Category Archives: pastor/theologian

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How to Tell the Difference Between Sheep and Goats: It Mattered a Great Deal to Edwards

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Can you tell the difference between sheep and goats? Does it matter on Sundays?

I trust you experienced a rewarding Easter celebration with your faith-family. I know Michele and I did.

You may recall earlier posts containing excerpts from Marsden’s, An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century. It’s amazing how current Edwards’s approach is even though his 18th century context and style of ministry is so different from ours.

One lasting effect of Edwards’s thinking and writing is his well-known, “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.” I first read it as part of my required reading in the mid- to late 80’s when I studied the church in America at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Marsden writes, “Edwards spent almost his whole life wrestling with the question of how to tell the difference between authentic Christian experience and its imitations: self-delusion and hypocrisy” (p. 104). He describes Edwards’s understanding of “affections” as,

“the sort of love for a person that brings joy unspeakable. True affections for Edwards include the joy and delight–at the heart of his theology–of experiencing the beauty of perfect love” (p. 106).

Okay, let me stop and say that my ministry for over 30 years has been in the context of two, Bible Church kind of churches. I half-jokingly say to our folks, “We’re a Bible Church which means we don’t feel anything.” It’s true; we don’t feel much and rarely do we let it show on our faces on a given Sunday morning. So, this makes it difficult to know if my listeners are experiencing authentic Christianity.

Edwards asked how we know the sheep from the goats.

He begins with indicators that don’t prove anything:

“high emotional experiences, preoccupation with religious things, readiness to quote Scripture, great self-confidence in one’s own spirituality, and other traits that can be found among hypocrites as well as among some genuine Christians” (p. 107).

As you can see, counterfeit Christianity exists. But Scriptures often provide ample opportunity for us to challenge the kind of faith our listeners have. One way is to continually ask if their faith-journey includes a dose of “joy and delight” and the “beauty of [God’s] perfect love.”

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as we address both sheep and goats each Sunday.

Randal

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From Cicero to Augustine to our Preaching

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Cicero influenced Augustine who, in turn, has influenced all of us!

The last few weeks I’ve been sharing key thoughts from Augustine’s, On Christian Doctrine (translated by Robertson). Because of my emphasis through the years of the intersection of homiletics and hermeneutics, I have read very little on ancient rhetoric. However, Augustine has given me a glimpse of it in this book and another that I began last week (Augustine and the Cure of Souls: Revising a Classical Ideal, by Paul R. Kolbet [not Stephen Colbert!].

You might be interested in the following quote from Augustine citing Cicero in the context of your own teaching and preaching work:

“Therefore a certain eloquent man said, and said truly, that he who is eloquent should speak in such a way that he teaches, delights, and moves. Then he added, ‘To teach is a necessity, to please is a sweetness, to persuade is a victory.'” (p. 136).

You and I are not interested in eloquence for eloquence’s sake.

However, we are interested in teaching. I had the privilege this morning again to teach the sacred Scriptures. It was my responsibility to interpret a section in Matthew’s Gospel in such a way that it functioned for my faith-family. We give biblical information and instruction.

We might not think about the second one, “delights.” Maybe because we’re not into entertaining. But what if I changed the angle with a quote from my mentor, Haddon Robinson: “It’s a sin to bore people with the Word of God.” So, if you struggle with the thought of delighting your listeners, you probably don’t struggle with trying to avoid boring your congregants with the Bible.

Finally, the third element, persuasion, is one that I expected to hear, even with my limited reading of ancient rhetoric. And this is one that you and I are extremely interested in. All our efforts to teach serve the goal of persuading our congregants to respond properly to sacred Scripture. Preachers talk about application or persuading listeners to apply their lives to the Bible.

N.B. You may recall from earlier posts that authorized persuasion is organically connected to theological exegesis. This requires skill to identify meaning of a passage that includes what God intends for that passage to do to listeners.

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as we begin preparing for victory in our next preaching/teaching assignment.

Randal

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Confusion or Clarity? A Brief Word From Augustine

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Augustine was very sure he was being clear! I am not always so sure!! You?

Last week I finished reading Augustine’s classic little paperback, On Christian Doctrine (translated by Robertson). I had seen it quoted so many times through the years and figured it was about time.

Early on in the book, Augustine baldly stated:

“I am not to blame because they do not understand.” (p. 3)

If I remember correctly, Augustine took a job teaching rhetoric in order to pay the bills. So, he was well-trained in communication. Evidently, he knew how to be crystal clear when he taught Scripture. And he was confident in his abilities.

His statement reminded me of the importance of being clear. It’s more important that being interesting or clever. As much as I value preaching with accuracy, what is accuracy without clarity?

Augustine got me thinking about what enhances clarity. Here are some things to consider as you prepare to preach this week:

  1. Exchange your informational sermons titles (I am assuming your titles provide statements) for transformational titles (ones that hint at application or response even before the sermon begins).
  2. Similar to #1 is to clearly state the primary worship responses to your Text. As I have written before, you might complete this sentence: “We worship this morning by_____________.” This is another way of talking about sermon application. When you insert this sentence into the opening minutes of your sermon introduction, your listeners are clear about how to worship during the sermon.
  3. Whether you use formal outline points or not, make sure to create clear transitions from thought-block to thought-block. Everyone should hear how the parts fit together so the sermon doesn’t fragment in their minds.
  4. I find it’s easy not to be clear with defining key terms. I am trying to make sure my sermon manuscript has one robust sentence for any word that requires careful evaluation. The lexicons are still my favorite source for concise definitions in context.
  5. I need to practice this more: follow up a lengthy quote, with something like, “Now, what D. A. Carson is saying is, ___________________.” That gives listeners two opportunities to hear the content.
  6. Finally, be clear about the Gospel, how Christ-crucified makes it possible for us to put the Scripture into practice (the worship response in #2 above).

Maybe, after all that, I can say with Augustine, “I am not to blame because they do not understand.” And may our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21), because of our sermon clarity.

Randal

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How Jonathan Edwards Helps Me With Applying Scripture

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Helping our Listeners Know What Influences Their Life Choices

Most mornings I continue to read Jonathan Edwards’s sermons as part of my devotional life. Along the journey through his preaching–currently in the Yale volume covering 1730-1733–I read for homiletical insights with the goal of being a more effective exegete/theologian/preacher.

Almost every sermon helps me learn how to apply Scripture. Edwards was meticulous in his application.

In his sermon, The Duty of Self-Examination, from Haggai 1:5 (“Now therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways.”), Edwards tells his listeners:

“We ought to consider which has the greatest influence upon us: our carnal appetites, or the promises and threatenings of God’s Word” (p. 486, vol. 10, Kimnach).

You’ll certainly want to explain “carnal appetites.” After you do, you have one half of an equation that affects our daily choices. The other half features two elements of sacred Scripture: promises and warnings.

Then, Edwards describes every moment of temptation:

“When there is set before us a self-denying, mortifying duty and a pleasant sin, for us to take our choice, the sinful pleasure and delight allures and entices on one side, and the favor of God and heaven invites on the other. Which do we choose, which has the greatest influence upon us…” (p. 486).

Your Scripture for this coming Sunday could have either direct or indirect reference to our “carnal appetites” or to “the promises and threatenings of God’s Word.” If so, then it’s a matter of identifying some specifics.

For instance, which element influences our thought life? What about the words we speak to each other?

And then, with typical Edward-like seriousness he states:

“Every man is in the way to heaven or the way to hell, and the way that we are now in, if pursued, will certainly bring us to one or the other of these” (p. 488).

And all that before the Application section of the sermon!

I hope that these excerpts from Edwards’s applicational angles helps you help your congregants put God’s Word into practice so that God continues to receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal

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Why Jonathan Edwards Was So Concerned About Identifying Genuine Faith and Why We Should Too

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“Edwards…offers every sort of professing Christian some important guidelines for assessing the authenticity of faith.” (Marsden, p. 103)

If you have read some of my earlier material you know I learn a lot from the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. It’s because he thinks at a level I never will. But it’s also because, despite hundreds of years separating us, our ministry contexts are similar.

Marsden makes this clear in, An Infinite Fountain of Light, and the chapter, Edwards and the Churches That Whitefield Built.

That shared context began with the likes of George Whitefield. Marsden reminds us, “The evangelists who succeed best are those who can attract the largest audiences. Think Billy Graham, for instance. This, plus the “populist-based versions” (p. 99) of the Gospel meant that churches were attended by those who professed faith in Christ, but who may not be genuinely saved.

Marsden writes, “Edwards spent almost his whole life wrestling with the question of how to tell the difference between authentic Christian experience and its imitations: self-delusion and hypocrisy.” (p. 104)

[If you haven’t read it, you might consider Edwards’s, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.]

I will go further in to this next time, but for now I wanted to ask you to consider your ministry context.

One of the scariest things I heard as a young pastor-in-training was something Chuck Swindoll said about his ministry in Fullerton, CA. I will never forget him saying that the longer he pastored, the more he believed that less and less of his people were saved.

It’s probably a good idea for you and me to keep this in mind as we preach and teach God’s Word. You may have noticed how much Scripture challenges the reader to make their calling and election sure (to quote from one place). One of my personal goals is to preach in such a way that there are no surprises at the Judgment for my faith-family.

May our Lord received glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as you follow Edwards’s example of making sure your listeners know that their faith is genuine.

Randal

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Current Preaching Challenges from our 18th Century Brothers

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The 18th Century Gave Us Edwards, but Some Troubles Too!

One of the unexpected takeaways from Marsden’s, An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century, is to learn some of the traits or tendencies in 18th century evangelicalism that affects our pastoral ministry and preaching.

The first two are big ones:

(1) “distrust of established institutional authority and

(2) increasing trust in individual experience.” (p. 82)

You and I continue to preach in this context. It’s an uphill, yet winnable situation as God gives ears to hear. Part of making it winnable is you and I being aware of these tendencies and being able to address them when appropriate in our preaching portions.

An interesting factoid is that George Whitefield and John Wesley contributed to this! Marsden writes, “Both were ordained Anglicans, but each effectively ignored most formal church authority” (p. 83).

Marsden goes on to add other tendencies that continue to plague us:

“to favor strong, inspiring, individual leadership over institutional tradition [later Marsden called it, “the rise of celebrity culture”, p. 89], to divide over differing doctrines and practices, and to grow through splitting” (p. 83).

The first tendency is something that we and our leadership must keep in mind. We do need to lead from the pulpit and part of that leadership involves championing the local church.

The second tendency requires an all-out effort “to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). We need wisdom to proclaim doctrine humbly and to shut down unbiblical divisiveness.

What scared me the most through those pages was thinking of how great preachers like W&W can contribute to negative elements in the church. God help us!

I find it helpful to have this kind of information in my mind as I think about the challenges of preaching. May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as you minister in this context which began in the 18th century.

Randal

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A Worship Response Fitting For All Sermons

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Helping our Listeners Enjoy “The Dynamic Beauty of God”

“The Dynamic Beauty of God” is the title of Marsden’s chapter 3 in, An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century.

I am suggesting you might consider making God’s beauty foundational for all kinds of sermon applications. This means, of course, preaching Scripture that, either in the text or immediate context, contains an element of God’s beauty, explicitly or implicitly.

[For a second, think about the last few sermons or lessons you’ve taught and the kind of application you developed and communicated.]

In, Religious Affections, Edwards wrote,

“God is God, and to be chiefly distinguished from all other beings, and exalted about them, chiefly by his divine beauty” (p. 64 in Marsden).

And of all the things that make God beautiful, nothing, according to Edwards is more beautiful about God than His love. Marsden summarizes Edwards, “God has created the universe in order to share the Trinity’s love with other persons who are capable of meaningful love” (p. 64) That includes our listeners who have ears to hear.

Edwards would tell us preachers to urge our folks to see God in all His beauty and respond appropriately with worship. Marsden writes that when God’s beauty is “at the center of reality…recognizing it will spark joy and delight” (p. 64). He summarizes with: “The primary purpose for which the mighty God has created this universe, then, is so that creatures might live in the infinite pleasure of the joy of God’s love” (p. 65). In my setting, I have to lead the way to this worship by smiling at my congregants as a result of my own joy and pleasure of knowing God as most beautiful.

So, Marsden and Edwards have helped me think about the wisdom of making sure that, with all our attempts to apply life to Scripture, we should urge our folks to respond to the dynamic beauty of God. May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as we encourage that most-appropriate worship response.

Randal

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How to Apply Part of Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer

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How to Locate the Worship Response to Jesus’s Prayer

Happy New Year to you!

Usually, at the start of each year I create a mini-series on some aspect of being a part of a local church. This year I am spending four Sundays on our four core values. Calvary Bible Church is:

  • biblically-shaped (we stand on God’s unchanging Word in an ever-changing world)
  • worshipful (we offer Him all that we are because of all that He is)
  • Disciple-making (we are new creations going to our neighbors and nations)
  • faith-family (we have been adopted by the Father, so we live and love like family)

But, that’s not important right now. What is is that this past Sunday we focused on being biblically-shaped from Jesus’s prayer in John 17:14-19: “Sanctify them in the truth…”

Preaching that text gave me an excellent opportunity to teach our congregants how God intends for them to worship Him through Jesus’s prayer. It is a unique aspect of theological interpretation. How is an ancient prayer of Jesus intended to function for the church?

The answer lies in God’s desire that His people would hear Jesus pray and then ask themselves,

“Am I experiencing a walk with God that Jesus prayed about?”

To use the brief excerpt above, Jesus asks His Father to sanctify His disciples in the truth. By implication our worship response is to make sure by the grace of God that we are being sanctified by the truth of God’s Word. This helps answer one of the most important theological questions about this prayer: does God automatically answer this prayer of Jesus or does it take a response from Jesus’s disciples?

Pretty simple.

You will run into this regularly. There are no imperatives in Jesus’s prayer: He says things to God and asks things of God, all intended for use in church. This approach is necessary for any attempts to worship with texts such as Pauline benedictions or prayers.

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as you preach and teach such Scripture that describe experiences intended for all God’s people.

Randal

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An Example of Christ-Centered Preaching from Jonathan Edwards’s Letter to Lady Mary Pepperell, 1751

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Jonathan Edwards Practiced Cross-Eyed Preaching

In Marsden’s, An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the 21st Century, he records a lengthy paragraph Edwards wrote to Lady Mary Pepperell in 1751. The excerpt provides an example of how Edwards preached Christ. Marsden writes that Pepperell had recently lost her only son and Edwards wrote to console her:

“[Christ suffered, that we might be delivered. His soul was exceedingly sorrowful even unto death, to take away the sting of sorrow and that we might have everlasting consolation. He was oppressed and afflicted, that we might be supported. He was overwhelmed in the darkness of death and hell, that we might have the light of life. He was cast into the furnace of God’s wrath, that we might swim in the rivers of pleasure. His heart was overwhelmed in a flood of sorrow and anguish, that our hearts might be filled and overwhelmed with a flood of eternal joy.” (p. 55)

This pattern, “He was…that we might…,” might help you form your own Christ-centered seconds near the end of your sermons as you move from the wording of the Text to the cross, urge faith, and then urge love and obedience from the Text.

If you’ve read some of my earlier posts on Christ-centered preaching, you can see how easy it is to move from statements like Edwards’s above to asking our listeners…

“Do you believe this good news about the Lord Jesus Christ?”

My goal on Sunday is to move from the biblical text/preaching portion to the Gospel from the specific wording of the preaching portion. [Edwards’s excerpt is missing any biblical text.] Then, the announcement of the Gospel leads to a faith-first application. I want to give everyone an opportunity to affirm their faith in the Gospel. Then, after urging faith–at this point non-Christians in attendance overhearing worship could believe–I can move to the primary application in the preaching portion.

May our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21) as we continue to preach Christ each Sunday.

Randal

P.S. Blessed Christmas and New Year!

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The Attitudes that Affect the Way We Respond to God’s Word

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Things that get in the way of applying life to the Bible

In my last post I began summarizing some of the things I’m learning from Marsden’s, An Infinite Fountain of Light. In the book he highlights a number of ways in which Jonathan Edwards is relevant for our day. Much of Edwards’s enduring value stems from the similarities between our listeners and those in the eighteenth century.

Here are some excerpts that help us know what is in the air we breathe:

“the autonomous individual is the fundamental unity of society” (p. 33). Which explains why it is very difficult to get a local church to think about community or to even think that the church is important enough to commit to.

“the God within” (p. 33). Virtually everyone in our society has been trained to think that listening to their own voice or following their own heart is the way to success. Each weekend you and I give them another word, a Word from God that is outside of themselves.

“the privatization of meaning” (p. 33). This is a spinoff from the one above. People in our day are ditching parents or a close knit group of neighbors or spiritual community and opting to discover their own meaning. Again, on Sundays we confront them with God’s Word and His meaning, but it’s not easy because deep down they believe they are the final authority on meaning.

That’s only three of them, but they are big ones that we face. What’s fascinating is to read how all this started with someone like Benjamin Franklin (remember, he and Edwards are contemporaries). Marsden points out one huge difference between their society and ours: they believed that there was some kind of transcendent basis for their values; our society does not.

This kind of analysis reminds me that when I am preaching, listeners are hearing God’s Word in the context of their cultural values. These attitudes always affect the way people interact with God’s revelation. As you head into this Christmas week and prepare to teach and preach on Christmas Eve, keep this in mind. See if your Scripture speaks directly to these attitudes and may our Lord receive glory in the church and in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:21).

Randal