Excellent Sermon: “We must rest in the Gospel before we run with the Gospel”

I listened to a great sermon during lunch today by Tony Rose, pastor of Lagrange Baptist Church in Kentucky, speaking in chapel at Southern Seminary this morning. His text was Hebrews 4:11-16, and the title was “We must rest in the Gospel before we can run with the Gospel.” He expounds many of the same Gospel truths I have been exploring here in recent days: the need for grace and the sufficiency of Christ for sinners. The sermon starts out slow, with a number of little greetings to the congregation, but picks up a head of steam as he gets into the text and had me loving Christ more and shouting “Amen!” by the end.

You can listen to it here.

Reading through Ryle’s Holiness

A number of people have recently recommended the book Holiness by J.C. Ryle to me. Holiness was written to correct a number of wrong-headed teachings about the nature of sanctification in his day, from the possibility of sinless perfection, to total antinomianism, to other errant understandings of the Gospel that are common to every age. Ryle’s treatment of theChristian life has endured as one of the finest ever written.

My friend Landon Preston and I have agreed to read through this classic together, and would like to post some of our reflections on each chapter here in the coming weeks. I hope it spurs you to check out Ryle for yourself, and more importantly, that it moves us all to “pursue holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord.”

Meditation on Titus 1:1

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of the elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness . . .

I have long been convinced that much is packed into the opening greetings of the New Testament epistles, and this is a prime example. There is much that could be said here, but as a pastor, Paul’s motivation as an apostle immediately strikes me. He grounds his identity first in being the servant of God and the apostle of Jesus Christ. How humbling it is to read that Paul’s identity is found first and foremost in being a servant. Much is said about “servant leadership” in church settings, but many times it degenerates into just more empty rhetoric. To truly be the “servant of God,” brings up images to me of bowing low in humility before the great King and joyfully pouring all energy into promoting the honor of the master. A faithful servant also refuses to entertain any notions about serving the King’s enemy. And this is no miserable slavery; Paul is motivated by love to serve the one who raised him up to new life in Christ. Do I structure my day as a servant of the living God, or as just another self-serving rebel following after the patrterns of this world in a minister’s garb?  

But then I see how Paul’s service to God is more specifically carried out, for the sake of the faith of the elect, and their knowledge of the truth. The true servant of God loves the people of God, and he labors for their increased faith and knowledge of the truth. This is what drives Paul to preach the the Gospel where Christ has not been named, and to clarify and apply the Gospel where the churches have already begun. It is a love for the elect, the very precious souls for whom Christ shed his blood, that they might know Christ and be found in him. As I sit in my living room, thinking about how I will spend my time today, I realize how often I am distracted from this goal. This can happen when the ones I am called to serve frustrate me, or when I do not feel like denying myself at the end of the day and go to the home of a missing member and exhort them to return to the body. Forgetting this charge produces pitiful efforts on my part in prayer for my people, rather than beseeching God to create faith where there is no faith, to bring about a deeper understanding of the Gospel, and a joy in Christ where there is suffering and despondence. Remembering that the faith of the elect and their knowledge of the truth has been entrusted to me will cause me to dig deep in sermon preparation for application that will ”wound and heal” them, rather than just churning out a generic exposition. I am their pastor, and this is my charge as a servant of God.

Along these same lines, Paul makes a tight connection between knowledge of the truth and godliness. True knowledge of the Gospel will result in a Gospel-shaped life. This will be an important theme in the book of Titus, as Paul speaks of those who “profess to know God but deny him by their works,” and God’s grace creating a people “zealous for good works.” Are my people walking in godliness, or do we all look just like the world? Paul says that godliness is directly connected to a knowledge of the truth, which will largely be dependent on faithful preaching and private ministry of the word. Will I address issues of sin pointedly out of love, or duck away like a coward? A few simple observations on Titus 1:1 have already lead to heavy conviction. May God help me to be faithful to serve the living God and labor for his elect.

An Undisciplined Man, the Spiritual Disciplines, and the Letter to Titus

It borders on the absurd for such an undisciplined man as myself to speak to the issue of spiritual disciplines. However, in my reading of Donald Whitney’s Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, I was encouraged to read that the discipline of prayer is aided by the discipline of Scripture meditation. And in my own limited experience, I know that nothing aids me in the discipline of Scripture meditation like repeating the text again and again through Scripture memory. So hopefully, by God’s grace, faithful memorization will lead to Godly meditation, which will lead to more genuine prayer, which will result in a more humble man to the glory of God.

The verse that struck me as I was thinking along these lines was Titus 1:15-16, “To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their minds and consciences are defiled. They profess to know God but deny him by their works.” This has always been an intriguing passage to me, and so it set me to attempt memorizing and meditating on Titus. This book speaks directly to pastoral ministry and the life of the church, so I hope to post some meditations here in the coming days. I am also hoping this will hold me acocuntable to the disciplines themselves!

A Model for Applying the Gospel

Dr. Ray Van Neste preached Psalm 15 this past wekeend, and his exposition models the kind of careful application of the Gospel’s implications discussed in the previous post. Our people need this kind of shepherding from the pulpit, but you cannot rightly shepherd who you do not know. Dr. Van Neste is not preaching at some high-profile conference; he is addressing his own people. When it comes to pastoral ministry, his blog is the real place to go for substantive discussion and instruction.

Bridges on Applying the Gospel to the Hearts of the Hearers

When tracing out the ethical implications of the Gospel in my own preaching, one concern is to not separate these exhortations from a robust doctrine of the work of Christ, our righteousness. While we certainly want to shun a Phariseical works-righteousness, there is an Evangelical (in the Puritan sense), Gospel-righteousness that is demanded from Scripture and delightful to God. This calls for razor-sharp application from the pulpit. Bridges addresses these issues well in The Christian Ministry:

But if some be defective in their doctrinal statements, others are equally so in their practical enforcements. They withhold the details of Christian practice lest they should entrench upon the freeness of the Gospel covenant. (267)

Bridges then makes the excellent point on the same page that the epistles of Paul serve as a model: he begins with an exposition of the Gospel, and then moves to the practical outworkings of the “Gospel-shaped life.” He closes with an exhortation to preachers:

Partial preaching will produce a luxuriant crop of of partial hearers, to whom a large part of Scripture is useless; full of notions, excited in their feelings, forward in their profession; but unsubdued in their habits and tempers, equally destitute of the root, the life, activity, fruitfulness, enjoyment, perseverance, of vital religion . . . Let not therefore the dreaded imputation of being thought moral preachers, deter us from inculcating the requirements, as well as illustrating the doctrines, of the Gospel.  (268)

This last point comes as a timely word for me. Could it be that our preaching is sometimes influenced more by what our peers might think of our presentation than what Scripture demands we bring to our people? D.A. Carson speaks of application as the “bite and balm” of the text. His 3-part series on preaching at the 1995 Desiring God conference is excellent, and part 3 addresses application.

Bridges on the “Doctrinal Preaching of the Gospel”

In the chapter immediately following the “Scriptural Preaching of the Gospel,” in which he addresses the issue of sufficiency, Bridges moves to “Doctrinal Preaching of the Gospel.” He contends that preaching the Gospel strictly from the temporal framework of Creation-Fall-Redemption, with the Gospel effectively “beginning” with the Fall of Man, falls short of the Biblical vision. After mapping out the Gospel from sin to glorification, he writes this:

But important and glorious as are these views of the Gospel; yet to affirm that they comprise the entire Gospel, is to put a part (though indeed a very considerable part) for the whole. To stop here is to withhold much of the divine revelation from our people, and to lower our statement from the Scriptural standard of truth. We ought to trace the river of infinite mercy to its original source in the depths of eternity – in the bosom of God; “who hath called us according to his own purpose and grace given unto us in Christ Jesus before the world began.” This eternal purpose is not only an integral part of the scheme of salvation, but the fountain from which all springs – the foundation, on which all rests and turns – the assurance by which all is confirmed.” (248, the second set of italics mine) 

How is this to be done? Bridges speaks further down the same page of “declaring the freeness of the invitation of the Gospel,” and bringing these truths about sovereignty “in their due place and order, and with that strength and distinctness of statement, in which we find them in the sacred volume.” Whatever dangers may be inherent in bringing forth the reality of God’s sovereign pleasure in our salvation will be minimized first of all when we make a practice of freely declaring the Gospel to all, from the pulpit and throughout the week on the community. Second, by simply working our way through Scripture, a book at a time, and addressing whatever arises from the text. This keeps us from harping on pet issues and shrinking back from others.

The Evil of “Quick Lies”

I was just sliced open by Doug Wilson’s post on “quick lies.” Here is (for me at least) a condemning excerpt:

Suppose your mom asked you to make your bed, and half an hour later, she asks you about it. You say, quickly, “Oh, I was just heading up to do it now.” The claim is being made about the immediate future and is not falsifiable, certainly not by your mom, and perhaps not even by you. You might have been doing this for so long that you have come to believe that you are always on the verge of obedience. This is a quick lie, a glancing lie, a “don’t look back” now kind of lie.

“I was going to call you today . . .”

“I had been meaning to tell you . . .”

“I was just going to pay you back . . .”

The reason we tell these is in order to save face, or preserve our pride, or make us feel like we are being better Christians than we actually are. When we tell them, we are being brittle and insecure.

The rest of the brief post should be read – - here. 

Are we imaging the God of all truth or the great deceiver in our daily speech?

Bridges on the Pleasure of the Trinity in the Sufficiency of the Gospel

Here is another terrific quote from Charles Bridges on the sufficiency of the Gospel from The Christian Ministry:

The great and glorious God is jealous of his own authority and of the the honour of his Son Jesus. Nor will he condescend to bless any other methods to obtain so Divine and end. than what he himself has prescribed. Nor will his Holy Spirit, whose office is to “glorify Christ,” stoop to concur with any other sort of means for the saving of sinners where the name and office of his Son, the only appointed Saviour, are known, despised, and neglected. It is the Gospel alone, that is the power of God to salvation.  (n. 244)

College Gameday meets 1 Corinthians 2:13-16

College football commentators and analysts continue to fumble for words when it comes to evaluating Florida quarterback Tim Tebow:

“He’s such a class act.”

“He’s one of the finest human beings you will ever meet.”

“There’s just something special about this young man.”

What could possibly account for one of the most gifted athletes in college football history exhibiting what appears to be genuine humility, gratitude, and joy when anyone else in his position would be an obnoxious narcissist?