The Main Thing is To Keep The Main Thing The Main Thing

A Message Preached 3/12/2011 @ BBCMP

THE MAIN THING IS TO KEEP THE MAIN THING THE MAIN THING

1TIMOTHY 1:1-6

INTRODUCTION:

1:1  This is the first of the three “Pastoral Epistles”, which were written to help us get it right when we do Church. 

The Apostle Paul is the author of this epistle –I assume you are familiar with him.  

God is the One who made him an apostle.  There are men who get in the ministry by other means, but those that God calls and sends survive what puts others out.

“God” as used here, is our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ.  God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One Being, in three Persons.  It’s more complicated than modalism – God being one Person with three offices or agencies.  But it is also more complicated than three separate Gods.  It’s so complicated that theologians have long admitted that we lack the vocabulary to really explain it to our own satisfaction.  The Father is not the Son, is not the Spirit, but all are God, and without any of them God as revealed in the Bible would cease to be.  But here, the emphasis is on the deity of Christ

“By commandment” is how Paul became an apostle.  I’m not so sure about the whole matter of volunteering for the ministry.  As Paul says here, he’s an apostle because he was commanded to be one.  Compare

Tit 1:3 But hath in due times manifested his word through preaching, which is committed unto me according to the commandment of God our Saviour;

His being in the ministry was “not of men, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father

Ga 1:1 ¶ Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;)

Elsewhere, he speaks of being called into it;

Ro 1:1 ¶ Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God,

 1Co 1:1 ¶ Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother,

ordained

1Ti 2:7 Whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an apostle, (I speak the truth in Christ, and lie not;) a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity.

appointed

2Ti 1:11 Whereunto I am appointed a preacher, and an apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles.

chosen

 Ac 9:15 But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel:

Being made

Ac 26:16 But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee;

Being sent

 Ac 26:17 Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee,

And there is a purpose for the sending (Ac. 26:18) – to “open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith” in Jesus Christ.

I hope you can see here that there is indeed something special about those that God has called into the ministry.  We are all “sent” in some respect under the Great Commission.   But there is an authority and function that is unique to those that receive a particular call.

Now I’m convinced that I don’t have the power to do any of the stuff in v. 18 on my own.  To open people’s eyes, to get them out of the darkness and into the light, to get out from under the influence of Satan when they don’t even realize that he’s pulling their strings, to get them to realize they need to be forgiven – and to get people to hear that have their ears closed, clogged, and covered – that’s more than I can do.  But I am the voice that certain people will hear. 

And that’s why it is so important that the Church pray for its ministers.  Prayer can do it, we can’t.  And I can pray on my own, but all of us praying together is bound to get more done than I will by myself.  Above all, we need to pray that people will have ears to hear.  As Harry Nix said, “Just because your pinwheel ain’t a-turnin don’t mean the wind ain’t a-blowin.

This is a matter of spiritual warfare.  Jesus said to His disciples;

Mt 13:16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.

-       This is because Satan does blind people. 

2Co 4:3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:  4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.  5 For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake.

 6 For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

-        Thus, they need eye-salve

Re 3:18 I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.

That was spoken to a very self-satisfied group of people that thought they had it all together.

-        Similarly, the ears of many people are also closed (Mt. 13:16 again)

Re 2:7 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

That’s repeated in Re 2:11, 17, 29;  3:6, 13 and 22.  In other words, each of the 7 had people in them that could not hear.  So why should we expect to be any different. 

It’s not that the Spirit of God isn’t doing anything in some places.  He certainly may be.  But He’s just not doing what some people think He should be doing.  Well, I’m not wise enough to tell Him what I will or will not acknowledge as His work.  I’m praying for eyes to see.   And I see plenty.  I can see it, I guess, because I know that He works through tribulation, hardship, breaking and bruising. 

Our hope is not merely in the Lord Jesus Christ.  Our hope is the Lord Jesus Christ.  That difference may be subtle, but encouraging.  It takes it off of me to put my hope in Him, and leaves the responsibility where it belongs, and where things can’t break down.  Whether or not you put your hope in Him, He is nevertheless your hope. 

1:2  As you probably know, this epistle is written to a young pastor.   The opening verses set the tone for the remainder, and it seems to me that Paul is concerned that Timothy, and by extension any of the rest of us that share his calling, not be distracted from that which is absolutely essential by that which is merely incidental.

The usual salutation follows, and while there is plenty that could be said about it, we’ll pass over it for now

1:3-6  We could take this apart, but I don’t think that’s what we need this afternoon.  I want us to look at all of this instruction in these 4 verses together and get the point he is making using it all.

We can get off the main thing.  We can preach “truth” or “a truth” and forget to preach  “the truth” that is most important of all.  We can get caught up in what may be true and valuable up to a point, and allow it to push out what is most important, and at that point it is no longer edifying, or conducive to faith, but it becomes ridiculous and pointless at best “vain jangling” (v. 6), and may even become positively dangerous and destructive

“Jangling” is making a lot of noise without any form or harmony.  There is always the chance of taking a swerve off the track and into nonsense.  When a person has done that, it is jangling.  

And there is undeniably some intersection here with a wrong understanding of the use of the law (v. 7).  We’re addicted to the law.  And as soon as we swerve away from the gospel as the main thing, and try to make the law the main thing, the more we talk, the less we actually understand.  We are to use the law to expose sin, not to remedy it.  The remedy for it is the gospel (v. 11).

Now I think I can use this passage to correct some wrong thinking that I’ve learned about that may have affected many of you.  It’s been said about our Church that “we don’t know what we believe about anything anymore”.  Those who say so don't care much for the truth.

To begin with, whenever we use all-inclusive terms or all-exclusive terms we are usually equivocating. 

EQUIV'OCATE, v.i. To use words of a doubtful signification; to express one's opinions in terms which admit of different senses; to use ambiguous expressions.

Equivocation is a form of bearing false witness. It is a form of the sin of lying. Nothing could be further from the truth than to say “we don’t know what we believe” or “everything I’ve ever believed must have been wrong”.  Not if we understand what is important and what is not. 

It seems to me from v. 10, 11 and 3, that there is an order or hierarchy of importance that we need to observe.  Let me explain it for you like this.   

1.  The most important thing of all is the gospel.  We have to get law and gospel right.   Unless we get that right, whatever else we may be right about is still wrong because we have the gospel wrong.  The gospel is what God uses to deliver from sins power – not just the day we are saved, but every day after that.

2.  The next most important thing after the gospel is sound doctrine.  We are not a “creedal” church, but I believe that the absolute bedrock most-important doctrines are the ones summarized in the early Christian creeds – The Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian.  We don’t have to recite them, but if we are sound in the faith we believe what they say.  We probably believe them more than most of the people that do recite them.  But all true Christians do believe those things.

3.  The next most important thing would be those doctrines as developed and presented in the aggregate of the Reformation era confessions of faith and the catechisms that accompany them.  With a few exceptions, the content of those confessions are agreed upon by all Christians.

4.  After that comes the things that would distinguish us, as Baptists, from all other Christians – Church government, ordinances.

5.  After that, the things that distinguish us from other Baptists.  By now, we are way out on the edge of what’s important. 

Now somebody may say, “Well, I’m learning that everything I was ever taught was wrong.”  Well, then one of two things is true.  Either they are equivocating, or they have put the emphasis on the wrong syllable.  Because simply re-evaluating a few peripheral points way out on the edge is not rejecting “everything”.  Not by a long shot.  The most important things are not what American Evangelicals or Fundamentalists invented in the 19^th or 20^th Century. 

The most important things are what all Christians in all times and places have agreed upon.  When I began to emphasize those things, that's when people began to complain that I was saying that everything they had ever been taught was wrong.  They messed a great deal, or they are liars.  

I’m not telling anybody “everything you’ve been taught is wrong” UNLESS everything they’ve been taught is the few little inconsequential nit-picky things that no other Christians ever cared anything about.  And if that’s the case, somebody failed to teach you the right thing, and spent all their time jangling at you.

I’m not saying that there is no place for things that may even distinguish us from other Baptists.  By the way, I’m inclined to go with much older Baptists before newer Baptists or slightly older Baptists.  But given that, I think we need to remember that “every idle word that men speak they give an account for in the day of judgment (Mt. 22).

Preaching With Depth

The past few weeks have been waaay too busy for blogging.  I hope to get back to it when things settle down, but as for now, I've got too many irons in the fire elsewhere to be able to come up with anything worth saying here.  The best I can offer is this second paper on preaching.


"Law and Gospel are rightly divided in preaching when the sermon is not primarily didactic, but rather something that claims the listener on God’s behalf… Christ is really present in preaching! Hence, preachers need to be bold enough to give Christ to their hearers. Preachers are tempted to give the text a moral – translating it into our terms or allegorizing it in order to offer us something to do. We miss Luther’s insight that it is the Scripture that interprets us. Preachers need to read the texts so as to allow themselves to be exegeted by them and then preach in a fashion that allows the text to do its deed to the hearers." - -Gerhard O. Forde "The Preached God: Proclamation in Word and Sacrament" (courtesy of Michael Borg)

PREACHING WITH DEPTH

 

YOU SHOULD BE WARNED

This article is the companion to the one concerning expository preaching, and depends upon what was introduced there.  If you have not yet read that one, please do so now.  The preacher truly interested in having depth in his preaching must develop his abilities as an expositor.  True and consistent depth is inseparable from careful exposition.  Not all expository sermons will necessarily qualify as “deep”, but deep sermons proceed from the kind of exegeses that expository preaching depends upon.   Flying high over the text may enable the preacher to notice the occasional “fortune-cookie saying” that he can rip out of context to stimulate a fine rant, and satisfy himself that he has delivered the Word of God.  But that approach is anything but conducive to discovering that which is deep.

A sincere preacher not accustomed to careful exposition may stumble upon a deep thought from time to time, but consistent depth will evade him because he has not regularly endeavored to dig down to where the deep things are found.   Meticulous exegesis is the way that things hidden deeply are excavated from the text.  There may be such a thing as a “deep” sermon that is not anchored in and driven by the text, but it is not likely.  More probably, any apparent depth was borrowed, and eisegeted.  In some cases, it is strictly artificial.

Concerning artificial depth, awareness of the need to be deep, at least from time to time, has often caused shallow preachers to invent outlandish interpretations, and even heresies in order to prove they can go deep too.  For example, recent “insights” into the Lord’s Supper offered by a prominent Independent Baptist pastor in a desperate attempt to go deep are nothing short of blasphemy.  The same is true of some imagined conversations concerning the plan of redemption that allegedly occurred between the First and Second Divine Persons.  Such concoctions are not deep, they are a witch’s brew of heresies and inexcusable eisegesis.   A firm commitment to regular exposition would have yielded something far more valuable, instead of something blasphemous and positively dangerous.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

If you are reading this with the expectation that some easy trick to extracting the deep stuff will be revealed to you, or if you think you will be handed a skeleton key that unlocks the deep stuff in the Bible, go away now, and never come back.  Deep preaching demands diligence, patience, and focus to uncover the depth of the Bible and skill to present it to others. 

Many, if not most Christians can identify depth when they hear it, although the majority still seem to prefer the shallow and less challenging.  Depth is one of those things that “you know it when you see it,” but nobody seems to have bothered to define it, at least not in such a way that has given us a widely agreed upon definition for depth in preaching. 

This being the case, then we must look to the dictionary and work with what we find there.  The venerable 1828 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language provides us with eleven possible meanings, some of which are so inapplicable that they can be dismissed immediately.  The ones that suit the purpose of this paper are:

·         The abyss; a gulf of infinite profundity. 

·         Abstruseness; obscurity; that which is not easily explored

·         Unsearchableness; infinity.

·         The breadth and depth of the love of Christ, are its vast extent. 

·         Profoundness; extent of penetration, or of the capacity of penetrating; as depth of understanding; depth of skill.

The first three on that list are offered mostly in jest, because they describe well some potential pitfalls that the preacher desiring to “go deep” may stumble over.  A “gulf of infinite profundity” would be a good description for many a failed attempt at depth in preaching.  The image comes to mind of the preacher attempting to be profound, but instead, sliding down a steep incline of whimsy into an abyss of abstruseness, tumbling farther and farther away from his audience in a shower of gravel, until an infinite gulf of obscurity renders everything he says unsearchable nonsense.  Failed attempts at deep preaching lose the hearers as the preacher goes out farther and farther into esoteric babbling.   We will seek to avoid this.

But despite the comical images generated by those first three definitions, they are still helpful in that they point in the direction of the character of deep preaching and the content it does address: the infinitely profound, the not easily explored, the unsearchable and the infinite.   Conversely, shallow preaching fails to tackle such matters, dealing only with the mundane, the clichéd, and the superficial instead.

Indeed, the definitions move in the direction we desire, referencing  what (or Who) is indeed the subject of deep preaching - Christ – the in-exhaustibleness of His attributes and Being, His ontological infinitude, which is in part accurately knowable, while simultaneously not fully comprehensible to finite beings.   The final statement is very helpful.  We can now offer both a definition for “preaching with depth” and also identify its goal.

Preaching with depth takes the listener on a mental journey to levels of greater and more skillful penetration into and analysis of those things in Scripture dealing with the person and work of Christ that are infinitely profound and not easily explored.  

The goal of deep preaching is to mentally lead the hearers into the person and work of Christ that they would never have thought their way to on their own.  

It should be self-evident that before one can preach with depth, he must study deeply and think deeply about what he has found while studying, and then labor deliberately to put it into comprehensible words and logical order.  That is all the formula there is.  There is no short cut to depth.  Yes, there is a way to frequent deep places, but it is time-consuming.

Now the probability of the preacher suffering from “Saturday Night Fever”, strip-mining the Bible for a heretofore unnoticed aphorism to jump out at him and provide the springboard for a deep sermon is zero.   By the undeserved grace of God, Who isn’t inclined to let His people starve despite the incompetence of His preachers, a thought, or maybe even an entire verse will probably “jump out” and engender yet another “Five S’s” or “Five P’s” sort of outline – not really a new sermon at all, but a new text to use to preach the same old thing. 

The congregation will at least hear a verse or two, and be reminded yet again that they need to be saved, surrendered, separated, sanctified, and steadfast; or that they have been purchased, are precious, should present themselves a living sacrifice, be prepared for the rapture, and please the man of God; all of which will be supported by personal anecdotes and overused clichés.  Hopefully, there will be enough of Jesus in it to keep them from dying, at least for a little while longer.  And that brings us to this:

STOP TALKING ABOUT YOU, STOP TALKING ABOUT ME, START TALKING ABOUT JESUS!

The goal of preaching ought to be to enable the risen Christ to walk in the midst of His Churches (Rev. 1:13-20)

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.  (John 6:53)

Jesus said something revolutionary there (cp. 6:33, 48, 50, 51, 54-57).  We understand that this is a spiritual eating rather than a physical.  There is no argument being made for transubstantiation or consubstantiation.  But it is vital that you see this; Jesus said that you either eat Him or you die.  That eating is not a one-time thing.  It is a life-time thing.  The preacher’s duty is to prepare a nourishing meal of Jesus, put it on a plate, and serve it to the congregation.   The real spiritual vitality of people is directly tied to the amount of Jesus they ingest on a regular basis.  The whip-lashing and pep-talking that pass for preaching may keep self-righteous or intimidated people busy in religious activity for a long time.  But they will be starving for the good news and the Christ that it speaks of.   They may indeed have been saved by “eating” Him once, way back when.  But unless you are feeding them with Him week after week, they are starving under your care. 

To preach deep is to preach Christ.  He is woven throughout the entirety of the Bible.  He Himself told us so.   So much of value could be said about this, but in the scope of a pamphlet there is not nearly enough space.  But consider this.  Jesus Himself said:

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. (John 5:39)

On the road to Emmaus,  

… beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:27)

Look up those verses, read the cross-references, and their cross references, and discover for yourself that the entire Bible really is about Christ, and until you have understood the passage before you with Him in mind, you have not gone deep enough.  You may moralize very convincingly and thunder away about everything but Jesus.  But you haven’t presented Him.  You can’t unless you know where He is in the text.

Do you want to know how to interpret the Old Testament?  Do you want to know how to really understand the deep stuff in there?  Then follow the example that Jesus provided in Luke 24.  Heed His admonition in John 5.  Did you ever notice the approach taken by the writer of Hebrews?  Over and over again, as He points to Old Testament persons and practices, he essentially says, over and over again, “Do you see that?  That’s about Jesus!”

LECTIO CONTIUA

Finally, the only way to really go deep, and stay deep, is to do so a little at a time, pushing down a little more every week.  Don’t expect to plunge down to the bottom of the mine at 9:00 on Saturday night.  It simply won’t happen.  But if you will select a book, any book in the Bible, find North, establish your control[1], begin at the beginning, and study thoroughly each segment (by the paragraph is best) until you really know what it says and how it points to Christ[2], you will not only have a new message every week, you will be going deeper and deeper, week after week.  

 By the time you have reached the middle of the book, after diligently working up to that point, you will be able to see things that will amaze and delight both you and your listeners – things that you could never have discovered in one session of even several hours.  But approaching it this way, you will have spent accumulated hundreds of hours studying in preparation for opening up the next paragraph. 

And that is the only way to really “go deep”.  May God richly bless your endeavors and reward you and your congregation with delightful and nourishing spiritual meals, week after week, year after year.

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[1] See the paper on Expository Preaching

[2] Tying it in