you to give up for the sake of his kingdom?

Even Their Virtues Were Burned Away

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Flannery OConnor Even Their Virtues Were Burned Away

From the prophetic voice of Flannery O’Connor:

“At last she lifted her head.  There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk . . . . A visionary light settled in her eyes.  She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.  Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven . . . . And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.  She leaned forward to observe them closer.  They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.  They alone were on key.  Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away . . . . In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile . . . . In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

—Excerpt from the closing paragraphs of O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation,” in Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories, 488-509.

What Does the Preacher Have to Say?

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“What does the preacher have to say that the psychologist, politician, stock broker, or social commentator has not already said with more passion and insight than most pastors can muster even on Easter Sunday? The credibility of the church’s proclamation will not be restored by acquiring new communication skills or devising better sermonic forms, as helpful as these may be. The answer is a preacher in whom the Word of God burns as a fire in his bones, one who must speak because he cannot keep silent, one who preaches with fierce humility yet also with unstinted audacity in the certain knowledge that God Himself is speaking in the faithful proclamation of His Word. Or, as Second Helvetic Confession (1566) put it even more succinctly: “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” This is the burden of doctrinal preaching.”

—Timothy George, “Doctrinal Preaching,” in the Handbook of Contemporary Preaching, edited by Michael Duduit (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1993), 93-102.

On Karl Barth’s View of the Bible and the Sermon

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In his book, The Sermon as God’s Word: Theologies for Preaching, Robert W. Duke “examines a variety of theologies in order to show how the preacher’s choice and development of a text is shaped by the assumptions of which he or she may not consciously be aware” (11).

In the first chapter Duke considers the theology and preaching of neo-orthodoxy’s champion, Karl Barth.  Duke writes one particular paragraph that is chock-full of important Barthian concepts and buzz-words.  Having studied Barth a fair amount over the last five months, I could not help but to nod in happy agreement as I read the following:

This strange book—this Bible—was for Barth a testimony to God’s dealings with people.  It is not essentially a record of our quest for God, but rather of God’s quest, in the person of Jesus Christ, for us.  Nowhere else are we told of this movement of God toward us.  Nor can God’s self-revelation be charted by human reason or discerned from any experience of culture, poetry, or science.  God is wholly other than our thoughts.   To become involved with the Bible is to enter into a strange new world.  Barth never tired of creating images out of his experience.  He writes that our situation is like that of a wayfarer who journeys through life “absorbed in his own thoughts and desires,” with eyes fixed ahead on the bend in the road—the curve that appears to be the goal sought.  This is a familiar world, with all its sights and sounds soothing to the ears, and the traveler retains this sense of well-being until a crisis arises.  But occasionally there occurs a foreign word, a sermon that moves him, excites him, and disturbs this ordered life.  The bend in the road ahead reveals not a continuation of the way he has been traveling, but a strange new land, “distance undreamed of, a vista he does not see, a place he does not know, the beyond!  This new land, shall we seek it? . . . To bring me to this point, to this sign of God’s highway, . . . to the end of what is earthly, and so to the beginning of things divine, just this is the aim of every thought and word of the Bible” (18).

The paragraph is Duke’s, but the quotations within it come from one of Barth’s sermons as recorded in Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Come Holy Spirit: Sermons, 196-197.

What Kind of Dreams Was John Calvin Having?

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John Calvin believed that God places an imprint of immortality upon the soul of every human being.  In defense of such belief, Calvin employs a litany of examples from real life experiences.

When speaking of “the sure indications of the agency of God in man,” Calvin offers the following rather unusual example of what the soul does while a person is asleep.   Calvin asks,

“What shall we say of its [i.e., the soul's] activity when the body is asleep, its many revolving thoughts, its many useful suggestions, its many solid arguments, nay, its presentment of things yet to come?  What shall we say but that man bears about with him a stamp of immortality which can never be effaced?”

—From Calvin’s Institutes (1.5.5, p. 60)

Did Calvin just say that he can see the future in his dreams?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he did.  Hmm?  Maybe there is more to the concept of déjà vu than I realized.  Calvin appears to think so.

My wife probably thinks I’m crazy, but there have been occasions in my life when the example Calvin gives of our dreams providing a “presentment of things yet to come” really clicks for me.

If I tell you the stories I have in mind you’ll likely think I’m crazy too.  Let’s just say that when I read the highlighted passage from Calvin—I definitely related.

P.S.  In case anyone is wondering, I’m referencing the free PDF version of John Calvin’s, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, available online at Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Two Weeks with Dr. Millard Erickson

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Dr 228x300 Two Weeks with Dr. Millard Erickson

My feeble attempt at sneaking a snapshot with my cell phone while Dr. Erickson was lecturing.

I’ve had the wonderful opportunity of spending the last two weeks being taught theology by Dr. Millard J. Erickson.  Dr. Erickson has been teaching theology at the graduate level for nearly fifty years.  He has authored many books and is considered by many to be Carl F. H. Henry’s successor as “the dean of evangelical theologians.”

Dr. Erickson is perhaps known best for his volume of systematic theology, Christian Theology, a work which I’ve used in various courses at three different seminaries now.

The course I’ve been sitting in for four hours a day every day for the last two weeks is titled, “The Last 100 Years of Theology.”  Our course textbook was, A New Handbook of Christian Theologians.

For those interested, a perusal of the notes I managed to type during Dr. Erickson’s lectures will give you a good idea of what I’ve learned.

Dr. Erickson administered a final exam in class today.  It covered quite a bit of material! We were asked about each of the following theological topics from the 20th century:

  • Social Gospel
  • Fundamentalist movement
  • Karl Barth’s view of revelation
  • Paul Tillich’s theological method of correlation and his idea of God as the ground of being
  • Rudolph Bultmann’s employment of the distinction between historie and geschichte and his notion of God as the ground of all being
  • Wolfhart Pannenberg’s notion of revelation as history
  • Jürgen Moltmann and theology as eschatology
  • Process theology’s concept of God as dipolar
  • Liberation theology’s nature of theology
  • African theology and indigenization
  • Death of God theology
  • Communicational role of narrative theology
  • Vatican II and degrees of church membership
  • George Lindbeck’s postliberal thoughts about the nature of doctrine
  • Inclusivism and implicit faith
  • Open theism
  • Annihilationism

The test was no walk in the park, but all of the questions were addressed in both our lectures and assigned reading.

I feel very fortunate to have been able to take a class with Dr. Erickson.  He was a very kind, professional, and sharp theological instructor.  He told our class that we would likely be the last class he ever taught.  What a blessing!