preachers as middlemen ii: ambassadors and freedom fighters · 2019-09-13 · preachers as...

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

Transcript - HR503 Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 05 of 20HR503

Preachers as Middlemen II: Ambassadors and Freedom Fighters

Biblical Preaching: A Pastor’s Look at Homiletics

We continue on to the section of the nature and purpose of preaching. Last time I was beginning to suggest that the preacher is a middleman, that he is standing between God and the people. I chose two metaphors last week, the first from the home and the household, namely the steward; and the second from civil engineering, known as the bridge builder.

Today I take two others. We come to the core encounter and liberation. The first is a political metaphor from the world of diplomacy, and that is the metaphor of the ambassador. The second is a military metaphor from the field of battle, and this is the metaphor of the soldier or the freedom fighter.

First we have the ambassador. Charles Simeon is one of my heroes and was in some ways the founder of the modern movement of expository preaching in the English speaking world. He was vicar of Cambridge for about 54 years, since that record at the beginning of last century. He wrote to John Venn, one of his great friends, on the occasion of his ordination in 1782, in these words: “My dearest friend, I most sincerely congratulate you, not on a commission to receive 40 pounds or 50 pounds a year, nor on the title of Reverend, but on your accession to the most valuable, most honorable, most important, and most glorious office in the world, to that of an ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ. An envoy from the King would not be ashamed or afraid to speak, even in the presence of princes, if the interests of his master’s kingdom were attacked or if any insult or reflection were thrown out against him. They’d be accounted there better than traitors if they held down their heads and sealed up their notes. So let it not be said of us, as of the prophets of old, they are light and treacherous persons.”

Simeon’s assessment of being an ambassador is it’s “the most valuable, the most honorable, the most important, and the most glorious office in the world,” to be an ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the New Testament there is only one passage

John R. W. Stott, D. D.Experience: Founder, Langham

Partnership International



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where the word “ambassador” comes, although the nouns and the verb relating to the idea of heralding are somewhat similar. The potential word that is translated ambassador comes only in II Corinthians 5:20, with the well-known phrase, “we are ambassadors for Christ.”

Now the image is very clear to all of us. An ambassador represents his country to another country. He lives in an alien environment in which he stands for the interests of his own people. And so it is that, in a sense, every Christian lives in the world as a representative of Jesus Christ, but no Christian does so more than the preacher. The preacher presses upon the people among whom he lives the claims of Jesus Christ his King. This is at least how Paul applies the metaphor. He says that Christ’s ambassador addresses the people on Christ’s behalf. Listen to the full text of verse 20: “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us.” I’ll come back to that phrase. “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” Now the two phrases “We are ambassadors for Christ,” and “We beseech you on behalf of Christ,” deometha or hyper Christou. And they both speak of the ambassador as standing in Christ’s place or on Christ’s behalf, as an ambassador in His name.

So the Christian ambassador stands before the people on behalf of Christ, and he announces to the people what God has done to reconcile them to Himself through Christ, especially in making Christ “to be sin for them,” verse 21. And then on behalf of the same Christ, he begs them to be reconciled to God.

The point I want to lead on to is this: That as he makes his urgent appeal, the ambassador announcing what the King has done on their behalf, begging them to be reconciled to God on the basis of what God has done, something even more wonderful happens. His appeal, on behalf of his Master, becomes his Master’s appeal through him so that we are ambassadors for Christ. “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” All that is true, but God makes His appeal through us. So who does the appealing? You could say that we do, on behalf of Christ. You could also say that God does it Himself through us. The ambassador pleads on the King’s behalf so that the King is heard pleading through the lips of His ambassador.

When you grasp this and the tremendous implications of it, I think we could call it the existential element in preaching; because existential preaching is preaching in which a dynamic encounter



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takes place between the congregation and the living God. Or I think I should put it the other way around, between the living God and His people. A hush descends on the congregation; the veil of time and of space is drawn aside; God Himself, the living God, draws near and confronts the people with Himself. His voice is heard, and His glory is seen, and the people bow down in awe and worship. I would say that there is no greater or holier moment than this in the experience of any preacher.

There are many preachers, ancient and modern, who have borne witness to this kind of experience and written about it. I will give you a few examples. Andrew Bernard, the great Scottish minister, wrote in his journal in May 1880, “It is one thing to bring proof from the Bible and another to bring it from God Himself through the Bible.” If you simply draw it out of the Bible, it need be no more than just a technical exposition from a book; but preaching takes on a new meaning when the person who is speaking is not just the expositor who is expositing from a book, but God Himself who is speaking through the Word that He has spoken.

Thomas Keir, who is a modern Presbyterian writer, in a book The Word in Worship, published by Oxford University Press in 1962, says: “Preaching is the occasion of encounter. It is a traffic between God and man.”

Or to take H.P. Liddon, of whom Dr. Wilbur Smith is very fond; you may remember that he referred to his Bampton lectures on the deity of Christ. H.P. Liddon was a canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral at the end of the last century, and he began his canonry in the year 1870. You will note Dr. Wilbur Smith’s theories of four or five volumes, the Great Sermons series: “Great Sermons on the Birth of Christ,” “Great Sermons on the Death of Christ,” “Great Sermons on the Resurrection of Christ.” I expect you will know them. He incorporates one or two of Liddon’s in “Great Sermons on the Birth of Christ.” This is how he comments:

When H.P. Liddon was called to be a canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, there now commenced what was without doubt the greatest ministry of preaching in the Anglican Church of Great Britain for the next twenty years. St. Paul’s Cathedral, once again, became a great national center of worship; in spite of the fact that none of his sermons was less than three-quarters of an hour in length, and some an hour and twenty minutes long. St. Paul’s Cathedral was soon crowded on the Sunday services



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when Liddon was preaching, with people from every walk of life, many of them leading intellectuals of their day. The verdict of Dean Stanley, who was dean of St. Paul’s at the time, himself a notable preacher and a great scholar, would be echoed by thousands of others, quoting, “Liddon took us straight up to heaven and kept us there an hour.”

Now, again, you see, just as in the phrase “took us straight up to heaven” speaks of a certain, if you like, transcendental rather than existential element in preaching, in which the preacher himself is forgotten because time and sense are forgotten. And the people themselves are drawn into the presence God, while God Himself draws near and confronts the people. Now, of course, congregations have this experience, as well as preachers, and they know when it happens.

Billy Graham has borne witness to it on a number of occasions. I remember at the end of the Greater London Crusade in Harringay, his first big crusade in Britain in 1954. He spoke to over 2,000 ministers in the Central Hall, Westminster. He made 12 points of the lessons that he had learned, and his third point emphasized the power of the Holy Spirit in answer to prayer. He said, “I’ve never felt such liberty and power in preaching in all my ministry as I have here. I’ve often felt like a spectator standing on the side watching God at work. I’ve felt a certain detachment from it. I wanted to get out of the way as much as I could and let the Holy Spirit take over.”

Again, I think I could bear witness in my own much more simpler way of being aware that one is forgotten in the pulpit, because the people are left alone in the presence of God. And God Himself is addressing them.

I turn to Dr. Lloyd-Jones again for perhaps the best forceful expression of this in a modern book. I do not know, if you are reading it, if you’ve come to this yet; but there is a chapter that he called “The Act of Preaching.” And in this chapter he says: “What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this: It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence. During this last year,” he says, “I’ve been ill.” He had quite a major operation two or three years ago.

And so I’ve had the opportunity and the privilege of listening to others instead of preaching myself. As I’ve listened in physical weakness, in recuperation from the



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operation, this is the thing I’ve looked for, longed for, and desired. I can forgive a man for a bad sermon. I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul. If he gives me the sense that, although he is inadequate himself, he’s handling something which is very great and very glorious; and if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Savior, and the magnificence of the gospel. And if he does this, I am his debtor, and I am profoundly grateful to him. Preaching is the most amazing, the most thrilling activity that one can ever be engaged in, because of all that it holds out to all of us in the present, and because of the glorious, endless possibilities in an eternal future.

There again he speaks of this sense of God, as Wilbur Smith speaks of Liddon lifting us into heaven. Now different preachers express it in different ways, but I believe this is central to the work of the ambassador; because the ambassador is not speaking on his own behalf. He’s representing somebody else, and his grand desire is that the voice of the King shall be heard and that the people will listen to a message from the King and will obey it. And so the more the ambassador gets out of the way so that the King’s message is heard and heeded, the better pleased He is. “God making His appeal through us.”

That brings me to the next metaphor, the fourth one of the four, which is that of the soldier or the freedom fighter. On the field of spiritual battle between Christ and Satan, or between the lion and the dragon, to use the metaphorical terminology of the Book of Revelation. On this field of spiritual battle, the preacher comes with a liberating word. It’s a message of deliverance, a message of victory.

Perhaps our starting point here for understanding this aspect of the ministry of preaching should be our Lord’s own sermon in the Nazareth synagogue, recorded by Luke in chapter four of his gospel. He read and presumably also expounded the passage in Isaiah 61, in Luke 4, verses 18 and 19.

He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He’s anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” I don’t know if you’ve ever meditated yourself



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on that passage, but what is especially noteworthy is that God’s Messiah, anointed by the Holy Spirit, not only preaches good news to the poor, not only proclaims release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, but he actually sets the oppressed at liberty. He doesn’t just proclaim their release, He releases them. He sets them free by His own emancipating message.

He quotes some of it again: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, but He’s anointed me to preach good news, to proclaim release, to proclaim the acceptable year, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” It’s an actual liberating ministry and not just a ministry of proclamation.

Or, again, as Jesus was to say later, the well-known words of John 8:31 and 32, to some believing Jews: “If you continue in My word, you will be wholly my disciples, and you’ll know the truth, and the truth will liberate you.” It will set you free, it will emancipate you. So this is a tremendous truth that the word of the gospel has an emancipating power, and proclamation can actually set prisoners free.

Now there are two particular writers who emphasize this, and I don’t know of any who have worked it out theologically as they have. One is P.T. Forsyth, whom I’ve already mentioned, the English Congregationalist who was principal of New College in London at the beginning of this century. And the other is Gustaf Wingren, the Swedish professor of systematic theology in the University of Lund in Sweden. In his book translated, The Living Word, 1949, it was written in Sweden; and the Student Christian Movement Press published it in Britain in 1960, titled The Living Word.

Before Wingren comes to the actual military metaphor, the idea, if you like, of the freedom fighter who sets prisoners free, he describes the preacher more generally as “the feet and mouth by which Christ comes and speaks to men today.” I mentioned that you should get again the theme that is running through all these metaphors, that the preacher is a middle man through whom God in Christ comes to people today. Listen to this quotation from Wingren’s book: “It is the Word that provides the feet on which Christ walks when He makes His approach to us and reaches us. Preaching has but one end: that Christ may come to those who’ve assembled to listen. Preaching is not just talk about a Christ of the past. It is a mouth through which the Christ of the present offers us life today.” Otherwise, he goes on that the living God



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seems indeed to be dead, or at least, and I’m quoting again, “to become the proud or deistic God who is remote from the preached word, and He’s only spoken about, as we speak about someone who is present.”

So here he gives us, I think, a very striking picture of the preached Word being both the feet and the lips by which Jesus approaches people today. And what Christ comes through the preacher’s feet to proclaim through the preacher’s lips is the old message of salvation. Here’s how P.T. Forsyth puts it: “Nothing but the gospel is unfailingly contemporary. It is into the Bible world at the eternal redemption that the preacher must bring his people. To every age it is equally new, and it is equally authoritative for every age, however modern. The only preaching that is up to date for every time is the preaching of this eternity, which is opened up to us in the Bible alone, the eternal and holy love, grace, redemption, eternal and immutable morality of saving grace for our indelible sin…” and so on.

I want to go beyond that, as these two authors in fact do, that preaching is not merely a word about the ancient deeds of God any more than it is merely a word about His ancient words. That is to say that God did something in Christ years ago, and God said something in Christ years ago, and the preacher talks about it today. It is not just that. It is something much more wonderful than that. It is that if God speaks today through His Word, He acts today through His Word also, that this God is active through the Word that is being proclaimed. For God’s Word is not like the words of men; and being backed by His authority and His power, it does not return to Him empty. On the contrary, it accomplishes His purpose. It prospers in the world for which He sends it forth. And so, as you’ll notice, the echo is from what was said before in verses 10 and 11.

If only we could really believe them, that it is by God’s Word that He created the heavens and the universe, and it’s by His Word that He continues to sustain and control it, and have this confidence in the divine Word. Now this same creative Word operates in the new creation. We thought about this a bit the other day in the work of redemption. And still today, through the Christian gospel, God speaks to people with this saving effect, if the preacher is in the Spirit. It pleases God through the folly of the kerygma to save those who believe.



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So preaching, then, becomes more than a word, you see. It becomes itself a liberating deed. He quotes Forsyth again: “Preaching is an act and a power. It is God’s act of redemption. A true sermon is a real deed. The preacher’s word when he preaches the gospel and not only delivers a sermon, is an effective deed judged with blessing or with judgment.” So he uses sacramental terminology. He said, “The great fundamental sacrament is the sacrament of the Word because it brings dramatically into the here and now, visibly and verbally, the ancient historic redemption that was in Christ.”

Now if you have begun to grasp what Forsyth is saying, it’s Professor Wingren who systematizes it theologically. Again, I want to quote, if I may. He said, “The theme of the whole Bible is conflict, the duel between God and Satan. And the kerygma, the proclamation of the gospel, is the good news of victory through the death and resurrection of Christ, a victory which is already decisive, although its hopes will not be finally gone until the return of Christ and the resurrection of men, when death will be destroyed. We are living, therefore, between Christ’s resurrection and our resurrection, between the victory and its consummation, and between these terminae of the Christian era there lies an empty space of waiting. And it is in this gap, this empty space, that preaching sends forth its voice. The time between Easter and the Parousia is the time for preaching. The time you see from the proclamation of what God has done in Christ before He consummates it when He comes again. It is this gap that is filled with preaching. It’s a period in which we walk not by sight but by faith. Therefore it’s a time for the Word. The function of Word and sacraments is the third bridge between what has taken place and what is still awaited, between Christ’s resurrection and the last day. So preaching binds together what God did in the past and what is yet to be. Preaching holds together the whole series of that in the form of a message, a promise, a summons. When our preaching the Bible becomes like a chain with a missing link, the Bible’s unity is found when it is preached.

Now we could spend a long time it’s Lutheran thinking, but it’s also biblical thinking; and I think it’s a very striking way of putting the indispensable place of preaching in the church. This idea of filling in the entering gap, if you’ve read either Booknon? or Cullmann, you will know something to which both of them also refer. For example, Oscar Cullmann wrote an analogy of D-Day and V-Day that has become celebrated, difficult to improve on it. The Allied invasion of Normandy is rightly seen of the decisive



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battle in World War II. And it’s comparable, if you like, to a kind of invasion, God’s invasion, of the hostile human soil in the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, the ascension, and the Spirit gift of Jesus. This was D-Day. This was the invasion of human soil when the decisive victory was won. The one thing that is certain is that when the final day does dawn, and it’s V-Day that lies ahead in the future, however far ahead of us it is, nobody, of course, knows. But the one thing certain is that when it does dawn, it will be seen to be nothing but the unfolding of the event of D-Day. Just as V-Day unfolded the decisive event of D-Day, the consummation when Christ comes will simply unfold and bring to fruition what He did when He died, rose again, and ascended in His triumph. It will be seen to consummate what has already been inaugurated in Christ. At present the Christian lives “between the times,” the phrase that Cullmann uses. He lives beyond D-Day and this side of V-Day.

This, of course, is what Pobla means when he refers to the Christian’s “betweeness.” However, unorthodox Volkmar may be in so much of what he writes, I think he’s right to stress this “betweeness” of the Christian. He’s always looking back to the one terminus and on to the next.

Michael Green, who also writes about this, says in his book The Meaning of Salvation, or uses the phrase “ inaugurated eschatology.” As far as I know, it’s his own original press, but it’s rather a good one. John the Baptist, he argues… This is quoting now from Michael Green’s book, The Meaning of Salvation: “John the Baptist was looking for a unitary eschatological crisis. Becoming one who John the Baptist would save and would destroy. He would garner his wheat and burn his chaff.” But Jesus splits the unified eschatological crisis “the day of the Lord” into two, so that he inaugurates the end. The end times began when Jesus came, died, rose again; but He splits the crisis, and the final consummation is yet to come. From now on the followers of Jesus will come to see that the last days were indeed inaugurated with His coming, but they were not consummated then.

Now it’s only, it seems to me, when you get this idea of the Christian’s “betweenness” clear, that you grasp what Wingren is saying when he talks about preaching filling the gap. He shared that preaching implies a definite view of man, that man is a conquered man. He’s in bondage to sin and guilt and death, and he needs to hear the Word of the Lord to set him free. Defeated man, man in bondage, as we see him all over the world today, is



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in Wingren’s phrase “man before preaching.” So he’s man before he has heard the gospel. He’s defeated now, but the task of the preacher is to do battle. And then he enters the human conflict by speaking and by making himself heard by human ears. It belongs to the nature of the office of preaching that it has its place in the battle between God and the devil, and that it must have its place there. Contrary wind, the noise of battle, such is the preacher’s native elements. The word of the preacher is an attack on the prison in which man is held in bondage.

It is always difficult when you’re trying to summarize a whole book or summarize a person’s argument. And you may not have felt the force of it as I myself did when I read the book. Although it is not required reading, I think you would enjoy The Living Word by Gustaf Wingren, because all of this is very finely said.

It seems to me to put preaching in its proper context by relating this kerygma, the great proclamation of what God has done and said, but done supremely in Jesus Christ…its proper context, because it relates it to the cross victory in the future consummation. Preachers are always speaking of these two terminae and always reminding the congregation that we are living between the first and the second advents of Christ in this interadventural period. It makes preaching increasingly dynamic.

I want to add one criticism of what Forsyth and Wingren say before I go on. That is that in their enthusiastic resolve to represent preaching as a deed, as something that is done in setting the prisoner free, there Forsyth and Wingren seem to me to exalt it a bit too high. That is, they tend to portray the completed work of Christ and the continuing work of preaching at two parallel redemptive deeds.

P.T. Forsyth writes of God’s deed of redemption in Christ, and I’m quoting again, “as an act that is prolonged in the word of the preacher and not merely proclaimed.” He talks, you see, about “prolongation” of the redemption of Christ. Professor Wingren argues that the preaching that is now going on is an organic part of the series of actions that God carries out from the beginning of time until the great judgment day for the world. Again, he says, “by sending forth preachers, the Redeemer comes to men who are in need. That the gospel should reach them belongs to the work of redemption, otherwise it would not be full redemption.”



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If you’ll think about that carefully, I think you would agree with me that he seems to represent that the sending and preaching belong themselves to Christ’s redemptive work. And Christ’s work of redemption takes place when men preach about Him. While you may consider it a bit perdoubting that I should take issue with those words, but I don’t think it is. For just as the word of preaching is not a continuation of God’s Word, as Wingren says, so it seems to me the deed of preaching is not a prolongation of God’s deed, which is P.T. Forsyth’s word. You cannot continue God’s Word in preaching, and you cannot prolong God’s deeds by preaching.

What we would want to say is that God speaks and acts through man’s preaching, but the preaching is neither a new word of revelation nor a new deed of redemption. There is an essential difference, in other words, between what God has said and done in Christ, on the one hand, and what He says and does through preaching today.

I would sum it up by saying that God speaks today through what He has spoken, that is by making vocal and vital His once spoken Word. But it is not a new word that He speaks. It is making this ancient Word contemporary. In the same way, He acts today by making contemporary and personal His once completed deed. He speaks through what He has spoken. He acts through what He has done.

There is a very good example of this in what the apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:1, when he reminds the Galatians of his preaching ministry to them and says that before their very eyes he has “publicly portrayed Jesus Christ as crucified.” Or New English Bible, “he has openly displayed Him upon the cross.” Now that’s a wonderful idea for preaching, because the cross happened 2,000 years ago, and this, of course, is the great problem of every Christian communicator. He says that here is a very ancient deed of God that was done these years ago, and the same old “Now generation” who are living in the contemporary world aren’t interested in history, let alone in ancient history of persons of years ago. So one of the great things we do in preaching, one of the great purposes of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as well as of the spoken Word, is to bring into the present and make a contemporary existential reality this deed that was done years ago and this Word that was spoken years ago.



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The sin-bearing death of Jesus on the cross was an event in the past. It’s Christos esto revenos, Christ as He has been crucified and as He will remain crucified today. It’s a perfect participle. But this Christos esto revenos, this Christ crucified is to be placarded before people’s eyes today. By our descriptive, our explanatory, our expository, our doctrinal preaching, we are able to present it to people’s eyes, placard it, as it were, upon a public billboard.

It is through this sort of audio-visual gospel that Christ Himself can speak and act. It is thus that men see and believe and are saved. P.T. Forsyth, using deliberately Catholic sacramental language in order to make his point, says that “the real presence of Christ crucified is what makes preaching, because true pulpit was His cross.” He is simply saying that it is preaching, both verbally and visually, through baptism and the Lord’s Supper, that brings these ancient deeds and words into the contemporary world and placard them before the eyes of people and makes them a living reality.

When Michael most likens the preaching of the gospel to a documentary film, which recovers for the present events that actually took place in the past, but recovers them in present, sets them on the screen in the present in such a way that they come alive to a new generation who were not there when the events took place. But we feel their impact, we feel their challenge, as if we ourselves had been present at that time.

To sum up, then, here are the four metaphors of preaching that I’ve tried to expound at last time and this, in each of which I’ve suggested that the preacher is a kind of middle man between God in Christ and the congregation.

First, the preacher is a steward, faithfully dispensing to God’s household the food with which he has himself been entrusted. He’s received the food from the household up, he dispenses it to the household. He is a middle man in that way.

Second, then, the bridge builder, who opens up lines of communication, permitting the traffic to flow from God’s unchanging Word to man’s changing world, that is bringing a message from an ancient Book and relating it to the modern scene.

Thirdly, he is an ambassador through whose presence the King Himself is present and through whose lips the voice of the King is heard.



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Fourthly, he is a freedom fighter proclaiming a message of liberation by which the prisoners are actually set free, because God can speak through what He has spoken. He can act through what He has done and can liberate those who hear the liberating Word.

To give you the four again and slightly distinguish between them: As stewards we are committed in our preaching to the task of exposition. Exposition is the essential truth that is conveyed by the stewardship metaphor; because we are entrusted, as stewards, with this once-given revelation and are to expound to the household this that has been given to us. This is what we are called to dispense, biblical exposition.

As bridge builders, we are committed to the task of application; and I believe increasingly that this is the great fault of evangelical preachers, myself indeed included, that we love exposition. We love to explain the biblical message. We may tell our stories and our anecdotes and give our illustrations, but we’re not good at actually relating to the contemporary modern world, with all its complexities and its issues, this unchanging Word of God. But the bridge builder is required to do this. He is required to let the traffic flow from this ancient world and this ancient Palestinian culture into the complexities of twentieth-century culture and its application.

As ambassadors, we dare to believe that through our preaching an encounter will take place, and “encounter,” I think, is the key word for the ambassador. As the ambassador stands with his message to the people, it is the voice of the King that is heard and the presence of the King that is felt.

As freedom fighters, we confidently expect the result of this encounter to be the liberty with which Christ sets people free.

I think I have left three or four minutes if you wish to ask me a question.

[A student asks]… According to what you have said that applies Wingren and Forsyth seem to connect preaching with redemption, preaching as a need. What about what happens in our church almost every Sunday, where we have preaching on doctrines of the church, preaching on life situations and problems? Can we classify this as preaching according to the New Testament usage of the word preaching?



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[Dr. Stott answers]… Yes, I’m glad you asked that question. I believe with all my heart that all our preaching is preaching for redemption that is in Christ Jesus, but that what we’re often doing is proclaiming and unfolding the fruits of that redemption. You gave me two examples: the church and modern issues. The church is part of the gospel. God’s purpose, as some of us were thinking in the last session yesterday, is to call out a people for Himself, to redeem a people. And this people is a redeemed community. It’s all to this…well, I can never think of the church, and, as I see it, within the context of redemption, of God’s historical redemptive purpose. And when you talk about issues again, I think one must once more see them in this much wider context. Perhaps we’d have to take some examples in order to get this home.

If you take the race issue, a Christian can never speak about race without speaking either of the doctrine of creation, or the doctrine of redemption, or both, and the racial unity of mankind that is due to both.

Whenever the preacher is preaching ethically or practically, he must relate his ethics to his doctrine. One of the grand problems of modern preaching is this atomization that we can take a little subject and detach it from the wide perspective and sweep of the biblical revelation. But it’s one thing the New Testament writers won’t do. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus wouldn’t do it. Doctrine and ethics belong to each other. The Pauline Epistles, as you know, are nearly all divided in half by doctrine and ethics. At the last session, I pointed out to both our preachers that there was a “therefore” in their text that they didn’t notion. But these “therefores” are the link between the doctrine and the ethics.

So don’t be afraid of preaching the gospel to the converted, because you’re not preaching the gospel to them in order to get them to respond to the gospel, receive it, and be converted. But we preach the gospel to them, we unfold the glory of the Good News to them, in order that they may grasp more of the implications of the gospel that they have received. It’s this unity of the biblical revelation that I long should be to some extent in every sermon. Every sermon, to some extent, is a little microcosm of the whole Bible. I say again: Bible equals gospel. Gospel equals Bible. The whole of the Bible is gospel.

[A student asks]… In light of that, do you feel that a serious message of salvation and the way of salvation should be in every sermon?



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[Dr. Stott answers]… Not in the sense that the preacher says to himself There may be an unconverted person here who must hear the gospel in order to be saved. Not in that sense. I think Christian congregations get bored with the gospel if the minister is always saying that kind of thing and feels it’s part of his duty in every sermon to think of the odd person who may need to have an appeal addressed to him that he should come to Christ. Then I would personally would say no. But if you mean that every sermon is related to God’s way and plan of salvation, I’d say yes. Do you see the difference?

[Student]: Yes, I do see the difference; but you are suggesting, then, that actually what God has done through Christ should be presented, not as a directive to an unsaved person, but it should be presented as the crux of the total focal part, I guess. Is that correct?

[Dr. Stott]: Yes. Maybe I could bring it to you in this way. Let me read you these verses: “I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are being saved, if you hold it fast.” Now here is Paul preaching and writing to Christian people, and he says I want to remind you of the gospel that you know, because I want to remind you not just that you received it, but you are standing in it. Your whole life now is a gospel life. It is a life that is conditioned and determined by the truth of the gospel. And I want to remind you of it and of its implications, so that you may hold it fast and grow in your understanding of it. This is what Paul is doing all the time in the letters, although he’s writing to Christian people.

To finally end on this note, as we grow in our understanding of the gospel, it seems one of the most tragic things that ever happens is that people think the gospel equals – just a couple sort of formulae – that Christ shed His blood for our redemption and He rose again and He calls people to come to Him. And the minister will say that in the same words and using the same clichés over and over again, until people do get bored with the gospel. It’s a terrible thing when an evangelical congregation cries that the gospel has lost its luster. And we need so to grow in our understanding of the totality of this message of the gospel that we ourselves are never bored with it, but we’re seeing fresh riches in the unsearchable riches of Christ and are beginning to unfold more and more of these riches. There are many preachers who may have paid lip


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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Preachers as Middlemen II: Ambassadors and Freedom FightersLesson 05 of 20

service to their unsearchable riches of Christ. They think they’ve searched them all out and know them, but they’re unsearchable! We’ll never get to the end of them.

preachers as middlemen ii: ambassadors and freedom fighters · 2019-09-13 · preachers as...

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