The Preaching of The Word

Transcript

Our sermon text this evening is 1 Corinthians 2, verses 1 through 5. We'll begin here and look at other texts as well, starting here in 1 Corinthians 2, verses 1 through 5. 1 Corinthians 2, "And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and am crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and much trembling.

My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray together. O Lord our God, we come before you tonight, acknowledging once again our great need of dependence upon you, and we pray, O Lord, that you would open our eyes, that we might withhold, once again, wondrous things from your word. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear, we pray, in Christ's name.

Amen. In Acts chapter 2, you remember that we find the Apostle Peter preaching the word of God with great boldness and power. And we ask, how did this man, who just a few weeks prior, relying upon himself, denied even knowing Christ because of his fear of man, now turn to such bold proclamation? The only explanation is the powerful, illuminating work of the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit-empowered words spoken that day not only changed him, the Apostle himself, but also transformed many who were listening.

There were about 3,000 souls, we read, who heard the word that day, they were cut to the heart, and they believed. These souls were added to the then small number of Christ's followers, and they formed the first Christian church in Jerusalem. This account reminds us of the power of the Spirit-enabled preached word of God and its central role in the church. Peter was not a man educated in the finest schools in the ancient Roman Empire, and he was not a prominent politician with great influence. He was rather a simple fisherman who was called by God and spent three years being educated in the school of Christ.

Yet there he was, being used to speak words of power and transformation in the lives of all who had ears to hear. God uses the foolishness of preaching to draw his people to himself. There were many more hearers that day, besides the 3,000, who mocked and scorned the words of Peter, and they went away rejecting God and their hearts were hardened. As we continue in our series tonight on what happens when we worship, we turn now to the preaching of the word. Preaching is one of the primary means by which God converts and transforms souls.

As such, it is one of the most prominent and longest parts of every Lord's Day worship gathering. Preaching is not powerful because of the giftedness of a speaker, the rhetorical prowess that he possesses, or the high standing that he has within a society. But God chooses what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chooses what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chooses what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

The preaching of the word is one of the most important means of grace in the life of the Christian. In a simple definition, preaching is the explanation, expounding, and application of the word of God to the hearers. The Spirit-empowered man stands up and humbles dependence on God to deliver the very words of God to the people of God. The hearers, empowered by that same Spirit, receive the words with eagerness, apply them to their lives, and are so transformed. Knowing this, then, we must be very careful to give greater attention to the preaching of the word.

My sermon tonight has two very simple points, two very simple exhortations that I want to leave you with. The first is I want you to recognize what true biblical preaching is, and second, I want you to know how to rightly respond to that preaching. Recognize and respond. First, in order to rightly respond to true biblical preaching, we must recognize it. We must know what it is and why it's essential so that we might discern the true from the false, and so that we will be properly transformed into the image of Christ.

It's often helpful in explaining what something is to first begin by doing the opposite, by saying what it is not. First, we should acknowledge that biblical preaching does not appeal to the natural man. It is not something we desire in our flesh. That's Paul's point in 1 Corinthians chapters 1 and 2 as he writes this letter to the troubled church in court. He states this emphatically in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 18.

He says, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God." He goes on then in verses 21 to 25 to say, "For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men." In other words, our simple flesh, in our simple flesh, we are looking for words to tickle our ears. We're looking for something that will entertain us. We want shortcuts, magic pills and secret codes that unlock the meaning of life.

This is probably best illustrated in Scripture in Paul's preaching in Athens in Acts 17. Paul goes to that great ancient city and he is provoked by all the superstition visually represented there through the pantheon of the so-called gods. So Paul began to reason with them. And as the Athenians engaged with Paul in the marketplace, they were intrigued by what he was saying. They responded, inviting him to the famous Areopagus to present his teaching for all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time and nothing except telling or hearing something new.

They were obsessed with novelty. You know how the story goes. Paul then goes to the Areopagus. He preaches the gospel. The response to Paul reveals the hearts of men and their sin enslaved state.

It says that some mocked, others wanted to just hear more, but only a small number actually joined Paul. Sadly, we never hear anything more about the church in Athens in the New Testament. The world wants the wisdom of men. It is obsessed with hearing new and novel things. This was true 2,000 years ago in Athens and it's still true today in all the cities of the world.

Paul warns Timothy about this clearly in his second letter to him, his final letter, his final epistle, in 2 Timothy 4, 3-4 as he exhorts him to preach the word. And here's what he says, "For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." You can find the abundance of this kind of attitude everywhere present today as we look at the multitude of self-help speakers, psychics on street corners, and multiplying so-called TED talks. Yet, sadly, this attitude isn't just present outside the church out there in the world. It's also evident in many pulpits or high-talk tables in many so-called churches today. Dynamic, engaging orders are given platforms where they impress with their natural command of language as gifted communicators and feed this desire for novelty and suiting the passions of those with itching ears.

But here's the thing, that isn't just true for other churches, those non-reform brands of churches out there. This is also an ever-increasing temptation in here, in our own circles of Reformed theology. It's even possible to be peddlers of God's Word, like Paul warns, with correct doctrine and Reformed theology. If we aren't careful, we can become puffed up with knowledge and actually neglect the means of God's transformative grace. So then, what is true Biblical preaching, really?

Well, it begins, first and foremost, with a posture, and is pervaded by this posture, of true humility before the presence of the living God. True preaching begins with the Spirit empowered reliance upon our Lord and a belief in the complete and absolute authority, infallibility, and sufficiency of God's Word. This is true for both those who preach the Word and for those who hear the Word preached. This prayerful dependence then leads to the proper submission to and reception of the Word of God in the pastor's study. We begin by submitting ourselves to proper exegesis, literally a drawing out of the text, what is there, what is contained within this Word, not imposing on the text our own ideas and our own meaning.

This involves first remembering that every text in the Bible is given to us, as people living in the 21st century, secondarily. It means that we are not the original audience of any text of Scripture. So we have to begin by asking this important question. What did this text mean to its original audience and its original context? Only then can we understand the true meaning so that we can then apply it to ourselves, living many centuries and millennia after it was originally written.

But even there, we can't stop. We must go further. We must be very careful. If we jump from the original text of Scripture to the original audience and then apply the principle to the audience of today, we will often miss a critical and absolutely necessary mediating step. That is, we will miss the important step of understanding how the work of the mediator affects every text.

This brings us to one of the most important, indeed, we could say the most important aspect of true biblical preaching. As Paul says, and we read earlier in 1 Corinthians 2, verse 1 and 2, "And I, when I came to you brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom, for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." Jesus Christ and him crucified is the foundation, motivation, point, and goal of all truly biblical preaching. It is the basis of all of our greatest needs and desires in life. Jesus is the center of all Scripture. Everything in the Word of God either points forward to or talks about or points backward to what Christ has accomplished.

Then, when all has been filtered through these lenses in every text, it is then applied directly to the people sitting in the room where the Word is being preached. You cannot have true, proper biblical preaching without the application of the text. In other words, we could say very simply, we must answer the question. We as pastors must answer the question, and then you as hearers must also answer the question, "So what?" Finally, biblical preaching is not only proper exegesis, Christ-focused application, it is also Spirit-empowered from beginning to end. As mentioned earlier, it is Spirit-empowered in the proper posture toward the Word, both by the preacher and the hearers.

It is Spirit-enabled as the preacher prayerfully depends upon the Spirit's illuminating work at every point in the process of preparation. It is Spirit-empowered in the prayerful dependence upon the Spirit in the pulpit. It is Spirit-empowered in the prayerful dependence upon the Spirit by the hearers as they receive the implanted Word with humility and fear and trembling as the Word is preached. This is what Paul means when he says in verses 3-5, "And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." That's the point. Paul could have spoken in the rhetorical flash.

He could have used the wisdom of this age, but rather he chose to do nothing but Christ and him crucified in the demonstration and power of the Spirit. So with these aspects of preaching in mind, why is true biblical preaching so important? Why can't we just listen to a dynamic orator with some nice platitudes that generally reference the Scriptures? Why do we need Spirit-dependent, Spirit-brought, exegetically informed, Christ-centered application of Scripture in our lives? Here's the answer.

Because Jesus alone has the words of eternal life. Where else can we go? Because the Word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword. True biblical preaching only clarifies, declares, and exhorts in what God says, not in what man says.

True preaching puts all the emphasis on the text of Scripture and seeks to take all the attention off the man who is speaking. It's not that wisdom and words of eloquence aren't important or sometimes necessary, but those tools should only be employed to better explain and imply Scripture and to focus on Christ and him crucified. We should definitely strive to be clear communicators even as we do rightly handle the Word of God. True biblical preaching then appeals to what we might call the soul's senses. When Christ is proclaimed through the preaching of the Word, it's as if we are seeing for ourselves in our minds eye through the eyes of faith.

It's as if we are seeing the Son of God visually portrayed as crucified. If you think that's strange, then you should go read Galatians chapter 3 and verse 1. That is exactly what Paul says to the Galatians. It is before your eyes that Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified, not because they saw visually Christ being crucified, but because the preaching of the Word was so vivid in their faith's eye. That's what Paul says.

And when we truly then hear the Word of God through the ears of faith, our spiritual powers of listening are awakened. It's possible to listen, but not hear. And when this happens, when we truly hear, we also then taste and see that the Lord is good. In other words, our souls delight in the Lord so that we can be enabled to rightly respond to him. Preaching is carried on by an insignificant finite man when he relies upon the Spirit and he speaks to accurately proclaim and apply God's Word.

But like with all of corporate worship, the totality of corporate worship, through preaching, something supernatural actually takes place. When the prophets of old spoke in the Old Testament, when they spoke the words of God to the people of God, what did they say often? "Thus says the Lord." In the same way, when pastors get up to preach the Word of God and they accurately reflect the truths of his Word, then we can rightly say, "Thus says the Lord." In other words, when a pastor gets up to speak the words of God to the people of God, hear me out on this, it's as if Jesus himself actually is in our midst preaching to us. This is why the Second Helvetic Confession can claim that the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. I know that sounds like a bold claim, and it certainly is a bold claim, but I'm not making it on my own authority.

And to speak. Preachers are simply God's heralds. We are Christ's messengers, his emissaries, called to represent his Word accurately and speak only what he says, nothing less and nothing more. And we are to apply that word to real flesh and blood people listening. This is why it is so critical that preaching is done in the power of and reliance upon the Spirit of God and centered upon the work of Christ.

So we must recognize true biblical preaching. We must reject the obsession with novelty and the desire for ear scratching that our flesh so constantly craves. We must instead seek the true and faithful Word of God. When we do, we must also know how to rightly respond to that true Word. That's the second point.

Responding rightly to the preached Word or how to engage. We must know how to engage with biblical preaching. We must know how to worship God through the act of listening to a man herald the Word as God's representative to his people. One of the key passages in scripture that clarifies how to rightly respond is found surprisingly, maybe, to you in James chapter 1 verses 19 through 25. There you read James's very clear instructions that every person must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger, knowing that the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Now, what does that have to do with your response to preaching, you say? Isn't James talking about our interpersonal relations with one another here? It's true that these words could be applied in a secondary sense to our relations with one another. But notice the immediate context as James continues in verse 21. He says, "Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls." So the first and foremost context of application for this text is in how we receive and respond to the Word of God.

So the first and foremost and most important rather way that we should respond to the preached Word is by being quick to hear. Be quick to hear. We all know too well the way it works so often as we come to worship and we prepare to hear the sermon. The words read, the pastor prays, then we immediately sit down, and our children have a million things that they want to say to us in that very moment. Potty breaks, death-inducing hunger, and the outrage toddler all beckon for our immediate attention and all, of course, behind the secrecy of the wall of the pubic.

Or you don't have any young children with you. Instead, your mind begins to wonder as soon as the pastor begins to talk about what you had for dinner last night and why it's not setting so well in your stomach. Or how many things you have to get done this week. One of our greatest hindrances to receiving the implanted word is our attention. Our minds tend to wander aimlessly, but we must be quick and careful to listen attentively to the Word of God as it is preached and read.

And with that, we also must be slow to speak and slow to anger. You say, "How does this apply now to the preaching of the Word?" Well, this comes particularly oddly in the form of critical listening. Here we are for just a moment. We come to the sermon looking for all the ways that we can disprove or disagree with what the pastor says. Or even worse, we come listening critically because we have something against the pastor who's preaching.

We don't like the way he dresses, he wears ugly ties, or we don't like the way he combs his hair, or how he says certain words or the pitch of his voice. And so we second-guess everything he says because we just simply don't like him. Here's the thing. Pastors are fallible, weak, and needy creatures just like everyone else. It's not the man speaking but the Word of God that matters and that has power.

In Calvin's Institutes, he writes, "When a puny man risen from the dust speaks in God's name, at this point we best evidence our piety and obedience toward God if we show ourselves teachable toward his minister, although he excels us in nothing. It was for this reason then that he hid the treasure of his heavenly wisdom in wheat and earthen vessels in order to prove more surely how much we should esteem him and it." Now we most certainly must be discerning as we listen so that we can actually recognize true preaching as such. But there's a right and there's a wrong way for us to listen carefully. The best example of the right way to be discerning is found in the comparison between the Bereans and Thessalonians, again in Acts 17. We all like to say that we have a Berean spirit, do we not?

And we like to use it as an excuse for having a critically critical and overly scrutinizing disposition. Yet what most people think is having a Berean spirit is actually more akin to the Thessalonian spirit. Many of the Jews responded to Paul's preaching in Thessalonica with jealousy, forming a mob, setting the city in an uproar, and attacking Paul and those who believed and received the Word. That's what we read about Thessalonica. They then told lies about the Christians to the government and then they extorted the Christians.

The Bereans, on the other hand, are deliberately compared and contrasted with the Thessalonians. It says that they were more noble than the Thessalonians. They received the Word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. And so many of them, therefore, believed. This is the right way of discerning the preached Word, receive it with all eagerness, and examine the Scriptures to find out what is being said and if it is so, to see if these things really are true.

It is so easy to allow interpersonal conflict to get in the way of our rightly receiving the preached Word, interpersonal conflicts that you personally might have with the one preaching, interpersonal conflicts that you might have across the Church, the congregation, with other people sitting in the room with you. But hear me on this. This attitude is debilitating to your faith. Is this your spirit when you come to hear the Word preached? Do you have the critical spirit of the skeptic who questions everything according to your own presuppositions?

Then James exhorts you accordingly. He says, "Put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted Word which is able to save your souls." Being quick to hear includes careful attentiveness. It includes laying aside distractions. It also involves coming in meekness and humility to receive the Word of God, which is, in fact, able to save. It involves laying aside offenses and presuppositions, and it requires a genuine desire to come to the Lord, believing that His Word preached rightly actually has power to transform.

But hearing alone isn't enough. And that's what James next says in verse 22, "But be doers of the Word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." For if anyone is a hearer of the Word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror, for he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. If our hearing doesn't go beyond us sitting in the pew, merely listening with a few audible moans and amens of affirmation, then the Word does us no good. If the pastor's words of exhortation and application don't result and you're actually putting those things into practice, then you have not benefited. In fact, a failure to put the Word into action results, the Bible tells us, in a hardening of your heart.

Being a hearer of the Word only and not a doer means a failure to repent, and lack of repentance ultimately will lead only one place, and that is to death. It leads to a lack of trust, a lack of rest, and a critical, restless, joyless spirit. But on the contrary, James says next in verse 25, "But the one who looks into the perfect law, the laws of liberty and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing." Here's the point. Being a doer of the Word always leads to blessing. That's a promise from God's Word, and it's not only here, it's in many other places.

Applying the Word to your life results in joy and growing in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord. Doing the Word equates to bearing fruit in keeping with righteousness. So we must remember that the doing of the Word is never something that we can do in our own power and strength. And our doing of the Word is never, this is really important, the grounds for our justification, for our right standing before God. Rather, doing the Word is something that you are empowered to do.

It's something that you're empowered to do, Christian, because of the perfect, justifying work of Christ on your behalf and His perfect life, death, and resurrection. And it is the spirits applying that Word to you day by day so that you live a life of daily repentance that produces the fruit of righteousness in your life. One word of caution isn't necessary and needed at this point. There's been a wonderful emphasis in recent years on the privileged place of preaching in the worship of God. And this has, in some cases, led to a prioritizing of preaching, listen to me, at the expense of careful emphasis on the whole of corporate worship.

And it's transformative power by the Spirit and through the Word. Preaching is, in fact, an act of worship, but preaching is not the only important act of worship. I think this prioritizing has often been in response to the charismatic movements identifying worship with music and singing and sort of saying that teaching is something on the side. But we must not overreact here. The identifying of worship as synonymous with music isn't simply a wrong priority.

It is a fundamental redefinition and misunderstanding of the nature of true biblical worship. So let us not overreact in the wrong way. We don't highlight the importance of biblical preaching by minimizing the careful attention that's necessary on all the means, the ordinary means of grace in the service of worship. Preaching is a primary means of grace, but the other elements of worship are also vitally important, and they work together in cooperation and in unity and harmony with the preaching of the Word. That's why we keep saying that the preaching of the Word is part of the worship of God, and the worship of God begins with a call to worship, and it ends with a benediction, and everything in between is the worship of God.

So how can this affect us if we have this wrong overemphasis and minimization of the other elements? Well, in many cases, this attitude has led to what I believe can be a paralyzing information overload. Because of the proliferation of online media, we have endless access to excellent preaching within the click of a button. Though this is indeed a wonderful blessing, it so often contributes to a "hearers only and not doers" mentality. How does that happen?

Well, we replace the doing of the Word with endless hearing, and then we mistake that with Christian maturity, growing in righteousness because we keep filling our minds with knowledge and with information. But this is nothing more than mere knowledge that puffs up when it causes us to neglect being doers of the Word and in walking in obedience. This has the ability to create a self-deceiving false sense of piety, which is exactly what James is talking about, deceiving yourselves. God has gifted his church universal with many gifted creatures, but as wonderful as creatures out there are, they are not charged with shepherding your soul. Though preaching is an essential and even a primary call for the pastor, pastoring involves more than simply standing up and preaching to a general audience.

Pastoring involves caring for Christ's flock and a local assembly of real people and keeping watch over their souls. Now, with that being said, how can you practically be one who is quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger, who receives the implanted Word with all eagerness, and who responds by being a doer of the Word and not a hearer only? Well, Charles Burgeon very helpfully said that we should consider what to do before, during, and after the sermon every time we come to listen. Let us prepare ourselves and our families before the sermon. This includes carefully reading through and meditating on the text of the sermons that will be preached each upcoming Lord's Day.

But it also includes more than this immediate kind of preparation. You must also recognize that the way you live your life all throughout the week is either preparing the fertile ground of soil to receive the implanted Word or is preparing the rocky, thorny soil that will reject the Word. Are you regularly reading, meditating on, and praying the Word of God? Are you putting the Word into practice every day? Are you confessing your sins and repenting every day?

We also can prepare specifically through praying for our own hearts, for our fellow Christian's hearts, and for the pastors who will be preaching on the upcoming Lord's Day. Pray that the Lord would make our hearts soft, fertile ground, and that he will fill the pastor with his spirit as he studies and prepares all throughout the week, mining the text and mining his own hearts and the hearts of the people for pointed application. During the sermon, we actively and carefully listen to what's being said, as we've already talked about. We look for the connections in the text of Scripture. We seek to give our full attention to this wonderful means of grace that God has given to us.

We look inwardly, not clenching the spirit, but allowing him to probe our hearts when necessary. And when our attention wanders in the sermon, we carefully, intentionally, and prayerfully return our attention, knowing the patience and kindness of our loving Lord who desires all to come to the knowledge of saving truth. And then finally, after the sermon, we must carefully review and recall what was said. It's often helpful, and I see many of you taking notes for later application. If you have time, review your notes, and even more, you can go and review the sermon recording to remind yourself of what was said.

Talk about the sermon and the points of application around the dinner table and in the car. Recall these things all throughout the week so that you might look for ways to apply the Word directly and concretely in your life. As Joe Biggy says, "God's Word, both law and gospel, precept and promise, read and heard, believed and obeyed, memorized and meditated on, prayed and sung, is God's primary road to holiness, spiritual growth, and assurance of faith." So in closing, we must know how to recognize true preaching and rightly respond to it. We must give greater attention to the preaching of the Word because it is one of the primary means by which God converts and transforms souls. Though God uses ordinary, broken, insignificant, but faithful men to speak on His behalf, when the Word is rightly handled and applied to the people of God, we can be confident that the Lord is actually in our midst and Jesus really does stand up to preach to us.

We can really trust that when the pastor speaks faithfully from the Word of God, that we can confidently believe, thus says the Lord. So let us come humbly and eagerly to receive the implanted Word which is able to save our souls in preaching. When we do, we can be assured that we will be transformed from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. Let's pray together. Our Father and God, we do come humbly before You, praising You for the gift of Your Word, the ordinary means of grace, especially the means by which Your Word is preached to us, declared, proclaimed, exhorted, applied.

We ask that You would make us more humble, You would make us more eager in receiving the Word, give us greater attention so that we might truly be transformed and not continue to be those who are hearers only and not doers, forgetting ourselves, forgetting what we look like and deceiving ourselves. Although we come now acknowledging that we need to be often reminded of these truths, knowing that in our flesh we desire to have our ears tickled and to be obsessed with what is novel, what is new. So help us to repent of these desires and turn once again to receive the pure and planted Word. We pray all of these things now in Jesus' name. Amen.