Chapter 7.  The Congregation

MLJ has two errors in view in this chapter.  On one side, he is critical more than once of young preachers he knows who became so enamoured with the Puritans that they modelled themselves on their preaching as closely as possible.  On the other side, he rejects the notion that the preacher can’t seriously expect to communicate well in the modern world until he has (say) worked for six months in a factory in order to get alongside people there, or dropped language such as ‘justification’ that unbelievers don’t understand.  He grasps the nettle of 1 Cor 9.19-23, and says that its main thrust is that ‘we are to do our utmost to make ourselves clear and plain and understood’.  He enjoys recounting an occasion when his preaching at an Oxford University mission was described by a student as suitable for ‘a congregation of farm labourers’, which was meant by the arrogant young man as a criticism and taken by MLJ as a compliment!

What runs right through the chapter is this:

–  man’s basic problem is his deadness in sin before God, and every kind of person has the same problem;

–  the gospel ought to be proclaimed clearly to mixed congregations;

–  the preacher can be confident that the Holy Spirit will apply to each person what they need to hear from the sermon.

 

Reflections

Forty years on, some of us may find some of MLJ’s illustrative anecdotes quaint and dated, but his simple point is a real tonic for the preacher:  no gimmicks;  no cleverness on display.  Instead straightforward simplicity is needed that isn’t ashamed to set out a doctrine like justification, acknowledging that it seems alien, but then expounding it so that all can understand and be drawn to Christ.

For myself, the Oxford mission anecdote was telling.  Would I really have taken the intended criticism as a compliment?  I can think of an occasion some time ago when a more educated church-member told me that my preaching was too simple, and wasn’t feeding them the way they wanted.  If I’d read this chapter on that occasion, I would have been urged to press on and not be swayed (which I was, for a while), since the truly spiritual intellectual will want a clear, understandable message.  Preachers who have not had much formal education can be encouraged;  those with lots of letters after their name might need to be chastened.

Chapter 6.  The Preacher

The next logical question to ask, says MLJ, is:  who then is to be a preacher?  Important here is Acts 8.4-5, which describes all kinds of Christians as ‘gossipping the gospel’ (v.4, Greek verb: euangelizomai), but the apostle Philip as ‘proclaiming’ (v.5, Greek: kerusso).  Only the latter, says MLJ, is what we call preaching.  In summary, in the NT preaching is confined to apostles, prophets, evangelists and teaching elders.

This view of preaching requires a notion of the ‘call’ of the preacher.  The tests of a genuine call are:

a sense of preaching being ‘thrust upon you’ in your own spirit;  wise Christians confirming it;  a concern for the lost;  a sense of ‘I can’t do anything else’;  a feeling of personal unworthiness.

 

All of this should be confirmed by the church discerning four things in potential preachers:  a settled knowledge of the truth;  a godly life;  an understanding of people;  ability, both in intellect and in a gift of speech.  He regrets that ability is too often put first by churches.

 

On the specifics of training, he recommends these elements:

–  thorough knowledge of Scripture

–  original languages, just in order to keep a man ‘accurate’

–  knowing the biblical theology that comes out of Scripture, and grasping it systematically

–  church history, especially knowledge of heresies (in order to avoid them), and of great revivals (in order to stay encouraged).

 

Overall, preachers are born and not made, but born preachers can be improved, and the best way for them to improve is by reading the sermons of past greats.

 

Reflections

His use of Acts 8.4-5 to discern a distinct activity of ‘preaching’ is right, I think.  It’s not easy to make the right kinds of distinctions, but in the NT there does seem to be something distinct about ‘proclamation’.

The notion of the preacher’s ‘call’ has been a vexed one, with some exalting it to almost mystical status, and others denying it in order to get as many trained people out into word ministry as possible.  In this chapter, it is clear that MLJ is writing in reaction against those who deny any restrictions on who may preach, so it may well be unfair to build a strong theology of ‘call’ on the basis of the proper corrective that he was offering  in his context.

His emphasis on preachers needing experience of life seems pertinent to me, if they are not to slide into being lecturers.  That is not always to do with age.  A few men in their early twenties are able to show understanding of people’s experience of life, and some never can, however old they get.

Chapter 5.  The act of preaching

MLJ describes this chapter as a general introduction to sermon delivery.  Certain elements must be present:

–  the whole personality of the preacher being exercised, including bodily action

–  a sense of authority and control of proceedings, since he has been sent to declare something

–  the element of ‘freedom’, being open to ‘the inspiration of the moment’

–  interplay between preacher and congregation

–  seriousness

–  liveliness (since seriousness isn’t dullness)

–  zeal (since we are personally involved as witnesses)

–  warmth

–  urgency (since the preacher ‘is there between God and man’)

–  persuasiveness

–  pathos (also emotion):  we must love the people, and that will show in our preaching

–  power (more on this later, he says).

 

The chief end of preaching is ‘to give men and women a sense of God and his presence’.

If we glimpse what preaching is, we’ll conclude that we’ve never really ‘preached’, but we’ll keep trying.

 

Reflections

There is much here that is wise.  I can do a good ‘delivery health-check’ on my preaching by comparing it to that list.  Do I have such a desire not to be thought boring that there is too little of the seriousness of the gospel in my preaching?  Am I so tied to my prepared notes that I don’t wisely adjust certain things when I see who is present and how they are reacting?  I think so, sometimes.

What is intended by saying that preaching should aim to give a sense of God and his presence is also right, I think.  Since the preaching of Christ ought to be received as the word of God (1 Thess 2.13), it is hard to see how that can be done without a sense in the hearers of also receiving Christ who is real and present by his Spirit.

I do find the line about concluding that I’ve never really ‘preached’ troubling.  There is a sense in it of something which I can’t find in the NT.  For all his acknowledged human limitations, we have no indication that Paul doubted that his preaching was truly preaching.  MLJ intends by the point to spur the preacher on to greater power and zeal, and that is a good aim.  He may well, though, end up discouraging the preacher by giving him too low a view of the effectiveness of his ‘ordinary’ weekly preaching.

Chapter 4.  The form of the sermon

He starts with some thoughts on sermon content.  Our primary call is to deliver the whole message of Scripture.  We much of course expound the part, but always in a way that shows that it is part of a whole.  This is why systematic theology is so vital.

 

He then moves on to sermon form.  The sermon is not an essay or lecture, since both lack ‘the element of attack’.  It must always be expository, but not a verse-by-verse running commentary.  The preacher should be like the OT prophets, with a ‘burden of the Lord’, that is, a single message to proclaim.

 

Getting more specific on sermon form, he recommends that it should:

–  start with exposition

–  ask of the text, ‘what’s the particular doctrine here?’, in order to get to something which is part of the whole gospel

–  arrange its heading with logical progression, understood as parts of a whole

–  make applications regularly throughout.

 

Reflections

There is no doubt that his understanding of the role of systematic theology in preaching is open to abuse, if used as an excuse to jump quickly out of the text into the preacher’s favourite doctrines.  But MLJ is more careful than that (at least in the theorising of this chapter).  If what the preacher ultimately should preach is the gospel, then he has no choice but to engage in systematic theology, whether he likes the idea or not.  MLJ’s proposed question is a good one to ask of a text:  what’s the particular doctrine here?

His insistence that the sermon should be understood as a single entity, communicating one basic message, is good.  I sometimes come across the idea that ‘expository’ preaching means cramming in as much exegesis as possible from as many verses as possible.  Instead, preachers should expound the ‘burden’ that the text gives them to expound.

Chapter 3.  The sermon and the preaching

Partway through this chapter, MLJ gives what he calls the basic definition of preaching.  What is that man doing there?, he asks…

–  ‘he is standing there as a mouthpiece of God and of Christ to address those people’

–  ‘he is there … to do something to those people’

–  ‘the hearer knows that he has been dealt with and addressed by God through this preacher’.

This explains, he says, why he once refused an invitation to debate with an atheist at the Oxford Union:  ‘God is not to be discussed or debated’.

 

He then makes another distinction:

–  The message of salvation (kerygma):  the declaration of God’s being and glory, of sin and of Christ.

–  The teaching element (didache), which edifies believers.  This itself has two aspects:  experiential and instructional.

It follows that there are three kinds of preaching:

–  primarily evangelistic (which should occur at least weekly in a church)

–  instructional-experiential

–  instructional-didactic.

He readily acknowledges that these aren’t strict distinctions, and the elements will often be mixed together in a single sermon, but it’s important for the preacher to keep them distinct in his mind.

 

Reflections

His basic definition of preaching is robust and bold, and rightly so.  It should both hearten and humble the preacher to read a definition like that every time he preaches.

His outworking of his definition of preaching often assumes that large numbers of unbelievers will be in church every week.  It may well be that, less than fifty years on, we live in different times.

The ‘three kinds of preaching’ analysis deserves some reflection.  Probably most of us preachers naturally default to one of the three, and end up being fairly narrow in our aim over a stretch of time.  Keeping those three categories in mind, and deliberately moving between them, may well help our preaching hit a wider variety of targets.

Chapter 2.  No Substitute

A key principle set out in this chapter is:  ‘the ultimate justification for asserting the primacy of preaching is theological’.  What he is particularly thinking of is that natural man’s deepest problem is his spiritual blindness, to which God’s salvation in Christ is the only answer.  And only the preaching of the church is fitted to address this problem.

That is why ‘social-gospel preaching’ empties churches, whereas in fact proper gospel preaching stirs believers up to great acts of compassion and social justice.

Personal counselling ought to be seen as secondary to preaching, in which the preached message is followed up with individuals.

Reading a Christian book or watching some Christian teaching on television can never replace preaching.  There are two reasons for this:

– in reading or watching, the individual is ‘too much in control’, since  they can put the book down or switch the TV off whenever they like;

– ‘the very presence of a body of people is part of preaching’, and that exerts spiritual influences on the listeners  –  influences which are hard to describe, but nevertheless are very strong.

 

Reflections

His understanding of the relation between a church’s preaching and ministries of mercy is one which has been effectively re-articulated well for us in recent controversies, and is not an issue likely to go away.

The final section was for me the most stimulating.  I don’t think that many of us have been trained much to understand preaching as essentially and particularly defined by the corporate setting in which it takes place.  At this point he makes his argument from reason and experience, as well as from Scripture (he quotes 1 Thess. 1.6ff).  I’m not sure if that passage makes the point as strongly as he thinks it does, but I do think that overall he is right:  there is something essentially different about sitting in a body of people who together receive a preached message, that isn’t exactly replicated in other settings.

Now that the Cornhill term is over I’m getting down to some more intensive reading on preaching.  One I’m particularly enjoying is Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers.  The book contains lectures delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1969.  As I chip my way through it, a blog per chapter will crop up here occasionally, summarising the content and offering some reflections.

 

Chapter 1.  The Primacy of Preaching

On the second page, Lloyd-Jones says:  ‘the main trouble arises from the fact that people are not clear in their minds as to what preaching really is.’  He then speaks of some of the key factors, as he sees them:

–  a right reaction against ‘pulpiteerism’, which seeks in the end to entertain through showmanship;

–  an emphasis on ‘personal work’ / ‘counselling’ will grow to the extent that confidence in preaching fades;

–  tape-recording is ‘the peculiar and special abomination at this present time’.  (It’s perhaps a mercy that he didn’t live to see any church websites  –  or indeed this http://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/, although many of us are hugely grateful for it).

The chapter ends with an excellent summary which reminds us how preaching was central to the ministries of Jesus and the apostles, with Acts 6 emerging as a crucial one in the Doctor’s understanding of the issue.

 

Reflections

He is surely right that our understanding of the nature of preaching is not as rich as it ought to be.  My colleague Jonathan Griffiths and I are doing a little work on this, and are finding that quite a number of otherwise excellent books on preaching aren’t as richly exegetical and theological as one would like them to be in answering the question:  what is preaching?

He does not play ‘personal work’ off against preaching, as later chapters will show, but the insight is surely right:  a pastor who spends so much time with dozens of individuals during the week such that sermon prep time is regularly squeezed out is a pastor who has lost confidence in what he ought to be most confident about.

The six pages on the primacy of preaching in Jesus and apostles is a wonderful little tonic for a pastor to return to, to show him where his weekly priorities might have been more set by man than by Scripture.

Summer series . Some years ago, we asked Sinclair Ferguson to write a brief paper for us on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Over the next week or so, we’re going to publish an edited version online as part of our summer series. It’s worth some time.

Developing a Christ centred instinct

If these principles hold good, then it must be possible along different lines, sometimes using one, sometimes using a combination, to move from any point in the Old Testament into the backbone of redemptive history which leads ultimately to Christ its fulfilment and consummation. In this way, the context and destination for all our preaching will be Jesus Christ himself, Saviour and Lord.

These are general principles; they do not constitute a simple formula, an elixir to be sprinkled on our sermons to transform them into the preaching of Christ.   There is no formula that will do that. We never ‘arrive’ or ‘have it cracked’ when it comes to preaching Christ.  But as we come to know the Scriptures more intimately, as we see these patterns deeply embedded in the Bible, and—just as crucially—as we come to know Christ himself more intimately and to love him better, we shall surely develop the instinct to reason, explain and prove from all the Scriptures the riches of grace which are proclaimed in Jesus, the Christ, the Saviour of the world. The ability to do that will itself be adequate reward for the hard work involved in learning to preach in a way that takes the Old Testament seriously within its own context, but also recognises that that context is not complete apart from Jesus Christ.

Summer series . Some years ago, we asked Sinclair Ferguson to write a brief paper for us on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Over the next week or so, we’re going to publish an edited version online as part of our summer series. It’s worth some time.

Principle 4. Proleptic participation and subsequent realisation

Despite the continuing influence within evangelicalism of various brands of dispensationalism, it lies on the surface of the apostolic writings that the majority of illustrations of salvation in the new covenant era are actually drawn from the old!  Of course the apostles recognise the substantial discontinuity between old and new.  Pentecost is indeed a quantum leap forward. But that notwithstanding, when Paul wants to illustrate how the gospel works, he goes back to the Old Testament figures of Abraham and David and says ‘This is how the gospel works’. A seismic shift took place after Pentecost so that the least in the kingdom is greater than the greatest of the prophets (John the Baptist, Matt.11:11). Men and women of faith do not come to perfection apart from new covenant believers who experience better things (Heb. 11:40). Nevertheless Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets are examples of faith (Heb.11). We receive salvation ‘better’, but not a better salvation.  If you want to know what the Christian life looks like, then there is much to be learned from the Old Testament!  What right-thinking Christian has not aspired to experience the whole-souled faith and worship of the Psalms?

But how could Old Testament believers experience grace and the fruit of the Spirit? They experienced  proleptic participation in what would be consummated in Jesus Christ and then subsequently realised in its fulness in post-Pentecost Christian believers.

Orthodox evangelical Christians employ the principle of proleptic participation with respect to justification. Were Old Testament saints justified by grace, and if so, how? Yes, of course—by faith in the promise of the Saviour. We who are as far removed in time as Abraham was from Christ are justified because we believe in the once-promised Christ now come. But through the promise of God, Abraham experienced in proleptic fashion what we now experience in the light of the actuality of the incarnation.

But exactly the same principle operates in the area of sanctification—both definitive (the once-for-all separation from the dominion of sin which takes place in regeneration) and progressive (the ongoing overcoming of the presence and influence of sin which takes place throughout the Christian life). For justification and sanctification, while distinguishable, are not separable in either old or new covenant realities.  Saints in the Old Testament were justified in the light of what Christ would do; they were sanctified in the same way: their lives were shaped and formed in the light of what Christ would do. An example of that is seen in Hebrews 10:39: ‘We are not those who would shrink back and be destroyed. We are those who believe and who are saved’. But from what source does the author illustrate this principle of the grace of perseverance? From the Old Testament!  Old Testament saints were commended for their faith, yet none of them had received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us and only together with us would they be made perfect. What they experienced then, was a proleptic, anticipatory, form of the reality we better experience in its fullness, namely the working out of union and communion with Jesus Christ.

It is the perspective of the New Testament that from the moment an individual becomes a believer, his or her life is shaped providentially by God and pressed into a mould which takes its form from the dying and rising of Jesus, and is shaped by his crucifixion and resurrection, his death bringing new life. In sanctification God transforms us into the likeness of his Son, so that reminiscences of Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected appear in us, and the pattern of death and resurrection shapes our lives—these are the genuine biblical stigmata in which all believers share.

But this pattern is also present in the lives of Old Testament saints. Admittedly the fascination with typology in some evangelical groupings has been unfortunate and without controls; but nevertheless a Christ-shape and a Christ-pattern appears clearly in a variety of Old Testament saints, and must ultimately be analysed as a shadow in their lives created by the backwards projection into history of the work of Christ.

There are so many illustrations of this that one might almost say that there is not an Old Testament historical-biographical account of any length that does not involve dying and rising, humiliation and exaltation, being brought down and being raised up, experiencing opposition and then deliverance, suffering want and then experiencing extraordinary provision. This is not merely the form of good story-telling. It is the embodiment of the gospel pattern.

Joseph is a classic case: the story of his life is shaped unmistakably by the pattern of death and resurrection. A pattern is written large in him: humiliation (rejected and stripped of his glory-robe, becoming a slave, being made of no reputation)à exaltation (being highly exalted at Pharaoh’s right hand)à provision (for the needs of the whole world)àthe ingathering of his people.  This, at the end of the day, is the Christ-pattern in sketch-like form. The pattern of meant-for-evilàproducing good, the salvation of many (Gen. 50:20) is fulfilled in the One crucified by the hands of wicked men—yet according to the plan of the God who raised him from the dead for the salvation of the nations (Acts 2:23).  That same pattern, while written large in Joseph, appears throughout the Old Testament. It connects the Old Testament saints to Christ, and underlines that we do not fully understand their experience apart from this template.

Summer series . Some years ago, we asked Sinclair Ferguson to write a brief paper for us on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Over the next week or so, we’re going to publish an edited version online as part of our summer series. It’s worth some time.

Principle 3. The relationship between the covenant and Christ

In the New Testament Jesus himself embodies all that the covenant signified in the Old Testament. His is the blood of the new covenant (Lk.22: 20). He fulfils all the covenant promises of God. ‘No matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ’ (2 Cor. 1:20).

The covenant promises of God form the scaffolding that God was putting in place as he directed redemptive history towards the coming of Jesus Christ. The scaffolding in the Old Testament is therefore built around the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ and shaped by him. We can see this in two ways.

[1]          First, there is the principle that in the covenant relationship the imperatives of God (his laws and commands) are always rooted in the indicatives of his grace. That is how the covenant works: ‘I will be your God; you will be my people.’  This is scaffolding shaped around Christ and the gospel. For this is how the gospel works: ‘I will die for you; therefore trust in and obey me.’  The dynamic of the Old Testament covenant was shaped with a view to the coming of Jesus Christ.

We can go further to say this: that which was promised by God in the Covenant at Sinai, and demanded by God in terms of its imperatives, did not have a sufficiently strong foundation to effect what it commanded. Geographical relocation is not an adequate support to provide the dynamic for Decalogue-style moral holiness (cf. Rom. 8:3-4). A geographical resettlement may motivate, but it cannot cancel the guilt of sin or empower morally. Thus the Sinai covenant—in its weakness—was always prophetic of a greater and fuller deliverance through God’s redeeming grace. ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. You shall not have any other gods before me’ (Ex. 20:2-3) was always a statement that looked forwards as well as backwards. Written into the way in which the old covenant works is an implied expectation, even necessity, that the indicatives of God’s grace will find a better consummation and the imperatives a better foundation—in Jesus Christ.

[2]          Second, the shape of Christ’s work is expressed in the covenant principle of blessing and cursing.

Today our appreciation of much of the Bible’s language has become very threadbare. There is a tendency to think that the words ‘blessing’ and ‘cursing’ function in a relatively trivial manner, equivalent to a kind of divine ‘boo-hurrah’ approach to morality. When someone sneezes, we say ‘Bless you!’  Few people set this within the historical context of the pre-modern world when sneezing was a symptom of the plague. It was therefore seen potentially as a sign of the displeasure of God. One prayed that the person sneezing would receive the blessing of God and therefore not perish. That is much nearer the Bible’s understanding of blessing and cursing than our usage is.

Blessing is not ‘have a nice day!’ nor is cursing  ‘you are a bit of a pain in the neck.’ Rather, here is God’s covenant; when we respond to it in faith he showers upon us the blessing he promised when he made it with us. And when we respond in unbelief he showers upon us curses (cf. Deut. 27-30). The gospel is that Christ took the curse of the covenant in order that the blessings of the covenant (promised to Abraham) might come to us (Gal. 3:13). Paul’s thinking here is both redemptive-historical and biblical-theological.  He recognises that all of this covenantal outworking of blessing and cursing in the Old Testament is inextricably tied to the fulfilment of God’s covenant purpose and promise in Jesus Christ.

This principle of Christ as the heart of the covenants of God, with respect to their blessing and cursing, helps us expound and apply the Old Testament as a covenant-focussed message in the light of the fulfilment of both blessing and cursing in Christ. The consequences bound up in the covenant blessing and cursing point us forwards inexorably, if typologically, to the eternal consequences of acceptance or rejection of the gospel. The contents of biblical history and wisdom literature, prophecy and the psalms all reveal this covenant dynamic. Insofar as this is true we are able to relate them to the ultimate fulfilment of that dynamic in Christ and the gospel.