Listen to this message:
Albert N. Martin
Some of you here will, no doubt, remember that at our pastors’ conference in October of 1988, I brought the first of what has developed into a series of sermons under the general title of Our Vision for These Days. That series was being preached an increment at the time, a year apart. The announced subject for today is the Restoration of Biblical Preaching. It comes as the fourth in that series of sermons Our Vision for These Days. Each time I have introduced each of those sermons, I have made a two-pronged disclaimer. By using the terminology “our vision for these days” we claim no extraordinary commission with respect to these concerns. Secondly, we claim no exclusive concern with reference to this burden. Rather, as we seek to view the current religious scene in the light of the written Word of God and our duty as determined by the same Word of God, our vision for these days is essentially our understanding of the crucial concerns which must be addressed if the church is to know, under the blessing of God, any true measure of spiritual health and vigor.
In the first of those messages, we dealt with our concern, our vision to see a recovery of the biblical gospel. In the second, our vision to see a renewal of biblical holiness. In the third, which was two years ago, our vision to see a return to biblical churchmanship. Now, as I’ve already indicated, in this fourth dimension of Our Vision for These Days, we address this vast and weighty subject of our vision for a restoration of biblical preaching.
Now, all that I have to say today, from the Word of God, is based upon a wholehearted agreement with the sentiments expressed by John A. Broadus in the opening chapter of his classic work On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, in which he writes as follows,
The great appointed means of spreading the good tidings of salvation through Christ is preaching, words spoken, whether to the individual or to the assembly, and this, nothing can supercede. Printing has become a mighty agency for good, as well as for evil, and Christians should employ it with the utmost diligence and in every possible way for the spread of truth. But printing can never take the place of the living, spoken word. When a man who is apt in teaching, whose soul is on fire with the truth which he knows has saved him and hopes will save others, when such a man speaks to his fellow men face to face, eye to eye, and 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, higher and yet higher, till they are born as on chariots of fire above the world, there is a power to move men, to influence character, life, and destiny such as no printed page can ever possess. It follows that preaching must always be a necessity, and good preaching a mighty power. In every age of Christianity, since John the Baptist drew crowds into the desert, there has been no great religious movement, no restoration of Scripture truth, and reanimation of genuine piety without new power in preaching both as cause and effect. (Broadus)
Believing that the vast majority of you are already convinced of the primacy of preaching and the saving purposes of God, I have chosen to take no time to establish that fundamental tenet of the things most surely believed among us, but assuming that we are agreed in that conviction, I pass on directly to the subject of our vision for a restoration of biblical preaching. If we are to pray for such a restoration, if we are to labor for such a restoration, and if we are to recognize the answer to our prayers and measure our progress in sanctified endeavor for the restoration for biblical preaching, we must begin with giving, at least, the main concerns which identify such preaching.
1) The characteristics of God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching.
I want to begin by addressing, first of all, the characteristics of God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching. While freely acknowledging the vast diversity of native ability, the measure of divine gift, and the diversity of preaching styles, I would still be bold to assert that there are some common denominators to all God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching which can be identified and articulated. I emphasize that in the expression of these common denominators, there will indeed be a reflection of a diversity of native ability, a diversity of the measure of divine gift, and a diversity of preaching style. Yet, within that blessed diversity in all of these areas, there will be this core of common denominators, with reference to God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching.
As we pray for and labor to the end that there would be a restoration of biblical preaching, what we are doing is praying and laboring to see preaching that will bear these following marks. First of all, something with reference to the substance of that preaching. Secondly, to the form of that preaching, and thirdly, to the ethos of the delivery of that preaching.
1- The substance of that preaching.
In its substance, God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching will almost invariably be marked by these four characteristics.
1. It will be pervasively biblical.
First of all, it will be pervasively biblical.
Pastor Brevard read to us from 2 Timothy chapter 4. The final charge of the great Apostle to his spiritual son, his mentor, and the one to whom he was passing on—not the baton of apostleship, for that could not be conferred by any but the Lord Himself—but passing on the responsibility of the care of the church at Ephesus. His final admonition to him was summoning to Timothy’s mind the great realities of the appearing of the Lord Jesus and the Day of Judgement. His great charge to Timothy is: “Preach the Word. Whatever else you do, Timothy, proclaim the message. You are to be preoccupied with the substance of a message that is pervasively biblical.”
I remind you of those familiar texts such as Hebrews 4:12. We are told that it is, “The word of God which is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, that pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, joint and marrow, and is a discerner of the very thoughts and the intents of the heart.”
It is Jeremiah who cries out in the name of Jehovah in Jeremiah 23:29, “Is not my word like unto a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”
Isaiah declares in chapter 8, verse 20, “To the law and to the testimony! If they speak not according to this word, there is no dawning for them.”
The same prophet declares in chapter 55, verse 11, “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that whereunto I have sent it.”
Our Lord Jesus—in that great parable—identifies the seed of all Kingdom workers, “The sower soweth the word.” (Mark 4:14.)
Likewise, again and again, it is the Lord Jesus who says, “Though heaven and earth pass away, My word shall never pass away.” (Matthew 24:35; Luke 21:33; Mark 13:31.)
“Sanctify them in the truth; Thy word is truth.” (John 17:17.)
We could go on multiplying texts. Whenever a man stands unashamedly convinced in every fiber of his being that this Book is indeed God’s infallible revelation, God’s changeless, eternal Word, surely the Spirit who is its author is most likely to be powerfully present, authenticating not the notions of the preacher, but His own infallible mind and will embodied in this blessed book.
Therefore, to speak of a restoration of biblical preaching, to speak of God-owned and Spirit-anointed preaching, to speak of preaching as to its substance, will have this as it’s primary characteristic: it will be pervasively biblical. Whether—as we shall see in the lectures tomorrow morning—the form is that of a verse-by-verse exposition of a book or a large portion of Scripture, the taking of an individual text, opening it up, and applying it; whether taking a subject and bringing the total witness of Scripture to bear upon it; whether it is taking an event, a need, a crisis in the life of the congregation, in the life of the community, in the life of the nation, whatever the particular sermonic form may be, God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching is in its substance pervasively biblical.
The Bible is never simply the springboard to something else. The Bible is never simply the framework within which other things fill up the substance. Rather, in its substance it will be pervasively biblical.
2. It will be unashamedly doctrinal.
Secondly, as to its substance, it will be unashamedly doctrinal. Not only pervasively biblical, but unashamedly doctrinal. That is, it will be preaching that does not shrink from articulating the time-proven formulations of the raw materials of the Bible. In the crucible of controversy, and in fighting against the wiles of error, and the propagators of heresy, the Church has sought to take this witness of God, and to formulate its broad strokes of revelation concerning the nature and the being of God. The Church has confessed from her earliest days that the God of this Book is the God who is Trinity in unity, and unity in Trinity. We worship the One, True, and Living God. Within that God we worship the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The Father who is not the Son nor the Spirit; the Son who is neither the Father nor the Spirit; the Spirit who is neither the Son nor the Father. We worship the One, True, Living God: Trinity in unity, and unity in Trinity.
Without embarrassment, our preaching will be unashamedly doctrinal. People will not have to listen to us for six months to see whether or not we stand in the great historic stream of biblical Orthodoxy, as unashamed, Trinitarian worshipers of the One, True, and Living God. We will recognize that that God is Creator, that that God is Law-giver, and that that God is Judge.
With reference to the doctrine of man, we will be unashamedly doctrinal in our statements about man. Man was uniquely created in the image of God. Man was fallen into the sin of our first father Adam. We will unashamedly make it known that—as unpopular as it may be—we do believe that God sovereignly piggy-backed the whole human race on Adam, and we fell in the first man, Adam. That fall has brought us into a state in which all the faculties of the mind and soul and body are tainted and twisted and perverted by sin, so that though we may not use the term ‘total depravity’ no one could sit under our ministry for very long without understanding that we believe that this Bible teaches that man, in his present state, though he has a dignity high above the most cultured of all of the domestic animals, he is nonetheless—in terms of his spiritual state—dead in his trespasses and sins. “None seeks after God, no, not one.” (Romans 3:11.)
Our preaching will be unashamedly doctrinal, with reference not only to the great issues of the being of God and the nature of man as created and fallen and depraved, but with respect to Jesus Christ. The utter uniqueness of His Person: as much a man as though He were not God; as much God as though He were not man. In this theanthropic God and man are not commingled to become this third thing. There is the distinct, and eternal distinction, of the nature in the one Person. Before the mystery we bow and we worship, but we unashamedly stand in the great Christological formulas that have sought to taint the witness of Scripture concerning the uniqueness of the Person of our Saviour.
We will be unashamedly doctrinal with reference to the uniqueness of His work. We will not find ourselves embarrassed in the presence of the words ‘propitiation,’ ‘reconciliation,’ ‘redemption,’ ‘atonement.’ We will not find ourselves embarrassed before the terms ‘the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin.’ We will not be embarrassed before the concept of an imputed righteousness.
Our gospel is unashamedly the gospel of Romans 1:17, wherein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith. There will be an unashamed doctrinal vigor to our preaching with reference to the Person and the work of the Lord Jesus.
So, it will be true with reference to the personal agency of the Holy Spirit in the quickening of the dead sinner, taking out the heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh; putting God’s meaning upon the prostituted term ‘born again,’ which means in our day nothing more than somehow a half-nod to Jesus that will incorporate Jesus into men’s hog-pens, and call themselves ‘born again Christians’ when they live like they knew nothing of the transforming grace of God.
We will be unashamed of the vigor of the biblical doctrine of conversion at a holy life, the Second Coming, and Heaven and Hell. While we will labor under God to express those old and time-proven doctrinal formulas in fresh and dripping constructions, with fresh and vivid illustrations, with relevant and poignant applications, that preaching which is owned of God is never marked by novelty. As surely as it is pervasively biblical, it is unashamedly doctrinal.
3. It will be intensely pastoral.
Thirdly, as the substance, it is always marked by this characteristic: it is intensely pastoral. I have—in using the term ‘pastoral’—two dimensions of thought in my thinking: the shepherd who seeks lost sheep, and of the shepherd who cares, guards, feeds, guides, and protects sheep that are within the fold. I’m saying that God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching is intensely pastoral. It is preaching that reflects the Bible’s own self-revealed purpose.
Nowhere is that purpose more beautifully summarized than in 2 Timothy 3:14-17. Paul says to Timothy that, “From a
There’s the first great purpose of the Scriptures, that through their proclamation the Lord Jesus might fulfill His own word of John 10:16. “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, one shepherd.” All of the sheep for whom He lays down His life He personally brings by His voice, and His voice is heard through preaching.
“How shall they believe on Him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Romans 10:14.) It’s when the preacher goes forth to herald the message, that Christ goes forth in him, and with him, and through him.
The Ephesians never, never had a visit from Christ before or after the days of His flesh, yet Paul can say in chapter 2, verse 17, “He came and preached peace to you who were afar off, and peace to those who were nigh.” He says the Christ who died to reconcile Jew and Gentile into one new man, that very Christ came and preached His own redemption at Ephesus. When did He preach it? He preached it when His servants came and proclaimed the gospel; proclaimed it not without any intention, hope, goal, or conscious desire to see men saved, but preached it with intensely pastoral yearning and concern.
Not only that intensely pastoral element with reference to the gathering-in of the lost sheep, but the caring for the found sheep.
“Do you love Me, Peter? Feed My sheep. Shepherd My sheep. Feed My lambs, Peter.” Show your love for Him by being committed not to a professional detached ministry that merely traffics in truth that floats by the mental faculties of those for whom you are responsible, but brings it down to where they can masticate it, swallow it, regurgitate, chew it, and assimilate it! “Feed My sheep.” The mark of God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching is always that it is intensely pastoral. Those whose ministries are owned of God are so owned because they are handling the Word in a way that parallels the purpose of God in giving the Word!
If the purpose is, in its first sense, according to 2 Timothy 3:14, to make us wise unto salvation, and secondly according to verses 16 and 17, also, “Profitable for teaching, correction, training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete.” Where a man is handling the Word according to its own professed intention, there you will most likely have most of the blessing of God, the Holy Ghost.
4. It will be decidedly evangelical.
The fourth mark, as to the substance of God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching is this: it will not only be pervasively biblical, unashamedly doctrinal, intensely pastoral, but decidedly evangelical, or if you want the more formal word, Christological. I use the word ‘evangelical’ in the sense that our Lord Jesus is the heart and soul of God’s good news to men. Not only to those that are without the fold, but He is also the life of those within the fold. Not only does He bid sinners to come to Him and drink with the promise, “Whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give Him shall never thirst.” Not only does He bid men to come and eat initially of Him as the bread of life, but there in John 6 He says, “He who eats [present tense] my flesh, and drinks [present tense] My blood lives by Me.”
In other words, we are not only given life initially in a crucified Saviour, but that life is sustained as it is lived by faith in the Son of God who what? Made the world? No. That would have been true. The Son of God who upholds all things by the word of His power? That’s true, but that isn’t what Paul said in Galatians 2:20. He says, “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, contemplated uniquely in this identity, who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.”
He could say to the Colossians, “When Christ, who is our life..” As ‘our life,’ I say it reverently. Though every attribute of Christ, every office of Christ, and every function and ministry of Christ is part of the way in which He is our life, the main conduit of His life to us is the contemplation of the virtue of His death and the power of His resurrection. It’s the efficacy of His advocacy and intercession at the right hand of the Father, and the burning anticipation that the hour is coming when He will break through the clouds and take us home to be with Himself. You see, the Holy Ghost delights to own with power that preaching that confluences with His most delightful ministry.
He is the Spirit who brooded upon the waters. If you’ve never read John Owen, Volume 3, that most comprehensive treatment on the ministry of the Spirit, I urge you to read it. From the initial brooding upon the original Creation, to His work in consummating the new creation at the end of the age, of all of His works His most delightful work—even within the more limited scope of the conversion and sanctification of sinners—is not to convict them of their sin, but it is to testify of the Lord Jesus. “He shall not bear witness of Himself. He shall bear witness of me.” The spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus!
While you have heard me in this place, take my stand against that view of preaching that says that every sermon to be a Christian sermon must have some facet of the Person or work of Christ as its ultimate destination. I repudiate that view of preaching! It will not stand the test of Scripture; it will not stand the test of the kind of preaching the Spirit of God has owned in the history of the Church. Nonetheless, I say that preaching which God has most powerfully owned, and to which His Spirit has most delightfully attended with His own presence is that which is decidedly evangelical. So that we can, by the grace of God, say as the Apostle in Colossians chapter 1. Paul’s vision is the maturation of the saints, yet in seeking to bring them to maturation, how does he do it?
Colossians 1:28, “Whom we preach, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily.”
Christ was preached not merely to see men brought into the narrow gate and set upon the narrow way, but all along the way Christ is preached by admission, by exhortation. Christ is preached in the full spectrum of divinely-revealed wisdom, that men may be brought mature in Christ, but Christ is proclaimed.
I say brethren, I say to you dear people who are not in the ministry whose hearts yearn that God would glorify His Son in our day, and you with me and these men are convinced that preaching has a unique place in the plan and purpose of God, as we pray for a restoration of biblical preaching, what are we praying for? How will we recognize it? When we find more and more preaching that in its substance is pervasively biblical. From beginning to end, you’re never far from either an illusion, a quotation, a reference, or an illustration that has it’s taproots patently in this blessed Book! Pervasively biblical. It is unashamedly doctrinal. It makes theologians out of its regular hearers. It is intensely pastoral. Saved and lost people don’t go out week after week saying, “So what?” They go out feeling, “That word has shut me up to where I must have dealings with God.” It is decidedly evangelical. Rarely can a person leave without realizing that whatever my duty is, saved or lost, it cannot be fulfilled apart from hard dealings with the Son of God.
That’s the preaching we long to see restored to our land; the kind of preaching we long to see heralded to the ends of the earth!
2- The form of that preaching.
What about its form? Does it have that substance? Should we be indifferent to its form? I answer: no, because there is a rational explanation for the uniqueness of preaching in the purposes of God. One day I hope my thoughts on this mature enough, that I’ll dare to preach on them. Form does, indeed, have something to do with the preaching owned of God, and anointed by the Spirit of God. I want to see three things about its form, and say them quite briefly.
1. It will be deliberately simple.
As to its form, it will be deliberately simple. Now, I did not say simplistic, but I said ‘simple’ as opposed to intricate and complex, so that one has to have a trained, theological mind, or a trained mind in academia in order to sort out that substance that is biblical, theological, pastoral, and evangelical.
1 Corinthians 14:9 is a text, my brethren, that if anyone in your congregation does calligraphy, have them do a nice, big sign in calligraphy and set it over your desk. When you think the sermon is ready to be preached, ask yourself, “Does it meet this standard?”
1 Corinthians 14:9, “So also ye, unless ye utter by the tongue speech easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye will be speaking into the air.”
Alas, the air is laden with the incomprehensible, with the complex, and with the convoluted, because in form we have not deliberately labeled the message to be simple. He who is the embodiment of all wisdom, the very infinite mind of God is his. Of Him it is said, “The common people heard Him gladly.” (Mark 12:37b.) He scratches where we itch! He takes the loftiest of the high, eternal truths and roots them into travailing mothers, into chirping birds, into opening flowers, and into crooked stewards. Need I go on?
“Blind guides.” He used the grotesque. He didn’t care if it got the message across. He said you’re like silly people, that when you open up the lead of the fresh skin of the goat into which your new wine has been poured, knowing some gnats dropped in and died while it was being trampled out in the hollowed-out stone, where you pressed your wine you put your piece of muslin over your cup. You’re sure to do that and strain out the gnats. While all your gnats are strained out, you remove your muslin, you turn to say greetings to someone passing by, and your camel gets loose from the tent post. He puts his rump inside the glass, and you don’t even see him. You swallow down your wine.
As Jesus said, “Ye strain a gnat, and you swallow a camel.” (Matthew 23:24.) You say, “That’s a grotesque illustration!” Jesus used it. He said you’re like people scrubbing and buffing the outside of the cup and the platter, and there it sits glistening in its beauty. Pick your nose up over the rim, and look in. It’s full of crud, the accumulated crud of a thousand meals, rancid, vermon-infested! He says, “You cleanse the outside of the cup and platter, but within are full of extortion and excess.” (Matthew 23:25.) What is He doing? He’s being deliberately simple, speaking in words easy to be understood by simile, illustration, analogy, metaphor, parable, the grotesque, and at times even borderline coarse. Deliberately simple.
That preaching which the Holy Ghost most often owns with power is that which in form is deliberately simple, in which all pride of appearing learned has been nailed to a cross, and all desire to appear elegant has been nailed on top of it! You’re willing to have people go out and say, “Oh, I’ve heard things about that preacher! He was a good preacher. It was so simple.” You can’t have a higher compliment from an unhumbled sinner than that.
2. It will be unmistakably intelligible.
In other words, in form it must be presented in such a way that not only will most people get it if they tried hard enough, but that no one will miss it unless they’re out of their tree, or deliberately perverse. That’s all the difference in the world. Unmistakably intelligible with reference to structure, illustrative material, imagery—all of these factors, so to speak, not that the vast majority will most likely get it if they tried hard enough, but that none can miss our meaning, unless they lack their rational faculties or are willfully perverse in their hearts. That’s the kind of preaching that the Holy Ghost owns: deliberately simple, unmistakably intelligible, and thirdly in it’s form, unashamedly personal.
3. It will be unashamedly personal.
Not saying good, true, biblical, and right things about God, Heaven, Hell, sin, Christ, repentance, faith, and holiness—not saying these things in the hearing of men, but saying these things to the hearts of men. Not dumping a load of truth out before them, but endeavoring with every legitimate faculty of form, structure, and personal address to bring it into the deepest chambers of their hearts. Not afraid to say, “You. You. You. And you!” Be done with this innocuous pulpit we.
“You!” Peter said, “Thy wicked hands took Him, crucified, and slew Him, and God raised Him up!” No wonder they were cut to the heart. Nobody looked around saying, “Who is this innocuous we? Somebody, somewhere, at some time apparently killed the Messiah. Let’s try to find out the critters and deal with them.” He said, “No. This Jesus approved of God among you with every Messianic credential required in your Bibles, you, by wicked hands, took Him, and killed Him! You hung Him on a tree!”
Unashamedly personal, not only in conviction, but in consolation. Oh, what a difference when a preacher says, “You, my preacher brother struggling and trying to be consistent in your devotions, struggling with trying to juggle your responsibilities as a husband, as a grandfather, as a counselor, as a confidant to other preachers.” “When he says ‘you’ there’s just God, the preacher, and me. I’m having dealings with God.” There may be some among us who in the work of the ministry occasionally have problems with their inner life. I say, well that’s an interesting statement; floats right by me. There isn’t a hook, there isn’t a barb, there isn’t an arrow in it.
Brethren, the Holy Ghost has come to do an intensely personal work in the hearts of men. He gets them into the Kingdom one by one. He sanctifies them in a most personal, intimate discipline that is tailor-made to everyone of His own. Therefore, the preaching that reflects the form of His dealing is most likely to be owned by His power!
I must hasten on. Preaching that is owned of God, the preaching which we long to see restored to our land in abundance, is not only marked by these characteristics with regard to substance, with regard to form, but also with the mode of delivery.
3- The mode of delivery of that preaching.
Here I want to root what I have to say in this pivotal text: Acts 14. In our day there is a great suspicion of anything that seems to be first cousin twice removed to that which would be called ‘rhetoric,’ mastering the science of effective delivery. The Holy Ghost has forever underscored the significance of this dimension of Spirit-owned preaching in Acts 14:1, “It came to pass in Iconium that they entered together into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake.” Houtos hoste. The emphasis falls upon the manner of their utterance, “That a great multitude both of Jews and of Greeks believed.”
Wait a minute. Has Luke descended to be a semi-pelagian or an outright pelagian in which every man is regarded as his own Adam, and by moral suasion he can in his moral and ethical neutrality choose to believe simply because the manner of speaking has been so compelling from a rhetorical standpoint? Of course not. This is Luke the theologian who has already said in the previous chapter these words: look at chapter 13, verse 48.
Acts 13:48, “And as the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of God: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.”
Who believed? Those that were ordained to eternal life. How many? Just as many. Not one less; not one more. Oh, how this verse has caused antsiness in those who flatly reject the doctrine of God’s free, sovereign, unconditional, electing decree. I’ve laughed as I’ve read the commentators who will not bow their necks to this clearly revealed doctrine. Luke the theologian is Luke the historian. As a little stroke of theological history, he says against the backdrop of the recalcitrance of these Jews, these Gentiles believed not because they had some more inherent capacity to faith, but because God has set His love upon them before the foundation of the world. He’s the Luke who later on says in chapter 16—as Paul is preaching by a riverside to a woman’s prayer meeting—concerning Lydia, “Whose heart the Lord opened.” Now, language cannot be more clear than that. Why did she respond in faith, in gracious compliance with the words of the Apostle? Because the Lord opened her heart! You say, “So and so opened his heart to the Lord.” Luke says, “The Lord opened her heart to Himself.”
You see, Luke—being the accurate theologian that he was—was not a hyper Calvinist. He both believed and unashamedly recorded the fact that the God who has ordained the ends has ordained the means thereto. God—to show us all that He’s God and He uses His Word—will sometimes take a man’s preaching that is the very quintessence of abominable, rhetorical production, and save sinners. That is not His ordinary method. As surely as God can take a dumb ass and open its mouth to state the madness of the Prophet is no warrant for us to start the first donkey Bible school of Montville, and turn the donkeys loose to go after every other cult leader, saying, “Maybe God will use our donkeys to turn away the madness of these false prophets!” What God may do in His sovereignty is His business, but what God ordinarily does in the way it is revealed in Scripture, it is our business to know and to take seriously.
This text says, “They so spake,” with the emphasis upon the manner of their speaking! The actual mode of delivery! “They so spake.” Now, that is referring to what they did when they were preaching. I don’t know how Luke could find words to describe it! Brethren, as we pray for a restoration of biblical preaching, we are not only praying for preaching that is marked by those four characteristics, as to its substance, and those three as to its form, but as to its mode of delivery, I mention again four things.
1. It is unashamedly bold.
Number one, and at the head of the list, as I understand the emphasis of the New Testament at present, it is unashamedly bold. In its mode of delivery, it is unashamedly bold.
Open, please, to Acts chapter 4. We’ll make a quick trip through four or five passages in Acts. I’ll simply quote several references from the epistles, but you remember the incident. Peter and John had been preaching, and as they preached, look at verse 10. “Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even in him doth this man stand here before you whole. He is the stone which was set at nought of you the builders, which was made the head of the corner. And in none other is there salvation: for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, whereby we must be saved. Now when they beheld the boldness..”
When they beheld the boldness! It doesn’t say that with rashness they perceived that they were uncultured, and took knowledge that no one ever taught them manners. It says, “When they beheld the boldness, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men.” In other words, they had not gone to the formal schools that would enable the average man to take a stand and say anything with certainty.
You see, the unlearned, the untaught in their schools might have the right to say, “Sirs, may I suggest that perhaps it could be that in the act of crucifying Jesus you may have crucified the Christ? Because there is an empty tomb and there are some rumors, one of the possibilities is that it may be that perhaps He was raised from the dead. Has it ever entered into your minds to consider, at least as a possibility, that that passage which speaks of the stones which the builders rejected as made head of the corner, just might possibly be fulfilled in this Jesus who just might possibly be the Christ, who just might possibly have been raised from the dead? I wouldn’t want to impose my views upon you.”
They beheld the boldness. What was the boldness? The boldness was this unashamed affirmation of what they knew of God’s mighty acts in Jesus Christ, and their life and death implications. There is salvation in none other. “Go on rejecting the One you’ve already rejected and crucified and lost, and that forever!” That’s boldness. “Well,” they thought, “we’ll shut him up. We’ll get at that boldness, and make him a little timid!” So, they threatened them. They told them, “Stop this business.”
They go back and do what? They gather the people together and say, “Our political rights are being infringed upon. Let’s appeal to Rome. Let’s draft a statement, get our signatures, and we’ll be the organized reconstructionist of the first century. We’ll impose God’s Law upon this Christ-denying, Christ-hating Sanhedrin.” No. They go back to their company and pray. Many of our reconstructionist friends would say they took the Pietistic route. Their dualism drove them to their knees. Bless God it did. They said, now we’re not telling you anything you don’t know about. They just rehearsed it all before the Lord. I love the way they do that. You can’t get sidetracked into prayer. You’ve got to stick with what I’m trying to do.
What happens? God was so pleased with their prayer that He says, “I just can’t give them an answer in an ordinary way. I want to show I’m so pleased with this kind of prayer.” Verse 31. “And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were gathered together; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.” What was the fruit of that fresh enduement, infilling, empowering of the Spirit? “They spake the word of God with boldness.” Well, wait a minute, what were they doing before when they beheld the boldness? Now it says they spoke with boldness! I wonder what measure of boldness was now upon them. I don’t know how much more bold you can get than what we read, but it says they spake the Word of God with boldness. It’s a word that means unfettered, uninhibited, pouring forth with what they knew. They spoke as men who knew it! Unashamedly bold.
Acts 14:3. In that same chapter where the emphasis falls upon the matter of their speaking to which we had previously preferred. What was the long-term description of their preaching? Long time therefore they tarried there. Here was Luke’s summary of what they did, speaking boldly in the Lord, who bore witness unto the word of His grace. As they preached the word of His grace, they did so boldly. They were not intimidated by philosophers; they were not intimidated by reprobate shoes; they were not intimidated by anything but the thought that they might not be true to their trust of proclaiming the Word of God.
That’s what Paul says he wants the Christians to pray for him above all else in Ephesians 6 at the end of that chapter. “With all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto for all the saints and for me, that boldness may be given unto me, that I may speak as I ought to speak.” (Ephesians 6:18-19.)
Colossians 4:1-2 has the same emphasis. Of all the things he could ask them to pray for, he says, “Pray that I’ll speak with boldness.” You see, it has nothing to do with personality. It has nothing to do with temperament. Now, the manner in which your boldness expressed itself will be tinged by your temperament. It will be colored by your personality, but it is not a matter that in it’s essence has anything to do with native temperament and personality! It is a spiritual endowment! “Pray that God may be with my mouth, that I may open it boldly, and speak as I ought to speak.” Unashamedly bold in its mode of delivery.
2. It is intensely earnest.
Perhaps the most pathetic expression of that—in the truest sense of the word pathetic—is 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Here the Apostle moves so naturally from the pastor into the evangelist, even when writing to a Christian church. This passage troubled me for years. He addresses the people as a company of the redeemed. He’s assuming gospel motives in the presence of the Spirit, and right in the middle of the epistle he starts preaching the gospel like they’re all unsaved. It bothered me for years. I still don’t fully understand it, but one thing is clear: the Apostle’s heart was so set upon seeing men right with God that in a sense—under the influence of the Holy Ghost who delights to testify to Christ, and peculiarly to Christ crucified—it’s as though he gets carried out of himself for a paragraph or two in this marvelous section on the ministry.
He says in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20, “We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ.” Brethren, here’s the language: “As though God were entreating by us; we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God.” “We are ambassadors on behalf of Christ, as though God were entreating by us.” It’s as though God Himself were entreating by our instrumentality. “We beseech you on the behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.” Parakaleó: we draw alongside and we call. Deometha: we ask, we entreat, and we beg. Intensely earnest.
How does God entreat sinners? When God says through the Prophet Ezekiel, “Turn ye, turn ye; why will ye die, O house of Israel? I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked!” (Ezekiel 33:11.) I don’t mean to be a reverend, but does God say, “I’ve got no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Turn ye. Turn ye. Why will ye die, O house of Israel”? It is borderline blasphemy to say that that’s what God says. None of us can, with any amount of vocal faculties, borne out of lengthy meditation and reflection until a whole soul is seeped in the pathos of a pleading God, but surely God does not say without emotion, “I’ve got no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Turn ye. Why will ye die?” It leads in the direction of, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Turn ye! Turn ye! Why will ye die, O house of Israel?!”
Looking at those bent over with the oppressive weight of the burdensome, legalistic system of the Pharisees, finding no escape from the galling, pressing conviction of an enlightened conscience, intensified by the galling bondage of all of the Pharisaic trappings. He sees them in their true state: bent over with such a weight. Does he say without emotion, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest”? What did He say? Everytime I try to quote the words they stick in my throat. What must it have been for Christ to say to those bent over in burden, doubly last with Pharisaic pressures? Those wicked leaders who bound burdens that they themselves would not lift a finger to assist in. “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you. Learn of me.” (Matthew 11:28.) “For unlike the Pharisees, in all their religious pompousness, and their burdens, I am meek and lowly in heart; you shall find rest to your souls.”
Paul says, “We beseech you in the stead of Christ.” Brethren, in God’s name, how can we have a view of preaching that says it’s just the Word, the plain Word, give out the Word, God uses the Word? No! “They so spake that a multitude believed.” There is an intimate conjunction between those whom God has used to call in many of His elect, and to build up His people in their most holy faith, in vigorous, Christ-loving piety, the passion, and the earnestness with which they preached. Though none of us in our right minds would think we had one-hundredth of the gift of the Whitfield, one-hundredth of the tenderness of the M’Cheyne, one-hundredth of the breadth of heart and mind of a Spurgeon, brethren, we can still have our humanity consumed, in proportion to what we are, with the same degree of earnestness with which they were consumed.
A work that I trust would see the light of a reprint, which one of my dear brothers here at this conference sent to me, is John Angell James’ book An Earnest Ministry—the Need of the Times. Let me just read several paragraphs on this matter of earnestness.
The secret of animation, the nature of earnestness, lie as we have said, in an intense feeling of the subject of discourse; in a mind deeply impressed, and a heart warmed, with the theme discussed. All men are in earnest when they feel. Hence the anecdote of the pleader, who, on being applied to by a client to undertake her cause, upon perceiving the coldness of her manner in stating her case, told the applicant he did not credit her tale. Stung by this reflection upon her veracity, and this disbelief of her grievance, she rose into strong emotion, and affirmed with expressive vehemence the truth of the story. “Now,” said he, “I believe you.”
James goes on to say, “Sympathy is the speaker’s most powerful auxiliary; there is nothing so contagious as strong emotion.” Grace and the dynamics of God’s regenerating work and His sovereign, mysterious work of sanctification—do not bypass those things which God in nature has implanted in us as image-bearers of Himself. The Holy Ghost seizes them, and takes ahold of them. Brethren, if we’re willing to pay the price, we’ll make it the conduit of bringing the Word of God to men, not in an icy, cold, calculating accuracy, but in unashamedly bold and an intensely earnest pathos and entreaty.
3. It is genuinely affectionate.
There must also be, as to the mode of it’s delivery, that which would be described as genuinely affectionate here. In the light of time, brethren, I can only give you the texts.
1 Thessalonians 2:7, “We were gentle among you, as a nurse with her own children.”
2 Corinthians 6:11-12 is one of the most pathetic passages. “O Corinthians, our heart is open to you. You are not compressed in our hearts, we are compressed in yours.” “But though our love is unrequited, our heart is wide towards you.” Genuinely affectionate; unashamedly affectionate.
He says in 2 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 14 and 15, “I seek not yours, but you; the more I love you, the less I am loved?” Brethren, in the mode of our delivery, men must sense and know, not because we have wept for them alone, or only in secret, but because there throbs through us—in the act of preaching—the sense, the perception of genuine affection.
4. It is naturally animated.
The fourth characteristic in the mode of delivery has a few exceptions, but until you can prove that you have the thundering voice of a charmer’s and the impressive presence of a few other exceptions, don’t consider yourself the exception to this fourth point. The mode of delivery that the Spirit of God is most frequently owned with power is marked by being naturally animated. It is not only unashamedly bold, intensely earnest, genuinely affectionate, but naturally animated.
You don’t know what is natural animation until you get loosed from carnal self-consciousness. Until the truth so gets ahold of you in preaching, and genuine compassion so grips you in preaching, that for a few minutes you forget yourself. I’ve seen it take the most stilted, unanimated people, and turn them into lions in the pulpit.
You see, some of the things God did for me—and I give very few anecdotes—some of you have listened to me for years on tapes, and you know that I rarely give a personal anecdote, but I want to give this one. Like so many other things, my spiritual birthright has been such a blessing in many areas. One of the areas was this: shortly after I was converted, one of the first fruits of my ministry was a young man that to this day is in the ministry out in Western Canada. I remember when he came out to the football team. He reminded me of this after he was converted. I was so ashamed, because I don’t remember it. I apparently almost buried him one time. I stuck him at half-back, and I was playing linebacker. He came through, and I leveled him and said something nasty to him. I’m glad I don’t remember. The Lord’s blotted it out of my mind. He had this great prejudice towards me after I was converted. He watched me like a hawk, and saw that I was a converted man. He listened, and he was converted. He was one of the first fruits, if not the first fruits of my ministry.
This guy was so shy. He always went around with his hands in his pockets, with his head down, and kind of mumbled. If he had a beard, he would have mumbled into his beard. When some wise old men put us out in a street corner to channel some of our zeal, and we began to preach on this street corner, I saw this quiet, timid, reserved, shy guy—to whom God had revealed Christ in a saving way—take his little New Testament. We used to carry out a four-by-six, onion skin New Testament so we could rip without throwing our Bibles away. I saw God turn that timid guy into a lion. It wasn’t forced! It wasn’t artificial! The truth gripped him, and when it gripped him it liberated his hands, his feet, his eyes, his whole humanity! The moment he was done preaching his hands were back in his pockets, his head was down.
I went for two years to finish my formal education to a Bible college that had a view of preaching that said, “God never alters your personality in preaching. So, if you’re a hands-on-your-pockets, mumble-in-your-beard kind of guy, then that’s what people will be stuck with for the rest of their days.” I said, “I don’t buy it, because I cannot deny what I’ve seen and heard!”
The problem with some of you men is that you can get plenty animated when it’s your favorite football team playing, and it’s the last two minutes. They’re going for a touchdown, and there’s twelve seconds left. A guy hits a flanker in the back of the end zone, and for a few seconds you forget who you are! What happens? Right in your own living room you become alive! “Yay! He got him! Look at that! He wacked a guy!” What happens? In the moment of the passionate preoccupation with the football game, you became naturally animated.
Some of you will never become effective preachers till you ask the Holy Ghost to liberate you in the area that you need to get liberated to become naturally animated. Now, I am not saying your natural animation will be like this man’s or that man’s, or set any standard, but don’t cut yourself short when in other areas your animation is natural. No one grabs you and sits you down and says, “Oh, that’s histrionic. You put that all on. You practiced that for four hours last night. Shame on you! You introduced into my living room playacting. Shame on you!”
You see, you’ve got to get liberated from this stupid notion in our day that anyone who is animated and energetic in preaching is a fake, and somehow histrionic. None of that! Die to that wretched accusation! The Holy Ghost will bear witness to your liberated humanity, and bring the Word of God through you in a manner of grippingness and power that you’ve never known before! For the Holy Ghost does not batter nature, but liberates it. He batters sin, and with the fire of His grace consumes sin and evil, but He liberates humanity. It’s a wonderful thing to be a free man. “Whom the Son sets free is free indeed.” (John 8:36.) Free to be all God made me to be, as a distinct image-bearer of God when He knit me together in my mother’s womb.
My brethren, you’re listening too well, and I better stop. I will just give you the heads of point two. We just looked at the characteristics of God-owned, Spirit-anointed preaching. Now, what are the sources of this? There are the factors of sovereign endowment, the factors of human acquisition, and the factors of spiritual and rhetorical acquisition by the use of means. Maybe that will be our sermon next year. I’ve kept you long enough.
May God help us. May we cry to God. Some of us have heard—even some of you men here—preach, and we’ve felt like Simeon. I sat in this place a few weeks ago. It’s been a long time since I’ve wept through Sunday School, Sunday morning, and Sunday night preaching. Not all the way through, but intermediately. I felt like old Simeon saying, “Lord lift thy servant apart. Mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” (Luke 2:30.) Three preachers stood in this pulpit, in whom those marks were manifested.
Dear brethren, we haven’t begun to make a dent. We need to cry to God to augment in all of us whatever measure of these things He’s begun to impart, and pray that He will raise up an army of men whose preaching is God-owned and Spirit-anointed. This is our vision: for the kinds of preachers we’ve sought to describe from the Word of God. May the Lord grant them for His glory, for the gathering in of His elect, and for the blessing of His people. Let’s pray.
Our Father, what thanks can we give to You, this night, for Your holy Word? That Word which is indeed a lamp unto our feet and a light to our pathway; that Word which teaches us what this mysterious thing called ‘preaching’ is. We confess our ignorance of so much of what your Word teaches, but O Lord, the little bits You’ve taught us has made us hungry and thirsty that You would work in us every grace and every gift, and enable us to cultivate and stir up, through legitimate means, every faculty. May we, with your servant Timothy, stir into flame the gift that is in us. We pray, Lord, that by Your Holy Spirit You will make us, first of all, the men that we ought to be before Your eyes. Then mold us into the preachers that this generation so desperately needs.
Thank you for Your presence with us. Thank you for one another. Thank you for the way You’ve ministered to our hearts through our brethren. Thank you for this fellowship of love, of open-faced comunion, for this fellowship of goodwill, and desire to be helpers of each other’s faith. O God, we are a blessed people. We thank you. We praise you. We ask that You would take each man safely to his home. Bless us all with a good night of rest. Thank you for the things You’ve given us today. Thank you for the labors of Your servant, Pastor Seeton, and all of the practical help received. Thank you for helping us in our discussion period. O Lord, we acknowledge that if a bunch of sinners like us could have such a day unmarred by any outburst of carnal speech and ambitious expressions of men, surely, our Father, this is all of Your grace. We come with praise and thanksgiving, and pray that the benediction of Your presence will rest upon us as we leave this place. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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