Tag Archives: Gospel

Advice from 1876 on how to preach to one’s contemporaries

05 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by in Preaching, Uncategorized

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William M. Taylor’s The Ministry of the Word, 1876, has a useful discussion of preaching to the contemporary age. His insights are useful precisely because he is writing 140 years ago.  First, he mentions a point which is the thesis of David Wells’ God in the Whirlwind, namely that holiness and love must never be parted in our understanding and presentation of Christianity. As Taylor writes

Let us take care lest in our preaching we “put asunder” those two things which God has so thoroughly joined together. We must not exalt love without making mention of the righteousness..But neither, on the other hand, must we exalt the righteousness in such as as to obscure love. In the once case the Gospel will be made to wear an aspect of indifference to evil …. In the other it will be made to assume an appearance of terror ….But when we give each element its proper prominence, the love attracts to God, and the righteousness restrains from sin. [p. 90]

Next, he broaches the issue of what do our contemporaries need. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones was found of saying the Bible is the most up to date book:

The preaching most adapted to any age is the preaching of the Gospel ….That is the Gospel which every age needs, and its adaption to the human heart is made gloriously apparent wherever it is earnestly proclaimed. [91]

He then well quotes Maclaren:

“Perhaps the trust adaptation of a message to its wants, is to bring into prominence what it overlooks, and to emphasize the proclamation of what it does not believe.” [92]

Just for that the world abhors the Gospel.

31 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by in Church History

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The world bears the Gospel a grudge because the Gospel condemns the religious wisdom of the world. Jealous for its own religious views, the world in turn charges the Gospel with being a subversive and licentious doctrine, offensive to God and man, a doctrine to be persecuted as the worst plague on earth. As a result we have this paradoxical situation: The Gospel supplies the world with the salvation of Jesus Christ, peace of conscience, and every blessing. Just for that the world abhors the Gospel.

Luther, Commentary on Galatians 1:1

What Happened on Easter Morning?

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by in Apologetics, John, Luke, Mark, Matthew

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the-resurrection-1544
The Resurrection by Titian

A harmony of the fear and great joy found in the Resurrection Accounts. As a trained lawyer (who practice for 18 years), I show how the evidence both fits together coherently and thus presents compelling proof for the resurrection as a historical — albeit remarkably strange — event:

His living poems

02 Saturday May 2015

Posted by in Ephesians

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Our condition at the beginning is a key to the entire picture. We start out dead because of sin, so only God can bring us back to life:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you previously walked according to this worldly age, according to the ruler of the atmospheric domain, the spirit now working in the disobedient. We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and by nature we were children under wrath, as the others were also. But God, who is abundant in mercy, because of His great love that He had for us, made us alive with the Messiah even though we were dead in trespasses. By grace you are saved! He also raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavens, in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He might display the immeasurable riches of His grace in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—not from works, so that no one can boast. For we are His creation—created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them.

It could hardly be clearer. We were spiritually dead before God. We were absolutely powerless to do anything on our own behalf. The “you” and “we” in this passage are Gentiles and Jews, respectively. All had sinned, Paul told us in Romans 3, and the apostle tells us the same thing here in different words. In the midst of this terrible dilemma, God shows up. He shows up full of mercy. Mercy is something God does because He wants to, not because He has to. He shows up full of love. God chooses to make us alive in Christ. God gives us a place with Him in heaven, making us a part of His family.

So in the end, salvation is His gift, not from works. Those who benefit from God’s grace are the work of His creative hands, experiencing a new life in a new birth, what Scripture calls elsewhere “being born from above” or “born again.” And yet, despite all Paul says about works, he does not throw them away.

This is another part of Paul’s teaching we often miss. Works are a product of the new life of faith. Faith saves and faith works. We were “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them.” Why does God save us? So that we can again be useful, fulfilling the design that He originally had for us.

That is true fulfillment—walking in the purpose for which we were made. Good works are the indicator that salvation has taken place. When we are born again, we are God’s creation, His living poems. The word for creation in Ephesians 2:10 describes something someone else, in this case God, has brought into existence. We are designed for good works. We are built to serve and be useful. God designed this path so that having been saved and enabled in this new relationship, we can now walk in the good labor He designed for us originally to perform.

Bock, Darrell (2010-10-28). Recovering the Real Lost Gospel (pp. 63-64). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Thou Shalt be Peter

03 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Preaching

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“Thou art Simon … thou shalt be Peter,” said Jesus, and at that Simon lifted up his head and his heart. His redemption began at that moment. Courage and high resolve entered into his heart there and then. He was saved “by hope.”

“Thou art … thou shalt be,” in that contrast you have the optimism, the redeeming optimism of Jesus. No man can be a redeemer who has not a “shalt be” for the persons he seeks to redeem. Plato could not be a redeemer to the poor and low-born of Greece, he had no “shalt be” for them. Priests and scribes could not be redeemers to the publicans and sinners of Palestine. They had no “shalt be” for them.

There are plenty of men who can diagnose the condition of mankind to-day with exactness, who can point out the ill and describe the malady, but they can do nothing to redeem, because they know no cure. Thomas Hardy can describe with terrible fidelity man’s misery and woe, but he can do little to redeem him; he has no “shalt be.”

But Jesus Christ is fitted to be the world’s Redeemer just because He has a “shalt be” for every one. Taking us just as we are, He tells us of something better and nobler, which by the grace of God we may become “Thou art … thou shalt be.

He has a “shalt be” for us, no matter how desperate and hopeless our case may appear to be.
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As If God Did Not Exist

13 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by in Preaching, Stanley Hauerwas

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I suspect preachers fall into these familiar traps because not only do we not expect God to show up, but we also do not trust those to whom we preach. God knows we all want to be liked. We want to preach sermons the congregation will “like.” Moreover it is hard to preach the truth to those one has come to love. But the truth of the gospel is a harsh and dreadful truth. It is a truth through which we come to recognize that when all is said and done we are sinners who would prefer to live as if God does not exist.

Stanley Hauerwas,
A Cross-Shattered Church

The Gospel is More Than Forgiveness

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Ministry

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The gospel starts with a promise: a relationship in the Spirit. It is pictured as a meal and a washing: the Lord’s Table and baptism. It is rooted in a unique action supplying a unique need: the cross. It is inaugurated as a gift that is the sign of the arrival of the new era: Pentecost. It is affirmed in divine action and Scripture: God working uniquely and inseparably through Jesus. It is embraced in a turn that ends in faith: invoking the name of Jesus. It involves a different kind of power and is designed to be a way of life: reconciliation and the power of God unto salvation

Recovering The Real Lost Gospel
Darrell L Bock

A true sermon is a real deed.

13 Thursday Nov 2014

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For this, therefore, I say that Christ Himself existed not to present us with the supreme spiritual spectacle of history, but to achieve the critical thing in history. The Gospel is an act of God,
gathered in a point but thrilling through history, and it calls for an act, and inspires it. Its preaching must therefore be an act, a “function” of the great act. A true sermon is a real deed. It puts the preacher’s personality into an act. That is his chief form of Christian life and practice. And one of his great difficulties is that he has to multiply words about what is essentially a deed. If you remember what men of affairs think about the people who make set speeches in committee you will realize how the preacher loses power whose sermons are felt to be productions, or lessons, or speeches, rather than real acts of will, struggles with other wills, and
exercises of effective power. The Gospel means something done and not simply declared. For this work Christ existed on earth. And to give this work effect Bible and Church alike
exist. We treat the Church as plastic to that work and its fulfilment, do we not? That is the true Church, and the true form of Church, which gives best effect to the Gospel. So also we must treat the Bible with much flexibility. The test and the trial of all is the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and in Him as crucified. Everything is imperishable which is inseparable from that.

P.T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind 22-23

But what does he mean by “flexibility”?

What if it be all True?

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Church History, Horatius Bonar, John Newton

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John Newton had a pious mother, who was taken from him when he was only seven years old. She taught him, when but an infant, to pray, and sowed in his young heart the seeds of his future spiritual life.

When a boy, he was led to think much of God and of eternal things; but his impressions wore off, and he entered on a course of sin. It seemed as if he had broken loose from all bonds, and delighted only in what was evil.

While in this impenitent state he was thrown from a horse, and was in great danger, but his life was preserved. Then his conscience awoke once more, and he trembled at the thought of appearing before God, sinful and unready. Under this dread he forsook his sins for a while, and gave up his profane living and speaking; but the reformation was only outward, and did not last long.

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Impassibility and the Gospel

06 Saturday Sep 2014

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Impassibility is the doctrine which states — not that God has no affections, no “emotions” — but rather that, “God is not affected or changed by anything outside of himself. The main point is that God is not affected rather than lacking affection!”

Michael Bird then goes to explain how impassibility makes the gospel good news:

Baddeley goes on to argue that impassibility is what makes the gospel good news.  First, impassibility proves that God acts out of love and in grace because it is only his own being that motivates him to be so. God is not persuaded to be loving and gracious because of his experience of suffering. Rather, God acts lovingly and graciously toward us because he eternally and unchangeably is so.

Second, the incarnation and cross were not simply a manifestation of what was always true, namely, that God suffers and empathizes with human tragedy. No, the incarnation was a fundamentally new event whereby the Son became incarnate and suffered for us. Therefore, things previously not possible for God’s Son, such as the experience of suffering and death, became possible when the Son took on flesh and blood. Impassibility establishes that God relates to us in a fully emotional way, grounded in his own nature; accordingly, he is able to act in love and grace toward us. Furthermore, the man Jesus Christ can authentically sympathize with our weaknesses because only God cannot be emotionally pressed to acting in compassion toward us.

So, then, does God suffer? Indeed he does. But his suffering is not surprisingly imposed; it does not move him to be something other than he is or to do something other than he intended to. God chooses to be the God who suffers with and for human creatures. Indeed, according to Packer, “a totally impassive God would be a horror, and not the God of Calvary at all. He might belong in Islam; he has no place in Christianity. If, therefore, we can learn to think of the chosenness of God’s grief and pain as the essence of his impassibility, so-called, we will do well.”

Bird, Michael F. (2013-10-29). Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction (Kindle Locations 2754-2765). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.