A long while ago I began a journey blogging through the Together for the Gospel Statement. I am sure that anyone who remotely remembers that I once did this would have been convinced that I would never get back to it. Today I surprised even myself by deciding that I really am determined to finish this. Perhaps ironically, their third conference—T4G 2010—has recently begun accepting bookings. What has happened to the last three and a bit years since this statement was penned? One thing is for sure—the statement is definitely as timely as it was when it was first published back in April 2006.

On my last attempt I got as far as Article Seven, which launched me into an entire series on the atonement, which you can review here. I do feel passionately about that subject. I also posted a number of times on Articles 1-3, and also Article 4, which also led to a long series on expository preaching, as well as a number of posts on Articles 5 and 6.

I need to pick up the pace considerably if I am going to complete my blogging through all these articles before the next conference begins! So my aim is to do this fairly quickly and ensure that by the time I finish it hasn't taken me four years! Still, when blogging about the Bible there is never a shortage of things to say.

So, let’s take a look at the next article in their list.

Article 8

We affirm that salvation is all of grace, and that the Gospel is revealed to us in doctrines that most faithfully exalt God’s sovereign purpose to save sinners and in His determination to save his redeemed people by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to His glory alone.

We deny that any teaching, theological system, or means of presenting the Gospel that denies the centrality of God’s grace as His gift of unmerited favor to sinners in Christ can be considered true doctrine.

These glorious couple of paragraphs are a great litmus test for all doctrine. While the statement does not go so far as to insist that all readers uphold the five points of Calvinism, instead, they do urge us to test all doctrine by its ability to bring praise to the grace of God.

God chooses to save us because he wants to, and because of his great grace. Do we really believe that we have NOTHING to offer to God except our sin and our utter dependence on him? Or do we think, even just a little bit, we have something to contribute to our own salvation? Ephesians 2 tells us that we were dead in our sins. They must depend upon a Savior to resurrect them!

Whenever we succeed in life, do we truly recognize that it is only because of what Jesus has done in us? I love the way Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 4:7, “For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?”

Whatever you hear in preaching, ask yourself—“Does this make me praise God more, and be more thankful to him that he should save me despite my sin? Or does it make me feel good— as if I have contributed something worthwhile to my own salvation?”

It is because of the implications of these two paragraphs that many of us find ourselves wholly unable to joyfully welcome some of the so-called new perspectives on justification. If we make justification dependent on our effort, then we rob Christ of his glory and deny the wonder of his grace that “saved a wretch like me.”

I need this wonderful sovereign, unmovable, unfailing, irresistible grace. If I was depending on my own will power to get me to heaven and a future glorified body then I would have no hope at all! My will is weak. My God is strong. My sin is horrible. His unmerited grace becomes mine, even as my sin becomes Christ’s! I just have to stop striving to make it to heaven under my own steam. Wonderful, wonderful news! Call it old fashioned and schismatic if you want, but I am not interested in any other gospel that fails to emphasize this wonderful glorious truth.

May God receive all the praise for our salvation!

I can exclusively announce that the all-new and FREE Gospel Coalition Network website opened just a few minutes ago. The kind people running it have offered blog readers like you the chance to be first in line to join.

If you already know what this is all about, then feel free to just follow one of the links below depending on which continent you're on, since this genuinely is a global offer. Don't worry, you will have access to the whole community no matter where you live. Then, do feel free to mention this on your own blog, or view my profile and add me to your contacts to follow my updates. You can also join a group to discuss the resurrection and help me choose my book cover!

There are options during the sign-up process controlling privacy settings which determine who can see your information. Although it refers to "state" and "Zip code" those from other countries can simply input our "country" and "post code", instead although giving an address at all is optional.

To join, simply follow the links:

• North America
• South America
• Europe
• Asia
• Africa
• Australia (and the rest of the Pacific)
  

This is just the beginning of what I'm sure will be a very exciting development, as I will try to explain in the rest of this post.

If you love the old old gospel, then you are very likely to find yourself in agreement with the vision of the Gospel Coalition. Their introduction begins:

"We are a fellowship of evangelical churches deeply committed to renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures. We have become deeply concerned about some movements within traditional evangelicalism that seem to be diminishing the church’s life and leading us away from our historic beliefs and practices. . . These movements have led to the easy abandonment of both biblical truth and the transformed living mandated by our historic faith. We not only hear of these influences, we see their effects. We have committed ourselves to invigorating churches with new hope and compelling joy based on the promises received by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. . ."

There is also a Confessional Statement and a Theological Vision For Ministry which are both well written documents worthy of careful study. I uphold their principles without reservation. The network allows me and many others like me to publicly declare our agreement with those ideas.

The Gospel Coalition is running their second biannual national conference next week where there will be a live webcast, but they are also rapidly developing into the umbrella organization for those who still hold to the central tenets of the Christian faith, certainly from among the Reformed wing of the church.

The Gospel Coalition Network (TGCN) is a growing fellowship of Christian churches, organizations, and individuals who are committed to a certain kind of ministry—that which is biblically-faithful and gospel-centered. There really is a new unity arising around the gospel. This includes a broad range of pastors, churches, and Christian leaders. I joined the group a little while back.

A number of Christian ministries and individuals have also already joined including: Desiring God, Sovereign Grace, 9 Marks, The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Together For the Gospel, Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, Mark Dever, Lig Duncan, Don Carson, Alistair Begg, Joshua Harris, Thabiti Anyabwile, C. J. Mahaney, Tope Koleoso, Liam Goligher, and bloggers Tim Challies and Justin Taylor. Terry Virgo, leader of Newfrontiers, has also joined today.

The group's council members can be seen online. If you want to show your allegiance to Jesus' unchanging gospel as expressed by these people, your agreement with the values the documents portray, and have an opportunity to network with and learn from other like-minded people, then this is the place for you! I understand that in the future a lot of great content will be available exclusively through the network.

The technology is, in fact, a FREE version of "The City," which was developed at Mars Hill Church and is designed to be a church community building and administrative tool. Whenever this is spoken about, the thrust behind it is to build real community, not just an online "virtual" community. Thus, in the life of Mars Hill Church it is where people connect to small groups, interact with each other, share prayer requests, share practical needs, and many other things.

It seems that a similar philosophy is behind the version of the network developed for the Gospel Coalition. If you attend one of their conferences, you can use this tool to keep in touch with friends you meet there. If you want to find other gospel-focused Christians who live near enough to you to make face-to-face meetings a possibility, the tool can also help you find them.

I should add that this network is still in beta, and the folks over at The City are cooking up some awesome new features and functions that will be ready soon. Be patient with them as they grow. It will be very interesting to see the different exciting directions the community of TGC Network takes.

In the future, other churches will be able to purchase The City for use in their own congregations as it has been bought by Zondervan and is being further developed. This Gospel Coalition Network will also, therefore, give you a chance to begin to get a feel for what is possible with this tool, and may help you decide whether it is suitable for your church.

If you are on twitter, you can follow the Gospel Coalition Network and The City to keep up with future developments. If you need help, email help@onthecity.org

This post contains great news for all those who are unable to get to the Together for the Gospel conference. The event is still happening at the moment, but you can already download the mp3s of the talks for free.

I also want to point you to what I predict will be the cream of the live-blogging during the Together For The Gospel conference. The following sites are great places to learn about what's been going on:

• Carolyn McCulley — Videos


• Tim Challies — Detailed coverage of the sessions


• Paul Martin — What it's like being Tim's pastor


• Dave Bish — The British perspective

I can't offer two conferences for the price of one, but I can—in one post—discuss two conferences which, for all the similarities of their names, do have some important differences. For a start, they are on opposite sides of the Atlantic, so booking into the wrong one would be a significant logistical headache! I am quite sure, however, that many will cross the "pond" to attend one of what I am calling the "Together" conferences. In fact. they don't happen at the same time, so it is very possible for you to attend BOTH if you want to, as at least one blogger I know is considering!

Both conferences have one important thing in common—they are filling up FAST and expect to be sell-outs, having to turn people away. Hotel rooms are disappearing even more rapidly for both events. Since I have now firmly booked my own place on the second one (sadly I can't make the first), I feel safe to remind you, my readers, that it is time to MOVE QUICKLY!



TOGETHER FOR THE GOSPEL (T4G)
Tuesday April 15 - Thursday April 17, 2008
Kentucky International Convention Center, Louisville, KY
BOOK HERE
It doesn't seem possible that it is now almost two years since this conference first burst onto the international stage. Representing a relationship-based coming together of much of what is best in various different evangelical traditions, this conference models something we would all do well to learn from. Speakers for T4G are Ligon Duncan, Thabiti Anyabwile, John MacArthur, Mark Dever, R. C. Sproul, Albert Mohler, John Piper and C. J. Mahaney.



TOGETHER ON A MISSION (TOAM)
Tuesday July 8 - Friday 11, 2008
Brighton Conference Centre, UK
BOOK HERE
TOAM is the international leaders conference for a worldwide family of approximately 600 churches, although it is open to anyone. There will be 5000 delegates gathering from some 50 nations. Less a conference, more a family reunion, TOAM has a very different feel from any other conference I have ever attended. This year Mark Driscoll will be the main visiting speaker. Speakers for TOAM are Terry Virgo, Mark Driscoll, Stephen Van Rhyn, Dave Stroud, David Devenish, P-J Smyth, Dave Holden, Guy Miller, Wendy Virgo, Mick Taylor, Roger Smith, Steve Oliver, Jeremy Simpkins, John Groves, Greg Haslam, John Hosier, and Ray Lowe

On Saturday, September 22nd I attended the Theology For All Conference in central London at which Mark Dever spoke. To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive about attending as I wondered if I would be the only charismatic in attendance. Since the concept of Together for the Gospel hasn't really crossed the Atlantic, I almost felt like an interloper.

It was great then to arrive and to feel so welcomed by a good number of my readers who were also attending. It still surprises and pleases me when I meet readers in real life—somehow thinking of them as eyes gazing at a screen is totally different from meeting them in real life. I was also greatly encouraged to discover that apparently my blog is widely read in such circles as the students of Oak Hill or the Cornhill training program. I was just disappointed not to have exchanged contact details with some of the people who I met that day. If you were there, or indeed if you are a lurking reader, feel free to make contact with me via e-mail, or still better, by asking me to be a friend on Facebook.

Listening to Mark Dever was a great blessing, and over the next few days I will share my notes. At the end of the conference I was able to sit with Mark over dinner and we recorded an informal interview. We discussed his latest book, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, among other subjects. The book is a useful introduction to personal evangelism, what it is, and how we should go about evangelizing. I believe the book is a great introduction to the subject, and certainly reading it challenged me to seek God for more opportunities to share the Gospel with others on a one-to-one basis.

The interview was a lot of fun, and at times it felt more like I was being interviewed by Mark! You can download it or listen to it right here:

Lig Duncan has responded resoundingly to both sides of the debate about whether he should be allowed to join a Baptist church. He argues that these differences are important and demonstrate a passion for truth that is critical. Here is just some of what he says:

". . . let me say that this significant difference (on baptism and church membership), far from being fatal to our unity, is precisely one of the reasons that Mark and Al and C. J. and I are in fact "Together for the Gospel." It is precisely one of the things that makes Together for the Gospel so different and extraordinary. Let me attempt to begin to explain.

The unity of T4G is not a unity in spite of doctrinal differences, in which we gain unity by downplaying doctrine, minimizing ecclesial differences and going with a lowest common denominator. Our unity is instead a unity of respect for the truth and for truth-in-practice, that sees in each other such a dogged commitment to God's Word in both faith and practice that we want to be together promoting biblical Christianity, even in the points of principle on which we seriously disagree . . .

I would never want to say to Mark or Al, "I will be with you 'Together for the Gospel,' as long as you relinquish your Baptist principles or as long as you do not follow your Baptist convictions in church practice." No, it is precisely their love of truth and their desire to see Gospel truth and love worked out practically in the life of the local church which causes my heart to love them as Jonathan did David.

I love Mark and Al's deep concern for truth and biblical church practice (even and especially at the points in which they disagree with me). I love the fact that they are not willing to compromise on points of biblical conviction, and yet at the same time they work so hard to promote principled unity. I love the fact that even though they believe me to be in serious error on this issue of baptism, they truly love me, constantly co-labor with me (and invite me to do the same with them), and reach out to numerous other non-Baptist evangelicals regularly, deliberately, nationally, and internationally to build biblical consensus and cooperation among the churches. To know Mark and Al is to know two men of unshakable conviction and broad sympathy, and I deeply value that.

There are actually good reasons why this debate should not be an easy one to resolve . . . "

In the comments section of Sam Storms’ contribution to the baptism debate is a comment that is too good to leave there. Here is what the commentator said:

Adrian,

I think Sam might be misunderstanding Mark's position. He keeps referring to the idea that Mark would deny a [paedobaptist] (visiting his church, maybe even speaking in his pulpit) access to communion. Hence Sam writes:

“One more thing should be noted. In his recent post, Dever indicated that he planned on having an Anglican and a Presbyterian preach from his pulpit in the near future. In the comment section of his blog, one person said: ‘The implication . . . is that there are people whom you are happy to have in your pulpit but not at the Lord’s Table. That seems a little odd."

Yes, it does. But Mark is in print saying something entirely different:

"Questions of visitors coming occasionally to the table may be separated from the question of Christians regularly coming as members under the care and guidance of that particular congregation. Such occasional communion may be considered as similar to occasional pulpit fellowship, or other kinds of Christian cooperation between congregations that may not agree on secondary matters, but that would agree on the primary issue of the gospel. On the issue of pulpit fellowship with those who have not been baptized as believers, see Dagg, Church Order, 286—298. Dagg concluded that it was not inconsistent for a Baptist congregation to allow someone to preach to it and yet for the congregation to deny that same paedobaptist minister membership in their Baptist congregation."

Mark Dever, “Baptism in the Context of the Local Church” from Believer’s Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ, footnote 16. p. 341.

To use Sam's analogy, Mark may occasionally have a paedobaptist visit his church and preach (and/or take communion). This is an expression of fellowship and togetherness! But he wouldn't have them come and preach weekly, nor would they join his church, nor would they be allowed regular, consistent continual attendance at the table.

Sam may still not agree with Mark's position, but it seems he needs to state it more carefully before he attacks it,

Or, am I the one that's getting this wrong?

Tom (promiseskept.wordpress.com)

Sam Storms has replied as follows:

Tom,

Thanks for your comments on my article. There appears to be some confusion on the point you raised. I’ve actually written to Mark for clarification on his view, and if it becomes clear that I’ve misrepresented what he believes, I’ll make immediate corrections in what I wrote.

But in the meantime I should point out that both Mark and Al Mohler were quite clear in their public comments at the T4G forum that a paedobaptist would not be permitted to participate in the Lord’s Table at their churches. You rightly point out that the footnote in Mark’s article appears to suggest that he might allow “occasional” participation by a paedobaptist. But this creates problems of its own. What constitutes “occasional”? Once? If once, then why not twice? If twice, then why not three times? Who draws the line and on what basis? It quickly becomes rather arbitrary, does it not?

It seems to me that if a paedobaptist is EVER disqualified from the table (simply for being a paedobaptist), he/she is ALWAYS disqualified from the table. Whatever it is that makes their subsequent and repeated presence at the Table unbiblical and wrong would make their initial and even “occasional” presence unbiblical and wrong.

What do you propose be said to a paedobaptist who has been granted access to the Table once or twice and then comes a third time? “I’m sorry, sir/madam, but although we didn’t regard your convictions as worthy of disqualification before, now we do. You weren’t in sin by partaking of the elements before, but you are now. Furthermore, although WE weren’t in sin by allowing you to partake before (on ‘occasion’), we would be in sin if we let it continue.” Is this really what we glean from the NT concerning celebration of the Table?

So, my point is simply that if a paedobaptist is welcomed by God to the Table once, he/she is welcomed by God at all times (assuming, again, that he/she is not under discipline). Otherwise you put the credobaptist in the rather awkward (and what seems to me unbiblical) position of compromising on his/her convictions out of compassion or friendship, but only once or twice, i.e., only “occasionally,” and then expecting them to do what they really believe is right and closing the Table to any further participation by paedobaptist believers.

The bottom line is this. If you believe the Bible forbids that a paedobaptist should be granted access to the Table, then abide by your convictions. Aim for consistency. Don’t try to make everyone feel better by saying, “Well, for the sake of ‘fellowship’ and in order to avoid giving offence to those we regard as ‘friends,’ it’s o.k. this one time. And maybe we’ll stretch it to twice, but after that we’ve got to stand firm on what we believe is biblical.”

Again, thanks for your comments. I hope this helps bring some clarity to the issue.

Sam Storms

The guys at Together for the Gospel are modeling something VITAL:

"Something that is meant to be different about the T4G conference, and what it may inspire in your own ministry, is that it is built on, and attempts to model and provoke relational networks for encouragement and accountability. So inviting Thabiti was no mere decision of the 4 of us to send him a letter. First, we had to work at building in relationships, and introducing Thabiti to the brothers who didn't know him. So the delay in announcing his speaking reflects nothing on our confidence in him, but rather highlights the different kind of conference this is. From the moment the idea was born, time would need to be set aside for fellowship together and co-laboring. That has now largely happened. And we are delighted not simply at Thabiti's agreement to speak, but at Thabiti's growing friendships with the other speakers involved in the conference."

— Mark Dever

Today, topically, with Easter upon us, we reach possibly one of the most controversial articles in the entire Together for the Gospel Statement — Article 7 on the atonement. Links to my posts discussing Articles 1-6 can be found in my last post entitled Loving God — A Guide for Beginners. The atonement is a subject that has come up on my blog many times over the last few years.

A new book, Pierced for Our Transgressions, has sold out of its first print run in just three weeks. It will be available again very soon, and is on a special offer over at Beginning with Moses, where you can order it for delivery worldwide. The list of endorsements for this book over on the book’s own website looks like a Who's Who of evangelical Christianity, and if the extracts quoted there are anything to go by, it should be fantastic.

The series I am now beginning here is based on teaching I first gave at Jubilee Church. If you want a sneak preview of what is coming, you can download the audio (you may need to right click and save to your PC) or listen online here:

T4G Statement, Article VII

We affirm that Jesus Christ is true God and true Man, in perfect, undiluted, and unconfused union throughout His incarnation and now eternally. We also affirm that Christ died on the cross as a substitute for sinners, as a sacrifice for sin, and as a propitiation of the wrath of God toward sinners. We affirm the death, burial, and bodily resurrection of Christ as essential to the Gospel. We further affirm that Jesus Christ is Lord over His church, and that Christ will reign over the entire cosmos in fulfilment of the Father’s gracious purpose.

We deny that the substitutionary character of Christ’s atonement for sin can be compromised without serious injury to the Gospel or denied without repudiating the Gospel. We further deny that Jesus Christ is visible only in weakness, rather than in power, Lordship, or royal reign, or, conversely, that Christ is visible only in power, and never in weakness.

To introduce the series, let me begin by saying that I believe there is nothing more critical for us to be addressing than the subject of how Jesus saves us. This is the heart of the Gospel. Without it—and specifically without the substitutionary nature of Christ’s death—there is simply no Gospel left.

There was a time when evangelicals could safely almost assume this message. We would simply preach it without pausing to explain precisely what it does and doesn’t mean. Our Gospel was simply, “Jesus took the punishment for our sins, turning away the wrath of heaven so God could justly forgive us.” That remains the Gospel.

It is vital that we now examine these truths carefully and, I would add, preach them more wisely. A generation of people who wear the label "evangelical" are being raised up who would not feel comfortable signing their name to this article of the Statement. Indeed, one of the most prominent people in the Evangelical Alliance and the Spring Harvest Conference in the UK would not feel comfortable with this language. These things can cause controversy. (See for example this post and this retraction from my interview with Dr. Wayne Grudem.) Last Sunday, the Telegraph reported the way certain preachers are changing the traditional message of the cross under the rather appropriate headline:

Easter Message: Christ Did Not Die for Sin!
The vicar mentioned in the above story describes the typical evangelical view of the cross as follows: "In other words, Jesus took the rap and we got forgiven as long as we said we believed in him . . . This is repulsive as well as nonsensical. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If a human behaved like this we'd say that they were a monster."

It is easy for us to simply react angrily to words like that and the news that some now doubt this doctrine. I am sure I have been guilty of that in the past. I fear, though, that at least part of the reason for this new wave of concern about this most valued and crucial of all evangelical doctrines is that we have not been very good at articulating its truth well. One thing is clear—this is a doctrine that is central to the rejection of Christianity as a whole by some. I therefore feel that we need to take more seriously our responsibility to explain this doctrine clearly. People who then reject it on the basis of clear teaching are rejecting a well-explained perspective rather than an overly-simplistic one.

In this series I hope to provide an opportunity for us to consider this matter together carefully. If you or someone you know shares concerns about this doctrine, you are welcome to join the discussion in the comments section, or to post about it on your own blogs.

Continues with "Does the Cross of Jesus Matter?

Today we draw to a close our series on the attributes of God—which has been inspired by the T4G Statement—by publishing an article which, in an abridged form, has already been published in the online Comment magazine.

The article addresses the nature of God, but focuses on the fact that we need to learn to love this God—which is surely a good way for us to round off this series.

For more posts on the T4G Statement, Articles 1-4 see Ten Conclusions About Expository Preaching, and for more on Articles 5 and 6, see the following posts:

• Book Review on How Much Does God Foreknow?
  

• T4G Articles 5-6 — Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the Trinity and Attributes of God
  

• International Federation of Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches Issue Warning — Do Not Jump in Church This Weekend
  

• T4G Articles 5-6 — The Attributes of God and the Trinity
  

In the light of eternity, we are all beginners in the task of learning to love God. It is the most significant challenge faced by the Christian. When asked what is the greatest commandment, Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” It is a measure of our spiritual weakness that we see this challenge as somehow less critical than the challenge to live morally.

How can I love someone I have never seen? We may experience a form of “love” for a character we read about in a book or see in a movie, but is that anything like the love we feel for someone we actually know? Is our love for God just a form of admiration that we might feel for a hero in a novel or the long-deceased subject of a biography. God is not the long-dead subject of a book. He is a living, breathing Person. How then can we learn to love Him as a real person?

I am convinced that the way we learn how to love God is to think of our relationship with Him in the same way we do with people we can physically see. God wants us to be His friends and to enjoy loving the One who is the most worthy of our love. We grow in our love for God in the same way we grow in our love for anyone else. In this article I will show you ways in which we build our relationships with other people and then apply them to how we can learn to love God Himself.


Love Goes Beyond Mere Feelings
The first thing to consider is, what does love actually mean? Many people think that love is simply an emotional feeling — like the way you feel when your knees go weak when you meet that someone of the opposite sex for the first time. Too often songs and sermons tell Christians to relate to God as if He were their heavenly boyfriend. Not surprisingly, that picture is frequently not very appealing to men. As Mark Driscoll says, “It's hard to worship someone you can beat up.” We must learn to love the real Jesus—not a weak imitation.

The contemporary concept of love is far from the biblical one. It is dangerous to think of love in merely emotional terms: Love is a “doing word,” a word full of action. It requires choices—hard choices sometimes. Love is about sacrifice, about faithfulness. It requires commitment. It doesn't always feel so good, and sometimes may even be very painful. As Daniel Bedingfield sings, “Nothing hurts like love, nothing causes your heart so much pain.” Loving God is no different. It, too, will at times be painful.

The first step toward learning to love God is to respond to His love for us. We do this because of what He has done for us: “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Like any other covenant relationship, we decide to love irrespective of how we feel or, indeed, how it appears to us another person is treating us. The extent of true love for someone else is not measured by how we feel about him when everything is going well. Satan's words could as easily have read, “Does Job love God for nothing?” (Job 1). Our challenge is to love even when we feel things are not going well — to love from the core of ourselves even when we feel despair attempting to take hold.

What is love? Love is a deep-seated orientation of your life towards someone else. It involves your whole being. It usually involves deciding to put the needs of another person before your own. Just ask any parent. Our relationship with God is no different, except that He doesn't have any needs—we are needy. We come to God determined to centre our lives around Him, and to put ourselves in the position of needy recipients of His grace. He calls us to serve Him and worship Him, but it is not because He is deficient in any way. We come to God as receivers, not givers. We love God as little children love their parents, and serve Him in the same way a good mother will ask her child to help her in the kitchen so the child will learn and so they can be together.


Love Requires Spending Time Together
There are no shortcuts to loving someone. Love demands interaction and communication, and these require an investment of time. Imagine a friend who comes to you complaining about his girlfriend. He explains that their relationship just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. You ask him how long they have been going out, and what their conversations are like. Your friend replies, “Oh, we don't actually go out and talk with each other!” Many Christians spend little or no time with God and then wonder why they are not growing in their relationship with Him.

What does spending time with God look like? Clearly one of the most important ways we spend time with God is in prayer. But how do we pray in such a way that we actually feel that we are in the presence of God — that we are in a real conversation with Him? Prayer must not be merely reciting a shopping list to God. Instead of rushing to ask Him to do things for us, we start by praising Him for who He is and thanking Him for what He has done for us. As we do this and experience clear answers to prayer, just as in any relationship, more of a sense of a shared history with God will emerge and love will deepen. The longer we know Him and the more we remember how He has helped us and answered our prayers, the more we will love Him. But prayer is not only about setting aside special periods of time to be with God. It's that sense of continually communing with Him in our daily routine. It is critical that we also spend time with God in repentance and receiving forgiveness. Jesus said that those who are forgiven much will love much (Luke 7:49).


Love Requires a Deep Knowledge and Understanding of the Other Person
There is no substitute for getting to know and understand God by reading the Bible. We must grow in the biblical knowledge of who God is and what He is like. Many Christians have only a vague idea of the character of God and are unable to identify where the Bible teaches what we assume about Him. To grow in our love for God, the Bible must shape our beliefs about God. I believe it is important that we know why we believe what we do, and that we do not merely parrot theories taught by others.

Do we merely “assume” certain truths about God? Unfortunately, not all of these can be assumed these days. Where C. S. Lewis was able to say, for example, “Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow” (Mere Christianity), we can no longer assert it as something generally understood by our culture. If we compromise on these truths and we end up with a God who doesn't know everything or who isn't all-powerful, our ability to love such a weakened God is severely diminished.

As we learn more about God—His glory, His perfection, and His existence as the Trinity—I believe our love for Him will grow. We can trace throughout the Bible the unique characteristics of God, and see how Jesus shares every one of these. It is said of Jesus that "in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9). He is the revelation of God to us. The more we learn of Him, the more we love Him.

We must understand God in all his transcendence and immanence. As the book of Exodus describes God: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:6-7). Many Christians emphasize one or the other of these aspects. It is only as we understand that God is both loving and holy, near to us yet separate from us, that we will learn to love Him for who He is. The following table will help you to allow the Scriptures to shape your understanding of God and the way that Jesus shares all of His attributes:

GOD EXISTS ETERNALLY
God: Psalm 90:2; Revelation 1:8
Jesus: John 1:1-5; John 17:5; Revelation 22:13

GOD IS LOVE
God: 1 John 4:8
Jesus: John 17:24

GOD IS THE CREATOR
God: Romans 11:36; Psalm 104:24; Acts 17:24-25; Ephesians 3:10
Jesus: Colossians 1:15-17

GOD IS OMNISCIENT - HE KNOWS EVERYTHING
God: 1 John 3:20; Hebrews 4:13; Psalm 139
Jesus: John 2:24-25; John 16:30

GOD KNOWS THE FUTURE
God: Isaiah 46:9-11
Jesus: John 13:19

GOD IS NOT BOUND BY TIME
God: 2 Peter 3:8; Psalm 90:4; Exodus 3:14
Jesus: John 8:58-59

GOD IS UNCHANGEABLE
God: Malachi 3:6
Jesus: Hebrews 13:8

GOD IS WISE
God: Romans 16:27; Psalm 147:5
Jesus: 1 Corinthians 1:24

GOD IS TRUTH
God: Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2
Jesus: John 14:6

GOD IS OMNIPRESENT - HE IS EVERYWHERE
God: Psalms 139:7-10; Jeremiah 23:24
Jesus: Matthew 18:20

GOD IS OMNIPOTENT - HE IS ALL POWERFUL
God: Jeremiah 32:17; Ephesians 3:20
Jesus: Mark 4:41

GOD IS UNCONTAINABLE
God: 1 Kings 8:27
Jesus: Matthew 17:2-6

GOD IS LIGHT
God: 1 John 1:5
Jesus: John 8:12

GOD IS SPIRIT
God: John 4:24
Jesus: John 1:14

GOD IS HOLY
God: Psalm 99:9
Jesus: Luke 4:34

GOD IS RIGHTEOUS AND JUST
God: Luke 18:19; Matthew 5:48
Jesus: 2 Corinthians 5:21

GOD IS JEALOUS AND FULL OF WRATH
God: Nahum 1:2
Jesus: John 2:17

GOD'S WILL ALWAYS ULTIMATELY COMES TO PASS
God: Ephesians 1:11; Job 42:2; Proverbs 19:21; Psalm 115:3
Jesus: Matthew 28:18

The Spirit Helps Us to Love God
It is sad that the arguments over charismatic gifts of the last century have led so many of us to forget that for hundreds of years many Christians understood that our birthright is an experience of God mediated by the Holy Spirit.

Christian leaders of the past spoke of a pouring out of the Holy Spirit that would help us to experience God's love. That is rarely spoken about today—even charismatic Christians sometimes have a tendency to over-emphasize the gifts instead of the Holy Spirit’s work in promoting the intimate knowledge of God that we are intended to have. The Bible describes the Spirit as follows: “For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10-11). Clearly it is not an option to ignore the Third Person of the Trinity if we want to grow in our love for God.

Jesus is very clear about how we demonstrate our love for Him, and what the results are. He links obedience with love, and then He promises that those who obey Him will know the presence of God by way of the Spirit’s presence in the world: “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him . . . my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:21).

The Apostle Paul describes it this way: “God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5) He also writes, “Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:6). If we need help in loving God, we should ask His Spirit to aid us in our weakness and teach us how to love Him.

Jesus says an incredible thing: “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). I am increasingly provoked that few Christians would say that their experience of the Spirit was preferable to Jesus’ living in the world bodily. But Christians should seek a deeper experience of God's Spirit — not for experience's sake, but that we might love God more.


We Learn to Love Others by Spending Time With Their Friends
How often do Christians effectively say to Jesus,, "I love you, but I don’t really like your bride," by their indifference and their lack of commitment to a local expression of the Church? For all of us who are beginners at loving God, playing active roles in local congregations will help us learn to love God in all of the way I have mentioned so far. But more than that, by giving and receiving love from other members of the family of God, we will be exposed to the many facets reflecting the glory of God. The church is intended to demonstrate the multicolored wisdom and glory of God (Ephesians 3:10). We cannot love God properly without loving His Church. As we learn to give ourselves sacrificially in love to our spiritual family in the same way we love our natural family, our love for God increases. This is of such vital importance that Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

I believe God has put the Church on earth to love God, to love each other, and to love the world. I pray that God will give us the desire and ability to do each of these better.

Read more about loving God on Adrian's blog:

• What is Love?


• What is God Like?

This Monday, I thought I would share a quote from the Doctor related to the subject of Articles 5 and 6 of the T4G Statement which cover the Trinity and the Attributes of God.

“But I cannot understand the doctrine of the Trinity,” says someone, “and because I cannot understand it, I don’t believe it.”

Stop for a moment and think about what you are trying to understand. God in three persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That is the message of the Bible. Not “the ground of all being,” not “the ultimate,” not “the absolute,” not some vague spirit of goodwill, not “a spirit of love”— but persons who think, who act, who intervene, who do things. God the Father, creating at the beginning: “In the beginning God created.” God is not a force that brought things into being but a person who decided to create, who did so, and who, having created, goes on sustaining. God the Son, active, appearing in various angelic forms in the Old Testament, and, when the fullness of the time was come, born as a babe in a stable in Bethlehem (see Galatians 4:4). The Son is a living person. “He that hath seen me,” He said, “hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) Here also in Acts is this great emphasis upon the Holy Spirit…

Oh, I am not saying that I understand the Trinity, and I am not asking you to understand it. I am simply telling you that you will go to a Christless eternity unless you believe this message of the God who is and always was, the three persons in this blessed Godhead—coequal, coeternal in every respect, God acting in this world of time. It is not our world; we did not make it; we did not bring ourselves into it. We are in the hands of the living God. He is the author of everything, the sustainer of everything, and we live our lives under Him—these measured little lives that we have in this world as we pass through it. Oh, the idiotic conceit of men and women. They cannot understand themselves, nor God, nor anything without this view of spiritual reality.

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Courageous Christianity (1st U.S. ed.; Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, 2001), p. 242.

The next two articles in the Together for the Gospel Statement discuss the nature of God. The concept of the Trinity is so entwined with God’s attributes and who He is I have decided to roll these two articles into one. I have already posted an extensive set of notes and an audio on the attributes of God and the Trinity. In my talk I demonstrated that Jesus can be shown from the Bible to share every major attribute of God that theologians describe. Enough of these are also ascribed clearly to the Spirit for us to say He must hold all the unique attributes of God also. There are also more articles on the trinity elsewhere on my blog.

Today, after sharing the two articles, I will share a long quote from what may possibly be the best article on the Trinity in the world. It is cited as by "Desiring God Staff" tho I am sure Piper was involved in it somehow. I encourage you to go read it all—I think it will be incredibly helpful.

Article V

We affirm that the Bible reveals God to be infinite in all his perfections, and thus truly omniscient, omnipotent, timeless, and self-existent. We further affirm that God possesses perfect knowledge of all things, past, present, and future, including all human thoughts, acts, and decisions.

We deny that the God of the Bible is in any way limited in terms of knowledge or power or any other perfection or attribute, or that God has in any way limited his own perfections.

Article VI

We affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is a Christian essential, bearing witness to the ontological reality of the one true God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each of the same substance and perfections.

We deny the claim that the Trinity is not an essential doctrine, or that the Trinity can be understood in merely economic or functional categories.

“WHAT DOES IT MEAN THAT GOD IS A TRINITY?

The doctrine of the Trinity means that there is one God who eternally exists as three distinct Persons—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Stated differently, God is one in essence and three in person. These definitions express three crucial truths: (1) The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons; (2) each Person is fully God; (3) there is only one God.

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons. The Bible speaks of the Father as God (Philippians 1:2), Jesus as God (Titus 2:13), and the Holy Spirit as God (Acts 5:3-4). Are these just three different ways of looking at God, or simply ways of referring to three different roles that God plays?

The answer must be no, because the Bible also indicates that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons. For example, since the Father sent the Son into the world (John 3:16), He cannot be the same person as the Son. Likewise, after the Son returned to the Father (John 16:10), the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit into the world (John 14:26; Acts 2:33). Therefore, the Holy Spirit must be distinct from the Father and the Son.

In the baptism of Jesus, we see the Father speaking from heaven and the Spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove as Jesus comes out of the water (Mark 1:10-11). In John 1:1 it is affirmed that Jesus is God and, at the same time, that He was "with God"—thereby indicating that Jesus is a distinct Person from God the Father (cf. also 1:18). And in John 16:13-15 we see that although there is a close unity between them all, the Holy Spirit is also distinct from the Father and the Son.

The fact that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons means, in other words, that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. Jesus is God, but He is not the Father or the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God, but He is not the Son or the Father. They are different Persons, not three different ways of looking at God.

The personhood of each member of the Trinity means that each Person has a distinct center of consciousness. Thus, they relate to each other personally—the Father regards Himself as "I," while He regards the Son and Holy Spirit as "You." Likewise the Son regards Himself as "I," but the Father and the Holy Spirit as "You."

Often it is objected that "If Jesus is God, then he must have prayed to Himself while He was on earth." But the answer to this objection lies in simply applying what we have already seen. While Jesus and the Father are both God, they are different Persons. Thus, Jesus prayed to God the Father without praying to Himself. In fact, it is precisely the continuing dialog between the Father and the Son (Matthew 3:17; 17:5; John 5:19; 11:41-42; 17:1ff) which furnishes the best evidence that they are distinct Persons with distinct centers of consciousness.

Sometimes the Personhood of the Father and Son is appreciated, but the Personhood of the Holy Spirit is neglected. Sometimes the Spirit is treated more like a "force" than a Person. But the Holy Spirit is not an it, but a He (see John 14:26; 16:7-15; Acts 8:16). The fact that the Holy Spirit is a Person, not an impersonal force (like gravity), is also shown by the fact that He speaks (Hebrews 3:7), reasons (Acts 15:28), thinks and understands (1 Corinthians 2:10-11), wills (1 Corinthians 12:11), feels (Ephesians 4:30), and gives personal fellowship (2 Corinthians 13:14). These are all qualities of personhood. In addition to these texts, the others we mentioned above make clear that the Personhood of the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Personhood of the Son and the Father. They are three real persons, not three roles God plays.

Another serious error people have made is to think that the Father became the Son, who then became the Holy Spirit. Contrary to this, the passages we have seen imply that God always was and always will be three Persons. There was never a time when one of the Persons of the Godhead did not exist. They are all eternal.

While the three members of the Trinity are distinct, this does not mean that any is inferior to the other. Instead, they are all identical in attributes. They are equal in power, love, mercy, justice, holiness, knowledge, and all other qualities.

Each Person is fully God. If God is three Persons, does this mean that each Person is "one-third" of God? Does the Trinity mean that God is divided into three parts?

The Trinity does not divide God into three parts. The Bible is clear that all three Persons are each one hundred percent God. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all fully God. For example, it says of Christ that "in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). We should not think of God as like a "pie" cut into three pieces, each piece representing a Person. This would make each Person less than fully God and thus not God at all. Rather, "the being of each Person is equal to the whole being of God." The divine essence is not something that is divided between the three persons, but is fully in all three persons without being divided into "parts."

Thus, the Son is not one-third of the being of God, He is all of the being of God. The Father is not one-third of the being of God, He is all of the being of God. And likewise with the Holy Spirit. Thus, as Wayne Grudem writes, "When we speak of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together we are not speaking of any greater being than when we speak of the Father alone, the Son alone, or the Holy Spirit alone."

There is only one God. If each Person of the Trinity is distinct and yet fully God, then should we conclude that there is more than one God? Obviously we cannot, for Scripture is clear that there is only one God: "There is no other God besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me. Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other" (Isaiah 45:21-22; see also 44:6-8; Exodus 15:11; Deuteronomy 4:35; 6:4-5; 32:39; 1 Samuel 2:2; 1 Kings 8:60).

Having seen that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct Persons, that they are each fully God, and that there is nonetheless only one God, we must conclude that all three Persons are the same God. In other words, there is one God who exists as three distinct Persons.

If there is one passage which most clearly brings all of this together, it is Matthew 28:19: "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." First, notice that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinguished as distinct Persons. We baptize into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Second, notice that each Person must be deity because they are all placed on the same level. In fact, would Jesus have us baptize in the name of a mere creature? Surely not. Therefore each of the Persons into whose name we are to be baptized must be deity. Third, notice that although the three divine Persons are distinct, we are baptized into their name (singular), not names (plural). The three Persons are distinct, yet only constitute one name. This can only be if they share one essence . . . .

How is God one? He is one in essence. How is God three? He is three in Person. Essence and person are not the same thing. God is one in a certain way (essence) and three in a different way (person). Since God is one in a different way than He is three, the Trinity is not a contradiction. There would only be a contradiction if we said that God is three in the same way that He is one.

So a closer look at the fact that God is one in essence but three in person has helped to show why the Trinity is not a contradiction. But how does it show us why there is only one God instead of three? It is very simple: All three Persons are one God because, as we saw above, they are all the same essence. Essence means the same thing as "being." Thus, since God is only one essence, He is only one being-not three. This should make it clear why it is so important to understand that all three Persons are the same essence. For if we deny this, we have denied God's unity and affirmed that there is more than one being of God (i.e., that there is more than one God).

What we have seen so far provides a good basic understanding of the Trinity. But it is possible to go deeper. If we can understand more precisely what is meant by essence and person, how these two terms differ, and how they relate, we will then have a more complete understanding of the Trinity.

ESSENCE AND PERSON
Essence. What does essence mean? As I said earlier, it means the same thing as being. God's essence is His being. To be even more precise, essence is what you are. At the risk of sounding too physical, essence can be understood as the "stuff" that you "consist of." Of course we are speaking by analogy here, for we cannot understand this in a physical way about God. "God is spirit" (John 4:24). Further, we clearly should not think of God as "consisting of" anything other than divinity. The "substance" of God is God, not a bunch of "ingredients" that taken together yield deity.

Person. In regards to the Trinity, we use the term "Person" differently than we generally use it in everyday life. Therefore it is often difficult to have a concrete definition of Person as we use it in regards to the Trinity. What we do not mean by Person is an "independent individual" in the sense that both I and another human are separate, independent individuals who can exist apart from one another.

What we do mean by Person is something that regards himself as "I" and others as "You." So the Father, for example, is a different Person from the Son because He regards the Son as a "You," even though He regards Himself as "I." Thus, in regards to the Trinity, we can say that "Person" means a distinct subject which regards Himself as an "I" and the other two as a "You." These distinct subjects are not a division within the being of God, but "a form of personal existence other than a difference in being."

How do they relate? The relationship between essence and Person, then, is as follows. Within God's one, undivided being is an "unfolding" into three personal distinctions. These personal distinctions are modes of existence within the divine being, but are not divisions of the divine being. They are personal forms of existence other than a difference in being. The late theologian, Herman Bavinck, has stated something very helpful at this point: "The persons are modes of existence within the being; accordingly, the Persons differ among themselves as the one mode of existence differs from the other, and-using a common illustration-as the open palm differs from a closed fist."

Because each of these "forms of existence" are relational (and thus are Persons), they are each a distinct center of consciousness, with each center of consciousness regarding Himself as "I" and the others as "You." Nonetheless, these three Persons all "consist of" the same "stuff" (that is, the same "what," or essence). As theologian and apologist, Norman Geisler, has explained it: "While essence is what you are, person is who you are. So God is one 'what' but three 'whos'."

The divine essence is thus not something that exists "above" or "separate from" the three Persons, but the divine essence is the being of the three Persons. Neither should we think of the Persons as being defined by attributes added on to the being of God. Wayne Grudem explains: "But if each person is fully God and has all of God's being, then we also should not think that the personal distinctions are any kind of additional attributes added on to the being of God . . . Rather, each person of the Trinity has all of the attributes of God, and no one Person has any attributes that are not possessed by the others. On the other hand, we must say that the Persons are real, that they are not just different ways of looking at the one being of God...the only way it seems possible to do this is to say that the distinction between the persons is not a difference of `being' but a difference of `relationships.' This is something far removed from our human experience, where every different human `person' is a different being as well. Somehow God's being is so much greater than ours that within His one undivided being there can be an unfolding into interpersonal relationships, so that there can be three distinct persons." READ MORE . . .
© Desiring God. Website: http://www.desiringgod.org/

Well, here it is. I finally draw to an end a series that could have run and run. Almost all my posts for the last month or so have been inspired by Article 4 of the T4G Statement, which is quoted in my post John Piper on Expository Preaching. As I have said, I am sure I will return frequently to this topic as it is, of course, never far from my mind — and in a way preaching is the over-arching theme of this blog.

In this final post, I will list ten personal conclusions I have made, having spent the last month thinking about preaching. I will also link to all the posts so you can find them in one place here. I have included some posts — such as the ones on John Piper's article — which although not strictly part of the series, are certainly closely related to the theme. For links to posts on Articles 1-3, see Blogging the Together for the Gospel Statement - The Place of Truth.

Ten Conclusions About Preaching

1. Expository preaching should be defined as preaching that seeks to explain the main point of the portion of the Scripture selected.
   
   
2. Expository preaching does not always have to take place as part of a long series working slowly through a book. Series can be helpful, but they need not last a decade. One-off sermons on specific verses, a chapter, or even a whole book can also be expository.
   
   
3. We must not have an overly-narrow definition of expository preaching — thinking that there is only one way to preach. Instead we must encompass the many different styles of preaching which are helpful and biblically directed. We must also understand that whilst the message of a specific verse is, of course, unified rather than divided or contradictory, its meaning is usually rich and many faceted. Because of this, different themes may be drawn out of the same passage, giving rise to very different sermons from the very same portion of the Bible.
   
   
4. Any definition of expository preaching which is too narrow and excludes the style of such men as C. H. Spurgeon, who was probably the greatest ever preacher — just has to be wrong. To criticize CHS on these grounds and fail to hold his preaching up as a model worthy of emulation today is, in my view, inexcusable. (See for example this post on Pyromaniacs.)
   
   
5. Expository preaching is not without its dangers, one of the chief of which is sounding too much like a Bible commentary read aloud.
   
   
6. Preaching needs to skillfully draw modern people into the Bible, explain the text, induce wonder, then drive the point home with a clear sense of how the people need to think, feel, believe, and act differently here in the 21st century.
   
   
7. Preaching is entirely dependent on the supernatural and sovereign activity of the Spirit, who equips both preacher and hearers for what is an impossible task and makes the words of the Bible live in its hearers hearts. Preaching needs to be passionate, emotive (though not necessarily emotional), and bring about a holy moment of experiencing the presence and voice of God through His Word.
   
   
8. Preaching God's Word is the primary way He has ordained for people to be saved, taught, equipped, matured, and encounter God. It is the hope of the church, and a restoration of true preaching has always accompanied true revival.
   
   
9. Our preaching should be targeted at and have something relevant for each of our different audiences — the unbelieving visitor, the backslidden, the new Christian, the mature Christian, and church leaders in the congregation. But, ultimately we are accountable to an audience of One before whom we must give an account.
   
   
10. Given the impossibility of this task, is it any wonder we need to be devoted to the study of the Word and to prayer, expressing our utter uselessness and unworthiness to proclaim God's Word? Surely we do well to conclude that we need the help of God in our preparation, personal lives, and delivery to make us instruments that He can use. When I read about preaching I do feel that we have barely scratched the surface, and that sadly a generation exists today that has mostly never heard preaching as it should be.

My Posts on Preaching

• Books to Help You Study the Bible
• Mark Dever on Expositional Preaching - The 1st of 9 Marks of a Healthy Church
• Steve Camp Challenges Us to Embrace the Spirit
• Am I a Thrill Seeker?
• What Changes Us In Preaching - Application or Wonder or Both?
• T4G Article 4 – Steve Weaver on Expository Preaching
• How Stories Change Our Worldview
• T4G Article 4 - Lloyd-Jones on Applying Biblical Truth
• John Piper Hears The Voice Of God
• T4G Article 4 - Rick Warren on the Point of Preaching
• T4G Article 4 - Multicolored Preaching
• T4G Article 4 - The Dangers of Expository Preaching
• T4G Article 4 - Sermon Preparation by John Stott
• Spurgeon's Challenge to Preachers
• Lloyd-Jones Monday - Dead Orthodoxy or an Encounter With God?
• T4G Article 4 - Alistair Begg on Sermon Preparation
• SERMON - The Reviving Power of God's Word
• The Risks and Rewards of Using Technology in Sermon Preparation
• Lloyd-Jones Monday - The Doctor, Spurgeon, and Plagiarism
• Shepherds Conference II - Steve Lawson on Passionate Preaching
• T4G Article 4 - Must Expository Preaching Always be a Series Preaching Through a Book?
• T4G Article 4 - Are There Three Types of Expository Preaching?
• John Calvin on the Inerrancy of Scripture and the Witness of the Spirit
• T4G Article 4 - Lloyd-Jones on Spurgeon: Are Sermon Series Compulsory?
• T4G Article 4 - Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Expository Preaching
• T4G Article 4 - John Piper on Expository Preaching
• AUDIO - What is the Bible?

I will also share here some more links on preaching

Sam Storms
An Appeal to All Pastors: Why and How Should We Preach - Part I
An Appeal to All Pastors: Why and How Should We Preach - Part II
An Appeal to All Pastors: Why and How Should We Preach - Part III

At the beginning of this year, Steve Weaver posted a multi-part series on expository preaching. I thought I would share a few quotes from this series for you — it is well worth a read if you haven’t already found it.

"What role does prayer play in the preparation of an expository sermon? Prayer should both precede and permeate your study time. Whenever I open God's Word I almost always pray, "Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from your law" (Psalm 119:18). But prayer is not just something I do to get started, it is a vital part of the ongoing communication between God and me during my sermon preparation. God is speaking to me through His Word, I am speaking back to Him in prayer. During the course of a day of study, I ask God for wisdom to understand difficult texts, thank God for letting me see the meaning of a text, praise God for what has been revealed about Him and His gracious purposes in the text, and confess my sins that have been exposed by the text. All of these spontaneous exclamations are types of the kind of prayerful spirit which permeates my study of God's Word . . . .

One of my goals from the earliest point in my preparation is to see how the text unfolds into its component parts. The process of continual reading, meditation, and prayer is the means to discovering the seams in the text. At this point, I am like a man chopping wood, and the text is the log of wood. Sometimes the log splits the first time that the man swings the axe, but it usually takes repeated blows before the log splits. Sometimes, the log is so hard that it is struck all week to no avail until it finally opens up late on Saturday evening. A couple of times in my experience the text never split and I was forced to roll the whole log into the sanctuary! This is less than ideal, but for the preacher there is an unmovable deadline each Sunday, and one must go to the pulpit with what you have . . . .

I strongly believe in the empowerment of the Holy Spirit in preaching. After all my studying is complete and the manuscript is written, there still remains a desperate need for the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit can cause the message to go forth in power and accomplish its God intended purpose. I pray for the empowerment of the Holy Spirit each time I preach. The more aware I am of my need for this work of the Spirit, the more powerful my preaching seems to be. If I go in my own strength, trusting in my preparation and not the empowerment, illumination, and convicting power of the Holy Spirit, I will crash and burn. Sometimes God graciously allows me to crash and burn when I go in my own strength in order to increase my dependence upon Him. On the other hand, some of my best moments preaching have been when I have been weak in body and therefore utterly dependent upon the aid of the Holy Spirit. God always seems to bless when I acknowledge my weakness before Him.

Because the act of preaching is one in which the Holy Spirit is at work, I never know for sure exactly how the sermon will go. I believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in my preparation, as well as in my preaching, but sometimes I say things that I did not plan to say and omit things which I had planned to say. This is the freedom in preaching that comes as the result of preparation, not as many believe, in spite of preparation. My observation is that the more one prepares, the more variety there will be in ones preaching because the Spirit has more material from which to choose from the preacher's mind. Those who do not prepare well to insure their spontaneity or "being led by the Spirit" usually end up saying the exact same things in the exact same ways. I wouldn't want to blame the messages that result from being ill-prepared on the Holy Spirit!"

— Steve Weaver

I have been addressing the subject of expositional preaching for some time now. I shared a quote from Rick Warren about the vital need for us to learn to apply Scripture. It seems Martyn Lloyd-Jones agrees. This quote is taken once again from the excellent Logos ML-J library.

“It is one thing to believe the truth, it is a very different thing to apply it. We did listen, and apply the truth, initially, otherwise we would not be Christians at all. But it is possible for us … to go on, content with just listening to, or reading the truth, and never applying it to ourselves, or examining ourselves in the light of it. Is this not one of the most alarming possibilities in the Christian life?

… read the life of any man who has ever been used of God … in connection with revival, and you will always find that he was a man who had examined himself, and had become alarmed about himself. It has always been the thing that has led him to God and to prayer — his astonishment at himself. But if we do not examine ourselves we will never truly pray, and our lives will be lived entirely on the surface. Now, how little we hear about self-examination! Oh, we believe in having a quiet time, a short reading of Scripture, a hurried prayer, and we have done everything. But where is self-examination? How much talk is there about mortification of the flesh? (Colossians 3:5, Romans 8:13)

… allow the truth to search you … apply it to yourself … preach to yourself … talk to yourself … meditate about these things … bring yourself under conviction …[do] not let yourself escape. But …do not stop at that … allow the Scriptures to lead you to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the cleansing of His blood. In other words, any Christian who is depressed and morbid and introspective is really failing to apply the doctrine of justification by faith only. If you stop in your sins, if you stop in the dust and the ashes and in the sackcloth, I say, you are not scriptural. You must go on from that and look to Him, and apply again the truth to yourself. You must be certain that you end in a condition of thanksgiving and praise, with a realisation that your sins are covered and blotted out, and that you are renewed, and that you are able to go forward.”

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Westchester, Illinois, Crossway Books, 1987), pp. 80-83.

This continues our series on preaching, which is based on the fourth article of the Together for the Gospel Statement. The previous post in this series described some of the stereotyped differences in preaching between black and white preachers and what each can learn from the other.

In the article I wrote for SermonCentral on technology and preaching, I ended by making the point that we must be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking the preacher’s task is over when we have unpacked a Bible verse to our congregation. Rick Warren agrees, and I thought I would share his thoughts here, even though I know I risking getting into all kinds of hot water for quoting him approvingly:

"Many preachers believe the purpose of preaching is to explain the Bible, or to interpret the text, or to help people understand God’s Word. But these all fall short of what it really is."

Warren then states what he believes is the purpose of preaching:

"To help people become like Jesus. How does this happen? Through application! The only way lives are changed is through the application of God’s Word. The lack of application in preaching and teaching is, I believe, the number one problem with preaching in the United States. Too many sermons are nothing more than lectures on biblical backgrounds or obscure Greek and Hebrew words. As a result, people walk into a church and walk out, but their lives remain unchanged."

Warren goes on to explain why he believes we fail to apply our sermons:

1. We assume that people will make the necessary connection.
   

2. We leave it to the Holy Spirit.
   

3. Personal application is convicting and it makes people feel uncomfortable.
   

4. We haven’t applied it in our own lives.
   

5. It takes more time and effort and preparation.
   

6. We’re afraid of being simplistic.
   

7. We don’t apply the Scripture because we’ve never been taught how to do it.
   

8. We haven’t realized the importance of application.

Warren believes that:

"Application is not something that you tack on to the end of the message. It is the message if you’re preaching to change lives and to make people like Christ."

Warren ends by explaining that, in his view, the application of a sermon should aim to answer two questions:

• So what?
  

• What now?

He provocatively ends the article by saying, "If your preaching doesn’t ever answer these two questions, you haven’t applied the Bible to the lives of your listeners."

This continues our series on preaching, which is based on the fourth article of the Together for the Gospel Statement. The previous post in this series warned of some of the dangers of expository preaching.

I found this fantastic quote from the pen of Thabiti Anyabwile over at Pure Church describing what preachers who are stereotypically black and those who are stereotypically white MUST learn from each other:

“Black preaching” is stereotypically thought to be emotional, even cathartic, rhythmic, centered on suffering and celebration, and ultimately doctrinally shallow. “White preaching” is thought to be (stereotypically) largely the reverse: doctrinal, cold, intellectual, etc. . . At least that's what you'd believe if you believe the cultural stereotypes.

And nothing, in my mind, has quite done as much damage to the people of God needing to live the culture of God like the false ways of viewing preaching. Too often we think of “black preaching” and “white preaching,” and by that we mean some standard or style of preaching that is acceptable in those human cultures. And attached to these general views of culture and preaching are certain norms for what we think is “good” preaching in each context. “Good” black preaching produces a whoop and a shout. “Good” white preaching produces . . . what? Knowledge? Emotional stiffness?

What does this do to our notion of preaching? It severs two essential aspects to good preaching: truth and passion. Good preaching, black or white or brown or yellow, is preaching the truth of the Scriptures with godly zeal . . . preaching the weighty doctrines of God with the weighty movements of the heart that accompany those doctrines. Now any individual preacher may have a different “emotional range” or “doctrinal range” to work with, but both those things go together in good preaching.

The practical effect of maintaining this human cultural distinctive where preaching is concerned is that large segments of the family of God are cut off from significant aspects to good preaching. Some are shaped into emotionally boisterous and doctrinally shallow Christians, while others are doctrinally heady and emotionally paralyzed. In the culture of God, we need truth set on fire so that we might be both rooted and grounded in the truth and stirred to compassion, love, and zeal . . .

Here's a place for great exchange among the people of God for the glory of God. Perhaps some African-American preachers could learn a great deal from some of their white brothers in making their preaching more doctrinally rich and in adopting an expository discipline in the pulpit. And perhaps some white preachers could learn a great deal from some of their African-American brothers about preaching with passion and urgency and seeing and celebrating the application of truth to the real human struggles sitting in their congregations.”

This continues our series on preaching, which is based on the fourth article of the Together for the Gospel Statement. The previous two posts in this series provided outlines for good sermon preparation from John Stott and Alistair Begg.

While Expository Thoughts is certainly committed to preaching that is well prepared, they have a great post which points out a trap we can all too easily fall into — even those of us who haven't been to seminary!

“. . . It is easy for us as preachers to slip into ‘seminary mode’ and preach with the shotgun of exegetical insight rather than articulating the Word with pastoral care. There will even be times where you go to great lengths to be pastoral and folks will still complain that the message is too heady. The solution is to strive for balance where the grind of hard exegesis is hidden from sight, yet the fruit is laid bare for all to see. One exercise helps me tremendously in this area: fellowship. The more I intertwine my life with those in the congregation the more I see opportunities for the Word of God to be richly applied in their lives. A pastor must spend an appropriate amount of time understanding the Word and preparing for Sunday, but he should never use that as an excuse to ignore God's people. Every pastor needs to find that balance in his life. This is at least part of what Peter meant when he said, ‘Shepherd the flock of God among you’ (1 Peter 5:2).”

(Emphasis mine.)

I cannot independently confirm the source of this, but I found the following over at Unashamed Workman, described as John Stott’s advice on sermon preparation. If anyone can verify the source I will, of course, acknowledge it.

Alistair Begg provides additional thoughts on this subject in my previous post, which can be found here.

I. Choose Your Text

A. It is best to rely on expository book studies for the steady diet of your people, because this ensures they will get “the whole counsel of God.”

B. However, the following may be occasions for special sermons:

1. Special calendar occasions: Christmas, Easter, etc.

2. Special external circumstances which are in the public mind

3. Special needs discerned by the preacher or others.

4. Truths which have specially inspired the preacher.

C. Keep a notebook to scribble down ideas for sermons, insights, burdens, illustrations, etc. Record them immediately, wherever they come to mind, because you will usually forget them later.

II. Meditate on the Text

A. Whenever possible, plan out texts weeks or months in advance. This gives the benefit of “subconscious incubation.”

B. Concentrated “incubation” should begin at least one week before preaching. It should involve the following:

1. Read, re-read, and re-re-read the text.

2. Be sure you understand what it means. Do your own interpretive work. Don’t use commentaries until you have formulated specific interpretive questions which you have been unable to answer, or until you have completed your interpretive work.

3. Brood longer over how it applies to your people, to the culture, to you, etc.

4. Pray for God to illuminate the text, especially its application.

5. Scribble down notes of thoughts, ideas, etc.

6. Solicit the insights of others through tapes, talking with other preachers, etc.

III. Isolate the Dominant Thought

(This is the purpose of section II.)

A. Your sermon should convey only one major message. All of the details of your sermon should be marshaled to help your people grasp that message and feel its power.

B. You should be able to express the dominant thought in one short, clear, vivid sentence.

IV. Arrange Your Material to Serve the Dominant Thought

A. Chisel and shape your material. Ruthlessly discard all material which is irrelevant to the dominant thought. Subordinate the remaining material to the dominant thought by using that material to illuminate and reinforce the dominant thought.

B. Your sermon structure should be suited to the text, not artificially imposed. Avoid structure which is too clever, prominent or complex.

C. Decide on your method of preaching for this text: argumentation, faceting, categorizing, analogy, etc.

D. Carefully choose words that are precise, simple, clear, vivid, and honest. Write out the key sections, phrases, and sentences to help you in your word choice. Stick to short declarative and interrogative sentences with few, if any, subordinate clauses.

E. Come up with illustrations and examples which will explain and convict. Employ a wide variety: figures of speech, images, retelling biblical stories in contemporary language, inventing fresh parables, retelling true historical and/or biographical events, etc. Keep a file of these, especially if they do not come easily to you. Avoid making illustrations and examples so prominent that they detract from the dominant thought. Also, avoid applying them inappropriately or overusing them.

V. Add the Introduction and Conclusion

A. The introduction should not be elaborate, but enough to arouse their curiosity, wet their appetites, and introduce the dominant thought. This can be done by a variety of means: explaining the setting of the passage, story, current event or issue, etc.

B. The conclusion should not merely recapitulate your sermon—it should apply it. Obviously, you should be applying all along, but you should keep something for the end which will prevail upon your people to take action. “No summons, no sermon.” Preach though the head to the heart (i.e. the will). The goal of the sermon should be to “storm the citadel of the will and capture it for Jesus Christ.” What do you want them to do? Employ a variety of methods to do this:

1. Argument: anticipate objections and refute them.

2. Admonition: warn of the consequences of disobedience.

3. Indirect Conviction: arouse moral indignation and then turn it on them (Nathan with David).

4. Pleading: apply the gentle pressure of God’s love, concern for their well-being, and the needs of others.

5. Vision: paint a picture of what is possible through obedience to God in this area.

VI. Write Down and Pray Over Your Message

A. Writing out your sermon forces you to think straight and sufficiently. It exposes lazy thinking and cures it. After you are thoroughly familiar with your outline, reduce it to small notes.

B. Pray that God will enable you to “so possess the message that the message possesses you.”

Note: Please keep Pastor Begg in your prayers as he has recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer and is scheduled for surgery on April 23rd.

In a booklet entitled, "Preaching for God’s Glory," written for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Alistair Begg shares some practical points about his own method of sermon preparation, which he learned from an older minister while he was still a theological student:

• THINK YOURSELF EMPTY
  It is all right and often beneficial to avoid the proud assumption that we know initially what everything means . . . it is always good to train our minds to expect the unexpected . . . The point is, if we do not become thinking pastors, we are unlikely to have thinking congregations.


• READ YOURSELF FULL
  There are certain books we should return to routinely. Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor, Augustine’s Confessions, and as daunting as we may find it, Calvin’s Institutes. I also find great profit in reading biographies. The two volumes on Lloyd-Jones should be a prerequisite for all pastors, as well as at least the first volume on Whitefield by Arnold Dallimore.


• WRITE YOURSELF CLEAR
  Aside from the essential empowering of the Holy Spirit, if there is one single aspect of sermon preparation that is most closely tied to fluency of speech and impact in delivery, it is this: freedom of delivery in the pulpit depends upon careful organization in the study.


• PRAY YOURSELF HOT
  There is no chance of fire in the pews if there is an iceberg in the pulpit; and without personal prayer and communion with God during the preparation stages, the pulpit will be cold . . . We dare not divorce our preaching from our praying.



• BE YOURSELF, BUT DON’T PREACH YOURSELF
  There is nothing quite so ridiculous as . . . the preacher who wishes he was someone else . . . James Stewart used to say, "Be yourself, but also, forget yourself!" ... If people leave worship saying, "What an amazing preacher!" we have failed. Instead we must long for them to say, "What a great God, and what a privilege it is to meet him in his Word, as we have just done."
  
  

  Alistair Begg, Preaching for God’s Glory, Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Series "Today’s Issues", Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois, 1999, pp.40-45.

I particularly like the way this reflects our dependence on the Holy Spirit - as Begg puts it, we need "the essential empowering of the Holy Spirit" to take our preparation and set it ablaze.

The next post in this series on preaching (T4G Statement, Article 4) continues with John Stott's thoughts concerning sermon preparation. It can be found here.

Over at Challies' second live-blogging post on the Shepherds' Conference, following John MacArthur's dismissal of amillenialism, Steve Lawson struck a blow for the kind of preaching I have been talking about in my series on the T4G Statement Article 4. The last post in that series was entitled Must Expository Preaching Always be a Series? I have also posted often in the past about the vital point that Steve Lawson made:

"Two deadly dangers face the church as it advances into the 21st century.The first threat is the wholesale devaluing of preaching itself. In this paradigm shift, biblical preaching is being displaced by other things. Exposition is being replaced by entertainment; theology for theatrics; [the] unfolding drama of redemption is being replaced by just plain drama. Preaching is out, dialogue is in. Straightforward exposition is being demoted to secondary status. As bad as this is, of even greater concern is another error. It is an error that befalls even those who are able preachers. The error is that their preaching is little more than a data dump. Preaching has become clinical, cold, sterile, and stagnant. It is precision without power or light without heat.

Dispassionate preaching is a lie. If the preacher is not consumed with [the] passage for the message, how can those who hear it believe it? This is what must be recaptured by the men at this conference who are not in danger of giving up the pulpit to entertainment, but who can become listless and lifeless in expositing the Scriptures. The kind of preaching [that] burst onto the scene in the first century. It was powerful and passionate. Acts is full of sermons, and when they are all added up, twenty-five percent of the text of the book is dedicated to recording the words of these sermons. This underscores how important apostolic preaching is. It suggests to us the kind of preaching we are to emulate. It is not just expository preaching we need, but expository preaching of a certain tone and thrust. We need apostolic expository preaching. We need to preach not just what they preached, but as they preached."

Tim's report is very helpful and detailed, and goes on to explain Steve's view of what apostolic preaching should look like. I especially liked this section, in which he claims that Peter's sermon in Acts 2 is the model we should use for our expository preaching:

1. Read the text. Beginning in verse 16 he reads the text. This is where expository preaching begins for it makes God the real preacher.

2. Explain the text. This is what the word "expository" means — simply explain the text. There is an inseparable connection between verse 21 and verse 22. In this verse he now begins to explain the text of the former verse.

3. Support the text. What Peter will now do, having explained the text, [is to] undergird it with other cross-references. He supports the central theme and traces it through the course of Scripture. He will now give four strategic cross-references that bolster his explanation. He will show that the full counsel of God speaks with unity and clarity on this truth. These serve as pillars to undergird the message.

4. Synthesize the text. In verse 36 he summarizes the text, bringing it down to the bottom line. He gives the bottom line conclusion that the whole sermon has been leading to.

5. Apply the text. This cannot be an expository sermon without this step. Now comes the crescendo of the sermon. Here is the action point, the imperative voice. This sermon is so powerful that the listeners give the invitation. "What must we do?" The authority of the Word of God has been pressed to their heart, their conscience has been awakened and the Spirit has stirred their hearts. Now Peter gives the application. Here is what you must do. Expository sermons must get to the "you." In this case: "Repent and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."

It starts with the text, stays with the text, and drives home the text.

Continued at Shepherds' Conference III - C. J. Mahaney Asked to Preach by John MacArthur

This continues our series on preaching, which is based on the fourth article of the Together for the Gospel Statement. The previous post in this series was entitled "Are There Three Types of Expository Preaching?"

Tim Challies defines expository preaching as “preaching that takes the point of the text as the point of the sermon.” In my view, he wisely differentiates it from his definition of textual preaching — not by whether it is part of a longer series working through a book, but because textual preaching “refers to a passage of Scripture, but does not use the main point of the text as the main point of the sermon."

However, later in the article Tim does seem to assume that expository preaching inevitably means that preachers will be working systematically through a book. Whilst I do value preaching through a book and think it definitely has its place, I will argue below why I feel that expository preaching is not limited simply to a verse-by-verse exegesis, which itself is not without disadvantages.

I think there are a number of real dangers and drawbacks to preaching through a book which we need to consider — this is not to say that these drawbacks cannot be overcome, and I do believe that preaching through a book can, at times, be very helpful.

1. Preaching through a book can introduce the very imbalance that it is designed to remove.

   Spending a decade in certain biblical books will inevitably mean that the congregation is not going to get the balanced diet we all agree they need. Yes, preaching through books forces preachers to focus on the issues that the book addresses. But there is surely a danger that the preacher will choose a book that is not sufficiently broad enough to give a good diet to the congregation. It might also be a book that reflects his own pet subject; for example, the charismatic might choose 1 Corinthians, the Calvinist Ephesians or Romans, and the eschatology fanatic would head straight for Revelation. So, a very slow preach through a book is not necessarily going to provide a good diet for every church.

2. Preaching slowly through a book requires a highly skilled preacher in order to remain interesting.

   Death by exposition is a real risk when the average preacher tries to emulate a Lloyd-Jones, Boice, or other gifted expositor. Sermons that are nothing more than recycled commentaries are surely boring. It is, of course, possible to preach this way and impart life, if God has gifted you in that way. But as one preacher admitted to me recently, spending even just a few months in one book can — even for the preacher — begin to feel a bit repetitive. Not everyone has the skill-set to be Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

3. Insistence on long series may hinder our aim of making visitors feel welcome.

   In this era of floating church populations and weekend breaks, we may not have the same people listening each week. In addition, surely we want our visitors to feel welcome. Imagine discovering on visiting a church for the first time that you have some 50 or 60 (or more!) sermons to catch up on to understand where the church is in their series. This is avoidable by making each sermon in the series stand alone and be more or less self-explanatory. But if we do this, then how is that different from a sermon which exposits a verse or paragraph seeking to put it in its context, but outside of a series?

4. Long series bind the preacher and could quench the Spirit.

   Whether we do have long series of sermons or not, I do feel the Doctor is definitely right when he says we must build into them the flexibility to respond to the needs of the congregation and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

In addressing some of these issues, here are some of my thoughts:

• Who says that the unit of a sermon has to be one verse?

• Why can't an expositional sermon be based on a large unit — even up to a whole book? Mark Dever by taking this method has preached through the entire bible, and is therefore the only preacher in the world that I am aware of that can trully say he has preached the whole counsel of God.

• Why do we assume that it should take years to get through certain books — can't some preachers who decide to do a shorter series exposit books from a slightly more “birds eye” view, thereby increasing the range of the Bible that can be covered in a given church?

• If we are agreed that expositional preaching is simply preaching that allows a portion of the Bible to speak, why must that always be part of a longer series? Surely there is room within the concept of expository preaching for one-off sermons, short series, and longer series, depending on the gifting of the preacher, the needs of the congregation, and the guiding of the Spirit?

See also my post regarding Steve Lawson on passionate preaching, delivered at the 2007 Shepherds Conference.

One thing I've noticed as I've been thinking and reading about preaching recently is that we can't seem to agree on what "expository preaching" actually is. This is critical for our understanding of Article 4 of the Together for the Gospel Statement, which has prompted this series on preaching. Some seem to feel that true expository preaching only occurs when a book is dissected verse-by-verse, week-after-week.

The folks over at Expository Thoughts have a clear preference for preaching through a book, and, indeed, list in the same post what they feel are the advantages of this preference. They are, I think, quite correct when they suggest that there are three different types of expository preaching:

"First, [a preacher] can select a different passage every week, with each passage having little or no relationship to the previous one. In this way, each passage would be handled in an expository fashion, but there would be no deliberate flow or cohesiveness from one week to the next. For example, he might preach Ephesians 5:22-24 the first week, Psalm 119:9-16 the second week, Mark 10:13-16 the third week, and so on. You might call this random exposition.

Second, he can select a group of passages, each of which deal with the same topic or theme, and then preach them week after week until the series is completed. For example, he could do a series on having a biblical view of God's Word by preaching Psalm 19:7-11 the first week, 2 Timothy 3:16-17 the second week, 1 Peter 2:1-3 the third week, etc., until he is ready to move on to the next series. You could call this thematic exposition.

There is a third approach, however, which I believe is the best option for the preacher who is in the pulpit on a regular basis, and that is consecutive exposition. Put simply, consecutive exposition consists of preaching verse-by-verse through entire books of the Bible."

The series on the Together for the Gospel Statement continues with "Must Expository Preaching Always be a Series Preaching Through a Book?"

In today’s Martyn Lloyd-Jones Monday, I come to one of the most fascinating questions about preaching. I am not sure exactly what was in the minds of the people who crafted the T4G statement which highlighted the importance of expository preaching. As we shall see in later posts, people differ on whether to define expository preaching as, by necessity, part of a longer series on a book of the Bible.

Spurgeon held somewhat different views to many today on the necessity of a preacher having a set series he is following, as the Doctor explained:

". . . one of the greatest preachers of the last century, if not the greatest of all, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, took a very strong line on this. He did not believe in preaching a series of sermons; indeed he opposed doing so very strongly. He said that there was a sense in which it was impertinent for a man to decide to preach a series of sermons. He held that the texts should be given to the preacher, that he should seek the Lord in this matter and ask for guidance. He held that the preacher should not decide but pray for the guidance and the leading of the-Holy Spirit, and then submit himself to this. He will thus be led to particular texts and statements which he will then expound in sermonic form. That was the view held by Spurgeon and by many others . . ."

The Doctor explains that he himself had been brought up in churches that held that view, but had dramatically changed his own mind. So you see, on this issue we have a divergence of opinion between two of my historical heroes. This in and of itself should make us want to tread carefully as we consider this question together on my blog over the coming days.

In the Doctor’s corner we have many of modern Reformed preachers, as well as the Puritans. The Doctor is intrigued by the fact that “though Spurgeon was such a great reader of the Puritans, and such a great admirer of them, at this point he disagreed with them entirely.”

So, what does the Doctor himself say about this issue? He has some very interesting things to say – especially considering his reputation as one of the foremost sequential expositors of scripture ever known.

“. . . it seems to me to be quite wrong to be rigid in this matter, and to lay down any hard and fast rule. I cannot see why the Spirit should not guide a man to preach a series of sermons on a passage or a book of the Bible as well as lead him to one text only. Why not? What is important—and here I am with Spurgeon whole-heartedly—is that we must preserve and Safeguard 'the freedom of the Spirit.'

. . . I have known men who . . . would actually hand out a list of their texts for many months ahead . . . I reprobate that entirely and completely . . . speaking generally, I feel that . . . is surely to put certain limits upon the sovereignty and the leading of the Spirit in this matter.

So, having asserted that we are subject to the Spirit, and that we must be careful to make sure that we really are subject to Him, I argue that He may lead us at one time to preach on odd texts and at another time to preach a series of sermons. I would humbly claim that I have known this many times in my experience.

There is a volume of sermons preached by me published under the title, Spiritual Depression. The story of how I came to preach that series may help to illustrate this matter. I had actually determined—it seemed to me that I was being led in that way, but undoubtedly it was my own determination—to start a series of sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians. However, one morning while dressing, quite suddenly and in an overwhelming manner, it seemed to me that the spirit of God was urging me to preach a series of sermons on 'spiritual depression'.

Quite literally while I was dressing the series took order in my mind, and all I had to do was to rush as quickly as possible to jot down on paper the various texts, and the order in which they had come to me, in that way. I had never thought about preaching a series of sermons on spiritual depression; it had never occurred to me to do so; but it came just like that. I always pay great attention to such happenings. It is a very wonderful and glorious experience apart from anything else; and I would not dare to disobey what I regard as a very definite injunction coming in that manner. I am quite confident that the preaching of that series of sermons was dictated to me by Spirit Himself.

I would add a further word to justify my attitude that we should avoid an over-rigidity in this matter. I am suggesting that it right both to preach on odd texts and a series; and, in any case, a series can always be broken into. Indeed a series should always be broken into if you feel a particular pressure on your spirit urging you to do so. That is why I would never print a programme of what I proposed to preach, even for the next three months. You cannot tell what you should do—at least I could never tell. Circumstances may arise which demand attention and provide a wonderful opportunity for preaching.

Indeed I could never give a guarantee that I would finish the sermon I had prepared on any one occasion. Many and many a time I have found myself in the position that the usual amount of time for the sermon had gone and I had only preached half my sermon! How can you tell what may happen? You are not in control, at least you should not be. The Spirit is using you, and dealing with you, as you are preaching, quite as much as He was at the time of preparation.

Do not misunderstand this; I am not advocating or excusing slovenliness. I have gone out of my way to emphasise the opposite. But, still, with all your preparation and forethought you have to maintain 'the freedom of the Spirit', and try to keep yourself open and sensitive to His every movement.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, pp. 188-190.

This series on the Together for the Gospel Statement continues with "Are There Three Types of Expository Preaching?"

Most Mondays I take the time to raid my electronic version of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' materials, which is produced by Logos Bible Software. Today's quote comes from a biography of the Doctor and includes several quotes from his writings that build a clear picture of the Doctor's view of expository preaching. The passage begins with a well-known statement from the Doctor’s book, Preaching and Preachers, about the critical importance of preaching.

This post follows on from the quote I shared from John Piper on Expository Preaching last Friday. Earlier posts in this series on the Together for the Gospel Statement can be found in my post on The Place of Truth.

"The most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching; and as it is the greatest and most urgent need in the Church it is obviously the greatest need of the world also." (p.9)

The key phrase in this forthright statement is, of course, 'true preaching.' To him this was expository preaching, which he defines in his volume on 2 Peter as "preaching which is concerned to expound the Word of God and not merely to express the ideas of the preacher, preaching which is not merely topical and intended to suit the popular palate and conditions prevailing at the moment." In his preface to volume one of Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, he says this:

A sermon is not an essay and is not meant, primarily, for publication, but to be heard and to have an immediate impact upon the listeners. This implies, of necessity, that it will have certain characteristics which are not found and are not desirable in written studies. To prune it of these, if it should be subsequently published, seems to me to be quite wrong, for it then ceases to be a sermon and becomes something quite nondescript. I have a suspicion that what accounts for the dearth of preaching at the present time is the fact that the majority of printed books of sermons have clearly been prepared for a reading rather than a listening public. Their flavour and form are literary rather than sermonic.

He had equally decisive views concerning the form of his sermons:

These are expository sermons which apart from minor corrections and adjustments were delivered as printed here. They are not lectures nor a running commentary on verses or passages. They are expositions which take the form of a sermon.

It has always been my view that this is how Scripture should be handled. Commentaries are of great value in arriving at an accurate understanding of the text, yet at their best they are only of value as scaffolding in the erection of a building. Moreover, it is vital that we should understand that an epistle such as this is only a summary of what the Apostle Paul preached. He explains that in chapter 1, verses 11-15. He wrote the Epistle because he was not able to visit them in Rome. Had he been with them he would not merely have given them what he says in this Letter, for this is but a synopsis. He would have preached an endless series of sermons as he did daily in the school of Tyrannus (Acts 19:9) and probably have often gone on until midnight (Acts 20:7). The business of the preacher and teacher is to open out and expand what is given here by the Apostle in summary form.

But perhaps the best-and crispest-definition he gave of preaching is this sentence from Preaching and Preachers: "Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire." He saw the chief end of preaching as giving men and women "a sense of God and His presence." He adds this personal postscript:

As I have said already, during this last year I have been ill, and so have had the opportunity and the privilege of listening to others instead of preaching myself.As I have listened in physical weakness this is the thing I have looked for and 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, though he is inadequate himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Saviour, and the magnificence of the Gospel. If he does that I am his debtor, and I am profoundly grateful to him.

He frequently returned to the theme of "true" preaching. Here is another succinct comment: "The true preacher does not seek for truth in the pulpit; he is there because he has found it." It all seems so simple, so obvious, so profound . . . .

^{JOHN PETERS, The Preacher - Biography of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 1986 (Joseph Kreifels).}

The biographer ends this section by quoting the doctor’s own description of his particular approach to expository preaching:

"My training in medicine and surgery are always with me. I look at a text, diagnose the condition and decide where I am to make the first incision. I cut deep through the layers of the tissue until I reach the heart of the problem. I deal with it and then rebuild and sew up."

The T4G Statement series continues with Lloyd Jones on Spurgeon: Are Sermon Series Compulsory?

This post is part of a series on the Together for the Gospel Statement. Links to previous posts on Articles 1-3 can be found in the introduction to my post, "The Place of Truth."

Article 4

We affirm the centrality of expository preaching in the church and the urgent need for a recovery of biblical exposition and the public reading of Scripture in worship.

We deny that God-honoring worship can marginalize or neglect the ministry of the Word as manifested through exposition and public reading. We further deny that a church devoid of true biblical preaching can survive as a Gospel church.

Today I want to share a quote from John Piper on Expository Preaching. Here Piper is keen to explain that it is not just "expository" preaching that we need to recover, but a certain type of expository preaching. I will speak more about this when I post on this article myself. Let's just say that there is a kind of expository preaching that can bring death and not life. This quote is surely an antidote for that.

"God exists to be worshipped—to be admired and treasured and desired and praised. Therefore, the Word of God is written primarily to produce worship. This means that if that Word is handled like a hot-dish recipe or a repair manual, it is mishandled. And the people will suffer. The Truth of God begs to be handled with exultation. And our hearts yearn for this and need it. Something in us starts to die when precious and infinitely valuable realities are handled without feelings and words of wonder and exultation. That is, a church starts to die without preaching.

But, of course, this assumes something massive. To treasure the Truth, and to love the Truth, and be impassioned about the Truth, and to exult in the Truth, you have to know the Truth. So it's not enough to say that preaching is exultation. We must also say it is "expository exultation." It is exultation in the Truth of God's Word. And the exultation is in proportion to the Truth delivered.

In 2 Timothy 2:15 Paul tells Timothy, "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth." This, too, is part of preaching. Preaching is handling accurately the word of truth. In other words, you can never twist or exploit the Word in order to increase the emotional response of the people. Preaching is not exultation without exposition of the Word. Nor is preaching exposition of the Word without exultation. One error cuts off the head. The other rips out the heart. In both cases the victim dies. No heart. Or, no head. You're dead. And so is preaching. And not too long after, the church.

So the command of the Lord is—preach the Word. Keep your head on (exposition) and keep your heart alive (exultation). Handle the precious living Word of God accurately. And come to this pulpit week after week and do expository exultation. Don't out-exult the Word. And don't under-exult the Word. There is enough glory in the Word that you need add nothing artificial. Just eat it until your heart is deeply and truly satisfied and then serve the same banquet for your people.

Martin Luther was one of the great preachers of all time. He explained the need for preaching like this:

Because heresies threatened the living apostolic message, it had to be recorded in a book to protect it from falsification. Preaching reverses this process of conservation again, allowing the Scriptures of the past to become the tidings of the present . . . The Gospel has been committed to lifeless paper; fresh words can transform it into glad tidings again.

Scripture turned into glad tidings—that is what happens in expository exultation. [Pastor], if the Lord wills, there are many years in front of you and many trials. You will be tempted in many ways to give up preaching. Satan will lie to you that it is not a great thing. Or that you could devote yourself to something more significant. But when that happens go back to 2 Timothy 4:1-2 and listen to the apostle. "I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word."

Then you will rise up and say with Martin Luther, "If I could today become king or emperor, I would not give up my office as preacher."

---

By John Piper © Desiring God.
Website: www.desiringGod.org.
Email: mail@desiringGod.org.
Toll Free: 1.888.346.4700.

The series on the T4G Statement continues with Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Expository Preaching . . .

It's been awhile since I last did this, but I intend to revive the series now. For more information about Together for the Gospel, please see my Conference Round Up Post. If you haven't already done so, I would encourage you to read the statement in full — it is available as either a pdf file or as Google's html version. There is also an ongoing Blogger's Challenge which I have set to encourage us all to blog about this Statement — thanks to Crossway for donating five copies of God is the Gospel to encourage your participation! The first two books have been awarded to Mathew Sims (who has already finished blogging through each of the articles in a 25-part series!) and Dave Warnock. It is not too late for you to win one of the remaining three by writing on your own blog or in the comments section about this important statement. Don’t feel you have to cover the whole Statement — why not just pick an article that particularly interests you?

I have posted myself on the Introduction, as well as a combined post on Articles 1 and 2. I have also shared a John Piper quote, and have posted from the Doctor's writings on the Introduction, Articles 1 and 2, and Article 3, part 1 and part 2.

T4G Article 3

We affirm that truth ever remains a central issue for the Church, and that the church must resist the allure of pragmatism and postmodern conceptions of truth as substitutes for obedience to the comprehensive truth claims of Scripture.

We deny that truth is merely a product of social construction or that the truth of the Gospel can be expressed or grounded in anything less than total confidence in the veracity of the Bible, the historicity of biblical events, and the ability of language to convey understandable truth in sentence form. We further deny that the church can establish its ministry on a foundation of pragmatism, current marketing techniques, or contemporary cultural fashions.

Before Christmas I spoke at Jubilee Church, London, about the doctrine of the Scripture and addressed some of these issues. I thought that sharing my notes and the audio of this talk would be appropriate in light of this declaration, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

During my talk I mention that the Bible shows that God communicates and He is very good at doing it. God communication is a true message that comes through as the author intends it. I believe that God has done everything necessary to achieve just that.

The audio is available to download (you may need to right click and save the file onto your PC), as are my PowerPoint slides (which should open in your browser), as well as a handout which has some blank points for you to fill in.

Article 3 of the the Together for Gospel Statement focuses on truth. Much has been written about the post-modern conception of truth. It is perhaps almost trite to talk about the fallacy of an absolute statement that “there is no such thing as absolute truth”. But, over-used phrases sometimes express things well. The notion of blurring the concept of truth is so vacuous as to be impossible to build a life on.

As a scientist, I have been raised with the idea that there is, indeed, such a thing as absolute truth. Either something has mass or it doesn’t. Either I will fall down because of gravity or float because I am in space. How can theology be any different? Give me someone who absolutely rejects the message of the Bible and the existence of its God any day over someone who tries to blur boundaries and talk about the “spiritual meaning” of events that they believe are basically lies.

I note that once more in this article of their Statement the subject of the Bible is again core. Quite simply, it is not possible to have a Bible that is full of error and yet also the word of God. God is no liar. I cannot see how we can compromise with post-modern ideas of truth and have any Gospel left. For either God is too weak or disinterested to make sure we have a Bible that we can trust, or He is a deceiver.

It simply will not do to say that the Bible contains God's words and we have to discern them. For, even with a Bible that we have all agreed is trustworthy, evangelicals have succeeded in coming up with differing interpretations. Imagine what we will be like if the anchor of our faith is severed and we are cast adrift.

I honestly believe that this Statement, issued at the Together for the Gospel 2006 conference, comes from men who are given to the whole church in the way described in Ephesians 4.

The series on the T4G Statement continues with John Piper on Expository Preaching . . .

Here's wishing all of you a great Christmas and a successful New Year where God blesses you richly in every way. Be prepared to be surprised, though, as God’s blessings don’t always look like we expect them to!

This time of year my thoughts always turn both forwards and backwards. So I'd like—in what will be my final post before the end of this year—to wish you all a great break, and to review the year. I did this last year and again in 2004.

Part of the purpose of this post is to give you a bumper post with links just in case you do go online during the Christmas break. Please don’t comment on the blog after the end of today (Friday, 22nd December) until I am back sometime in January after a prolonged break - that is not unless you are happy for your comment to wait in a queue. I will not be approving any comments or answering any emails either for a while. I need a rest, and so do you!

So . . . what of the year that has passed, and what glimmers of expectation do I have for the New Year? I will consider this under four headings — God, Family, Church, and Blog. You will notice the deliberate omission of work. I always try hard to keep my work out of the blog entirely — which I suspect is a wise move for most people. If you are a new reader, this blog is not my full-time job, nor is the preaching I do from time to time.

GOD

What can I say? Personally, this has been a great year for my relationship with my Savior. He has been so faithful — there have been hard times, such as beginning the year nervously wondering if my new job was the right move, and if we really would move to our new house in January. Also, my episode of shingles — which incidentally has still left me unable to sit behind a desk for more than a couple of hours at a time — was also a real low point, and yet in it I knew the peace of God in a more real sense than I had known it in other trials. I found myself able to trust God, knowing many times the sweetness of His presence. I also found myself grateful that things were not worse — that I didn’t have a job at all, or that I was homeless or dying of a serious illness. I have learned a lot, and this blog and all my preaching remains primarily addressed towards me.

I thank God for more evidences of His grace upon me, and for helping me begin to learn some key character lessons I have needed to learn for a long time. Looking forward into 2007 — I don’t think I have ever been as optimistic about the things I believe God has in store. I have a strong sense of commission from God in the things that I am currently doing. Oddly, unlike this past year, I do not expect major changes to occur in many areas of my life — although there is one to come as I will report in a moment.


FAMILY

On the 18th of January, I remember praying like I never had before. I was sitting outside the estate agent's, waiting for the money to go through so I could pick up the keys for our new house. As the hours went by, it really looked as if something else had gone wrong! Buying and selling property in the UK is never easy. You can imagine my joy when I realized that, with a matter of minutes to go before we would have faced broken contracts and a legal mess, I was given the all clear!

Buying this house has, God-willing, secured some aspects of the future of our family, and for this I am grateful. It is a nice location, and a reasonable drive from the church we all love. We now also live near two great schools, which should serve all our children right through to age 18. Like Tim Challies, we don’t home school.

You will notice that I never mention here the exact town in which I live — this is again an obvious precaution aimed at keeping my public life and private life separate — and one that I would recommend, especially to those with young children.

There was a lot of surprise among many of our friends when the news started to leak out over the last couple of months — some of you will know this already — but Andrée is now pregnant with our fifth child. Thoughts of her finding some kind of income-generating work she could do around four school-age children have, for now, evaporated, and we are preparing for what we had believed would not happen again. We are thrilled, and the poor child will undoubtedly be blogged about!

Each of our kids have grown up this year — each one has reached a new level of maturity, which is thrilling. I think that much of this has been because they have learned from such difficulties as the problems with the move — which was eventually resolved; my shingles — which caused major disruption to our lives for a while; my wife being put on bed rest for a few weeks in early pregnancy with recurrent bleeding and contractions — which stopped as suddenly as it had begun following prayers by some in the church; and more recently, the unexpected death of their pet rabbit.

Of all my roles and all the hats I wear, there is no doubt that the one that brings the most joy and biggest challenges is that of being a husband and father to these dear people God has entrusted to my care. If, at times, I neglect my blog, remember that I cannot and must not neglect my family. I am not convinced that up to now I have always had that balance right, so don’t be surprised if there are a few more times when the blog shuts down for a time, or if there is the odd day here and there when I don’t post at all.

I have a family that sacrifices a lot in order for me to be free to do the job I do, and on top of that, to blog and preach. I want to thank them all publicly now, and promise by God’s grace to try to ensure that when my time on earth is up, I will be most remembered as someone who loved his family. They are as dear to me as my soul — and I could easily adapt Jesus’ words to say, "What would it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his family?"

My darling wife, and wonderful children, I truly do love you all more than anyone else alive. Let's make 2007 a great year for our family — which I trust will finally be complete after a four-year gap since the last arrival.


CHURCH

Again, what can I say? Being a part of Jubilee Church at this time of astonishing blessing and growth — both in numbers and maturity — is nothing short of a dream for me! My heart goes out in love and appreciation to every single person in Jubilee.

As our lead elder, Tope Koleoso, would say — we have a lot to be grateful for!


THE BLOG

I have deliberately left this to last; as important as it is to me, the blog definitely comes in below all of the above areas of my life in terms of the priority I place on it. Of course, I will spend more of my time in this post on the blog, but don’t think that’s because it is more important to me — far from it.

It started as a small hobby to fill idle time, and has grown into some kind of monster. I truly feel like a kite in God’s hurricane, as Driscoll describes himself.

Why do you guys keep coming back? I do everything I can to drive you away - don't I give you enough links to visit elsewhere? At the beginning of the year my strategy was to focus a lot of attention on the charismatic issue. I had only really come firmly out as a charismatic on the blog towards the end of 2005 — believe it or not, some people were surprised to hear it. Well, I was not surprised to drive about a quarter of the readers I had away in those early months by relentlessly posting on this subject. But the numbers came back, and many more, as the year drew to a close.

I don’t want to bore you with statistics — and I know it is easy for me to say, but these days I really rarely look at them. But there are a few interesting things that came out of looking at the last nine months of data I thought I would share with you.

• 37% of you have visited the blog more than once — which means there is a whole lot of passers-by, but a significant number who have stuck around to get to know me a bit more! You are welcome — old or new!
  
  
• Some of you visit the blog more than once per day — for your sakes, I just hope it is to check the Warnie Headlines box and get out of here — these days I rarely post more than once-a-day.
  
  
• 45% find the blog through Google, so thanks are due to them - assuming this was the kind of place you wanted to find!
  
  
• 15% of visits were thanks to my top 20 referring blogs; however, TeamPyro was the biggest individual referrer (i.e. not a search engine), but led to only 3% of visits, so a whole bunch of smaller blogs have sent me a whole lot of traffic between you. A BIG thank you to everyone who has linked or commented this year.
  
  
• 56% of visitors were from the USA, whilst 25% were from the UK and 5% were from Canada, but a staggering 188 countries were represented (although in many cases by just one visitor).

Whilst on the subject of statistics, I thought I would also share my 25 most visited pages over the last nine months, the non-search engine sites that have sent me the most traffic, and finally a list of the most popular and interesting searches that have led people here — not surprisingly, almost every one of these resonated with me in some way as I read them — if you want to find the posts to which the searches refer, just copy and paste these key words into the search box at the top of the blog.

But before I leave you with those lists, let's take a look at the year that was:

• January saw the pace of my interviews hotting up with two — Justin Taylor and Mark Dever. In fact, most of the interviews you see in the sidebar have been carried out this year, and I have certainly enjoyed every one of them.
  
  

• In February I had a brief period of bloggers' block — OK, it lasted less than a day — and ended when I received an email that would lead to my major blogging pre-occupation for the rest of the year — someone asked me to explain what charismatic gifts looked like in our church. I realised that it would cause an argument and send some readers away, but I felt I must blog about the Holy Spirit. I never did find out if I eventually managed to answer that reader's question to their satisfaction!
  
  Then, right at the end of February came a sovereign intervention from God that would change this blog forever - especially for those who notice typos and grammatical errors. An email from Annette Harrison arrived in my inbox and got my attention by mentioning Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. God had a plan that neither of us could have imagined and within very little time I had an editorial and research assistant who does more to help keep this blog going than most of you could imagine.
  
  

• March was a momentous time, for it was when I discovered Mark Driscoll and was very, very impressed (although I had mentioned him in passing before). O for the days when a post about Driscoll would only generate two comments!
  
  

• April was dominated by the Together for the Gospel conference — the archive page is full of links to posts I wrote whilst “remote blogging,” something I like to do almost as much as Challies likes to live-blog. I did get to do an exclusive interview with Mark Driscoll, however, and that still only generated six comments!
  
  

• May was possibly my most eclectic month — with Driscoll, Together for the Gospel, and the Holy Spirit issue competing for my attention. Picking out an individual post is not so easy.
  
  
• June was dominated by the "Did God Kill Jesus?" debate — the atonement is never far from my blog, but then I was struck down by shingles and had to actually close the blog down.
  
  
• July saw me struggling to live-blog the Together On a Mission conference whilst I should really still have been in bed, and the beginning of the snail’s pace debate Dan Phillips and I had over the charismatic — I say "had," although it is always possible Dan will be bold enough to reply to my last installment! July also was the beginning of my 25% Off Logos Bible Software offer, which is still running today.
  
  
• August saw me traveling to Washington D.C., and to the church where C. J. Mahaney and Josh Harris serve — again there are loads of posts in the archive page.
  
  

• The weekend when September became October was the Desiring God 06 conference, and somehow the blogosphere hasn't stopped criticizing Mark Driscoll since then despite his fantastic talk and John Piper's public acknowledgement that he had something to learn from Driscoll.
  
  

• In November I was thrilled to interview Al Mohler, and also had a chance to visit Toronto.
  
  

• A look at the the archive page for December shows that from December 2nd when I reviewed his book, my blog has been completely taken over by an interview with the great theologian, Wayne Grudem. I thought interviewing him would give me a few days when I wouldn’t have to think much about the blog. How wrong I was! Unprecedented traffic and comment levels mean that some of these posts have gathered more traffic in the last few days than some of my most popular previous posts managed to gather in nine months. I have even had to change my comment policy, and thanks to the graciousness of Michael Burer, although the interview has finished, the debate goes on. Thanks, Dr. Grudem, for giving me the highlight of my blogging year of 2006!

  
  The 25 Most Visited Pages on My Site

• The Home Page
  
• Mark Driscoll Interview
  
• The Google Calendar
  
• The ESV Interview
  
• Free Christian Books
  
• The Best Blond Joke in the World
  
• Beginning of the Warnock-Phillips Charismatic Debate
  
• The Toronto Blessing
  
• C. J. Mahaney Interview
  
• Books Every Christian Should Read
  
• More Books every Christian Should Read
  
• Steve Chalke and the "Lost Message"
  
• Mothers Day Poem
  
• Did God really Kill Jesus?
  
• Wayne Grudem Interview Part One
  
• What is Love?
  
• Wayne Grudem Interview Part Six
  
• What is a Reformed Charismatic?
  
• What is Reformed or Calvinistic Theology?
  
• Wayne Grudem Interview Part Four
  
• Wayne Grudem Interview Part Five
  
• Thanksgiving Sermon by Tope Koleoso
  
• Justin Taylor Interview
  
• CJ Mahaney Sermons
  
• Josh Harris Interview
  
  
  The Top 20 Referrers
  
  
• teampyro.blogspot.com
  
• challies.com
  
• theologica.blogspot.com
  
• jollyblogger.typepad.com
  
• thebluefish.blogspot.com
  
• englishbibles.blogspot.com
  
• albertmohler.com
  
• benwitherington.blogspot.com
  
• boarsheadtavern.com
  
• esv.org
  
• hughhewitt.townhall.com
  
• solofemininity.blogs.com
  
• hughhewitt.com
  
• speakertruth.blogspot.com
  
• pigwotflies.blogspot.com
  
• worldofsven.co.uk
  
• psalm305.blogspot.com
  
• smartchristian.com
  
• joshharrisblogson.blogspot.com
  

• undersovereigngrace.blogspot.com
  
  
  The Top Most Popular and Interesting Searches
  
  anointing, baptism of the holy spirit, best joke in the world, blog sponsorship, brian maclaren christian blogs, christian counseling, christian psychiatrist, christmas greeting message, cosmic child abuse, daniel ekechukwu, davinci code, derek prince, does the future have a church, electrician, emergent church, english standard version, esv bible, esv journaling bible, esv reverse interlinear, finding god's will, flylady.net, free christian books, fruit of the spirit, gods will, google calendar and outlook, grace and the adventure of leadership, c. j. mahaney, greg haslam, halal meat, Halloween, holidays for large families, how to draw swords, how to preach, how to treat your wife, ikea catalogue, inclusive language bible, is the world overpopulated, jack deere, john eldridge, john piper, jonathan aitken, joseph the dreamer, josh harris blog, joshua harris, justin taylor, life goals, lig duncan, limited atonement, m25 traffic, macarthur, mark dever, mark driscoll, john piper, martyn lloyd-jones, michael shumacher, my heart is filled with thankfulness, newfrontiers, paedobaptist, patrick armstrong, pentecostal blogs, plymouth brethren, poems about school, prayer journals, random statistics, rebecca needs, reformed charismatic, remember, remember the fifth of november, richard cunningham, rick warren, rob rufus, sam storms, science of listener attention, scottish covenanters, gifts of the spirit, selwyn hughes, shingles, social styles, sovereign grace review "worship god live", speaking in tongues, spiderman layouts, steve chalke, T4G
  

It is a real pleasure to welcome to my blog again today, Dr. Albert Mohler. Dr. Mohler should need no introduction to most of my readers, but I include a link to his biography for any who need to know more, as well as a link to my Together for the Gospel Conference Round Up Post.

This interview is being serialised over several days. So far I have published parts one, two, three, four, and five. Today we discuss the future ramifications of Together For the Gospel.

Adrian
In light of your experience in Together for the Gospel, have you guys given any thought to how you can foster such partnerships for the Gospel based on real friendships at a local level? Is there any way to create, if you like, local bands of brothers who come together in the way you guys have? Some have suggested some way of either making a list of attendees public or creating a list of churches or individuals who hold to the "T4G" ethos - is that something you have in mind?

Dr. Mohler
That is certainly something we hope to see develop. We are looking closely at mechanisms for helping persons associated with this movement to identify each other and establish local or regional relationships. The actual mechanism for doing that is something we are considering very carefully.

Adrian
I think it was Mark that spoke of not wanting to create another organization - have you any thoughts about how to avoid that, or do you think it is almost inevitable that your friendships will spark something more concrete?

Dr. Mohler
We certainly do not want to create another organization—I have been fairly emphatic in trying to make that point. The evangelical landscape is littered with organizations that have taken on something of a life of their own. We do not want to create anything that would seek to perpetuate itself and to outlive its usefulness. On the other hand, since our movement, if this is the right word to describe Together for the Gospel, is based in prior relationships, we see the relational aspects as far more important than the institutional representation.

Adrian
How do you guys all feel about the response that has been seen to Together For the Gospel - did you predict that it would be this successful and capture the minds and hearts of so many poeple?

Dr. Mohler
We were confident that there were many pastors and young Christians headed for the pastorate who shared many of these common concerns and a desire to see a healthy, happy, and hopeful direction charted for a Gospel movement. But, we would all have to admit, we were overwhelmed by the response to the conference. Taking the point even further, we were overwhelmed by the spirit of those who attended the conference. This was a truly humbling experience for us.

Adrian
Why do you think Together for the Gospel was so successful?

Dr. Mohler
I hope this represents the blessing of God upon the pastors of churches. Our hope is that the movement, growing out of the conference, will be a genuine source of encouragement. If that defines success, then we are thankful to be successful.

Adrian
One of my readers asked, "When are we going to have a Together for the Gospel England" - do you have any response for them?

Dr. Mohler
Well, we are certainly honored by the interest among our brothers in England and Great Britain. This is something we would certainly want to consider as we look to the future. At the same time, there are many capable leaders in Great Britain who have a much keener sense of what is most urgently needed there.

Continued in Part Seven . . . .

It is a real pleasure to welcome to my blog again today, Dr. Albert Mohler. Dr. Mohler should need no introduction to most of my readers, but I include a link to his biography for any who need to know more, as well as a link to my Together for the Gospel Conference Round Up Post.

This interview is being serialised over several days. So far I have published parts one, two, and three. Today we continue to discuss Together For the Gospel.

Adrian
When I hear about the camaraderie that seems to have been part of the atmosphere of the T4G conference, it makes me think of my own experiences of being part of a band of brothers within newfrontiers. Through that experience, I am convinced that such a sense of belonging together is only possible when a group of men are led together by a certain kind of leadership - do you agree with that?

Dr. Mohler
Yes, I certainly do agree. I think that leadership has to be the humble sense of perceiving the common leadership of God in our midst. For us, that is not so much a mystical experience as it is the process of coming to a common mind, based in Scripture and theological reflection. There has never been a serious disagreement among us, and our friendship is based in a commitment to do only those things that would bring health to the church. If this is not the net result of Together for the Gospel, there is no reason at all for us to give ourselves to it. All four of us are busy enough already. That common focus keeps us very much together.

Adrian
Isn't that the core of what the four of you do - both together and back in your own ministries? Do you think that the four of you actually fulfill similar roles in your respective spheres of influence outside your local churches despite your different formal positions and titles?

Dr. Mohler
Absolutely. The core of our common concern is a common calling to the Gospel ministry. Even though our respective titles may differ, we are all deeply involved in the pastoral and teaching ministry of the local church. Beyond this, we see the local church as the fundamental focus of our ministry and where God’s people are to be found. It seems to us that, as individuals, each of us has been placed exactly where we can be most strategically deployed at the present time. Yes, I would hope that that becomes something of a seminary president’s ministry by extension. I serve as something of a pastor to other pastors in my denominational role. This is first directed towards the students on our campus, but is extended to pastors throughout our denomination and beyond. There is a tremendous hunger among pastors for attention to their concerns and understanding of their challenges.

Adrian
When C.J. speaks about apostolic ministry with you and is referring essentially to a role in inspiring, training, mentoring, and facilitating the development of church leaders, do you sometimes (whilst presumably wanting to call it something else) think, "Hey, that's what I do?"

Dr. Mohler
That’s what I’m trying to say. Ministry is a lonely and demanding task, and pastors especially need the encouragement of other pastors and church leaders. I am somewhat reluctant to embrace the more generalized term of “leaders” simply because our specific focus is on those who are called to Gospel leadership through the teaching ministry of the local church.

Adrian
Would you agree that it is that sort of leadership of other leaders that is one of the pressing needs of the church today?

Dr. Mohler
The relational aspects are absolutely important. If anything, my experience in recent years has reminded me of this urgent responsibility. I think you can find this within the New Testament—especially within the Book of Acts and the letters of the Apostle Paul.

Adrian
Is this value of being relational one of the key things, in fact, that ties the four of you together? Or are other things more important?

Dr. Mohler
The relationship among Christ’s pastors, ministers, and servants is a reflection of our common love for Christ and commitment to the truth. We must not only agree with each other concerning these things; we should truly love each other. I am humbled by the fact that God has given me some of the most pleasant, bright, kind, clever, and gifted persons as colleagues. I am especially glad of the fact that we care deeply for each other, for each other’s families, and for each other’s ministries. A common heart and a common mind. It is the common convictions and sense of vision that established our friendship—not the other way around.

Adrian
Are their other things that you all hold in common? How important are they to the success of the Together for the Gospel initiative?

Dr. Mohler
Well, we do hold other things in common. I am sure it is not an accident that we find ourselves at a rather common stage of life and experience. But when it comes to matters of more avocational interests, our paths quickly diverge. C. J. is a sports fanatic, and Lig was heavily involved in collegiate athletics. Mark and I are generally left out of their conversations on those matters. On the other hand, we are united in many common interests, ranging from books and music to culture and food. We truly delight in each other’s eccentricities. And, considering the four of us together, there are a lot of eccentricities to go around.

Continued in Part Five . . . .

Well, I've just about caught my breath from the conference posts, but thought it might be an idea to just list a few things some of us might have missed whilst we have all been away. No pretty pictures in this post, I am sorry, but lots of lovely links to take up all the room instead!

This week, I will not be as available as normal to interact with email and comments since I am traveling with work and will not have time in the evenings to blog, and then when I get back I have a sermon to prepare for next Sunday. I have a couple of articles already written that should get published whilst I am away, though, thanks to my ever-patient editorial assistant! There will, however, be no MLJ Monday today, and possibly not next Monday either.

Make sure you DON'T miss the posts from the DGM conference whatever you do - just follow my headline links and get reading. But for those of us who have been consumed with that conference, what did we all miss?

The ESV Bible Reaches Five-Year Milestone. Five years ago on 1st October 2001 the ESV was released. Three million copies later, J. I. Packer believes it could be one of the most significant things with which he has ever been involved. I wonder if this will be the version that finally replaces the KJV, which is still (bizarrely) the best seller as far as I know. To celebrate there were, of course, a couple of blog potshots taken against it!

• ESV person and number changes. Better Bibles Blog reports two times where the ESV has changed her to you or they. The good news is that, unlike some translations, they tell us in the footnote that the context of the verses seems to demand the change, and it's 2, not over 3,000.


• Singular "they" in ESV 1 John 3:24. Wayne thinks that he has found another inconsistency in the ESV with its own translation principles. We are up to three so far! In this specific example, it is simply not possible in English to say "He in Him," so I understand why they did it.

"God’s purpose in ordering marriage is peace. One takes the husband’s role, one takes the wife’s role, one in guiding, one in supporting. If both had the very same roles, there would be no peace." Over on T4G, they are quoting Chrysostom as a complemenatrian.

The marginalization of evangelical feminism. Dave Warnock sits on the other side of the fence from me on a whole host of different issues. What I love about blogging is that I get to actually hear what people like Dave think of people like me and hopefully understand his perspectives.

David Field: Roasts Anglican Bishops. Despite being a lecturer at Oak Hill, he suggests a new test for bishops - "If I heard that X were to be my successor as pastor-teacher of the congregation I've cared for over the last ten years, would I be thrilled, content, mildly concerned, or dismayed?"

An assault on our friends the Pyromaniacs. "In the middle of a serious exposition of Scripture or analysis of a deadly error within the Church of Jesus Christ, one’s sense of sobriety is assaulted by a cartoonish parody usually involving the ubiquitous Pyromaniacs label. It appears to the non-fans like gamesmanship. Gamesmanship about matters of doctrines that have split churches, turned homes upside down, divided families, and have consequences of such importance that agonized prayer and thought must be invested in the imbibing of them is simply unfunny."

Tim Keller. Articles and audio by Tim Keller.

Guiseppi's Ramblings: Non-Cessationism and John Piper. More quotes from Dr. Piper on the charismatic issue.

Heavy Dluxe journey towards charismaticism. Seven careful posts on the Spirit later, this blogger feels he has become a reformed charismatic. This whole series is well worth reading and interacting with.

The Perfect and the Prophets. Eddie Beal weighs in with some heavy logic regarding Dan Phillips' view that the perfect in 1 Corinthians 13 "most likely refers to the completed result of the process of revelation."

"Perfect" - Canon or Christ, Part 2. Mathew Sims' continuing discussion regarding the meaning of the "perfect" in 1 Corinthians 13:8-12. He references several other bloggers' arguments, and then lays out the evidence to support his own view, including a fantastic table which identifies usage in the Old Testament, inter-Testament, and New Testament. For those of you who may have missed part 1, you can access it here. Sims will have one more post on this topic, which will be written from an historical perspective.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was unquestionably the world's greatest English-speaking Christian teacher of the last century. It is essential that we continue to learn and benefit from this gift of God to the whole church.

Loved by charismatics and cessationists alike, even at the height of the tensions felt in the 1960's and 1970's, "The Doctor" as he is affectionately known to this day, requires your attention.

Here on this blog we give space every Monday for "MLJ Monday". Read the following posts, which reference quotes from him, read his books, and download his sermons from the MLJ Recordings Trust and you will be touched by the word of God. John Piper listened to The Doctor decades ago, his life was transformed, and he set out on a lifetime of ministy. Many others tell the same story.

Lloyd-Jones Posts
Preach the Word
Hearing from God and from Charismatics
Preaching the Gospel
Remembering Lloyd-Jones
Baptism of the Holy Spirit
More Baptism of the Holy Spirit
Vital Place of Joy
2000 Posts and a Thank You to Lloyd-Jones
Sealed with the Spirit
Sealed with the Spirit #2
Sealed with the Spirit #3
Our Only Boast
A Dead Man Answers C.J. Mahaney
Sealing of the Spirit
What the Doctor Would Have Thought of T4G
Sealing With the Spirit
Was the Doctor a Charismatic?
Kauflin quotes the Doctor
Why Examine Doctrine?
Is the Bible Authoritative?
Is the Bible Totally Trustworthy?
Who Killed Jesus?
Speaking the Truth in Love
Speaking the Truth in Love, Part 2
Guidelines: Blogging the Truth in Love
The Doctrine of Regeneration
Were Tongues in Acts and 1 Corinthians Both Unintelligible?

Thanks to Paul Schafer for cataloging these posts.

As regular readers will already know, I devote space each Friday for quotes from John Piper. Dr. Piper is the preacher of his generation, as Lloyd-Jones was of his own. John combines authentic experiential Christianity with a solid doctrinal foundation. There is no Christian preacher alive whom I think would consistently benefit you more to read or listen to. Fortunately, there is (as far as I know) no Christian preacher alive who has more material available for free on the net!

Later this month a new version of his website will be released which will contain 1800 sermons in audio, manuscript, and sometimes video format. The worldwide church will be immeasurably richer.

Here is a collection of posts from this blog which speak about John Piper or quote from his writings:

Piper to Always Preach From the ESV Bible
Reflecting on Tsunamis and God's Sovereignty
The Simple Gospel According to John Piper
Penal Substitution
Christ Our Righteousness
The Simple Gospel Saves Marriages
Feeding Them Bible Truth
Why I Like Wrestling
The Divine Transaction
The Effects of Understanding
Do not Deny the Wrath of God
John Piper on ESV
Listen to Why Piper uses ESV
Baptism and Church Membership
Piper on the Baptistm of the Holy Spirit
God is the Gospel
The Marks of a Spiritual Leader
John Piper Has Cancer
The Sovereignty of God and Prayer
Prayer and Preaching
Prayer - We Are at War
How Long O Lord?
Brothers, Pray for Us Pajamas Preachers
Fasting to Drive Us to God
Will Prayer and Fasting Change the World?
Piper the Continuationist
How Prayer Brings God's Victory
A Religion of Peace
Don't Waste Your Cancer
Piper on Using Charismatic Gifts
John Piper Resting
Suffering
Horrifying Commands of Jesus
A Cause to Live For
Worship Jesus
Worship is War
Reactions to Piper's T4G Message
More from Piper at T4G
Adrian's Response to Hearing Piper's Sermon from T4G
Preaching as Expository Exultation
Expository Listening
Using Our Mouths to Impart Grace
Building Our Lives on the Bible
God Did Punish Sin in Jesus
Passion of Jesus Christ
Truth and Pragmatism
Legalism is More Dangerous than Alcoholism
John Piper on Worship
John Piper is Back

Thanks to Paul Schafer for cataloging these posts.

• EGALITARIANISM
• WORSHIP GOD 06
• ALCOHOL AND THE CHRISTIAN

T4G - Affirmation and Denials - Egalitarianism

Mathew Sims begins his critique and commentary on Article 16 of the T4G Affirmations and Denials. "This topic," he says," will probably take up quite a few posts to accurately and Biblically discuss the issue and article."

Egalitarianism: Agreement, Confusion, and Clarification

Mathew Sims continues his critique of Article 16 by explaining and clarifying some issues raised in part 1 of his commentary.

Tags: complementarianism T4GB

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"The fact that we can please God is a never ending source of amazement to me. Of course, when it comes to justification, nothing we do can please God sufficiently for him to accept us. But as his children, forgiven and reconciled through the atoning sacrifice of his Son, we can actually bring God pleasure through our grace-motivated, faith-empowered acts of obedience."

Just hours ahead of WorshipGod06, Bob Kauflin has "a deep desire that everything that takes place over the next few days brings pleasure to God."

Tags: SGM worship

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To Enjoy or to Abstain - Alcohol and the Christian

The Thirsty Theologian has a seven-part series prompted by the SBC ruling requiring abstinence from alcohol. Incidentally, for your interest, most British Christians have no qualms whatsoever about moderate alcohol consumption.

Tags: ethics

Mark Dever asks over at the T4G Blog, "What is C.J.?" The question, no doubt, relates to C.J. having handed over his senior pastor role to Josh Harris. Having seen a little of his public persona, and having had the pleasure of interviewing C.J. over e-mail, I am willing to bet he will be hesitant to answer - so I am going to do so for him - not that I am trying to speak on his behalf!

Over at the Covenant Life Church website, C.J. is still listed as one of the pastors. Both this page, and also a page of audio messages for those considering pastoral ministry, clearly use the term "pastor," "elder," and "overseer/bishop" interchangeably. I believe that I am correct to assert that almost all modern scholars would concur that the New Testament itself does the same thing (see especially Acts 20).

C.J. is listed on the Covenant Life Church website as working full-time for Sovereign Grace, which is presented almost as an outworking of that local church itself - it is as though Sovereign Grace is one of the areas of church life that individual elders/pastors care for specifically. The SGM website itself speaks of C.J. as follows: "C.J. Mahaney leads Sovereign Grace Ministries in its mission to establish and support local churches."

The structure of church government in Sovereign Grace Churches is well described in one of the FAQ's covered on the SGM website: "Our polity stands upon three principles: plurality among elders, the senior pastor, and partnership with apostolic ministry." As far as I can see, nowhere does the website actually name specific people as being modern day apostles. But, the clear implication is that the leadership team of SGM, including C.J., fulfill an apostolic function. I have written previously about my own reasons for believing that apostles are needed in today's churches. I like the way the SGM FAQ defines their role:

With regard to the principle of apostolic ministry, we want to be clear that the men identified as apostles within Sovereign Grace Ministries are understood by all to hold a position decidedly and radically inferior to that of the original twelve Apostles. But the label is retained because Scripture appears to offer another type of apostle — one that neither writes Scripture, nor is counted among the twelve. In fact, there appears to be at least eight others, apart from Paul himself, who graced the pages of the New Testament in apostolic ministry. In our view, apostolic ministry can exist today without comparing its authority or impact to Paul or the twelve. Briefly stated, the role of the apostle is to ensure that the Gospel is preached and applied in the daily life of the church. Concentrating attention on the writings of Luke and Paul, one might conclude that apostles are devoted to church planting, being set apart for the Gospel and sent forth with the Gospel, that they might protect the Gospel and build with the Gospel. They are called to serve churches as spiritual fathers, with primary responsibility during a formative season in a local church (much as earthly fathers do with the formative years of their children), a pattern that eventually transforms into a partnership with mature local churches.

Well, here I am — just back from holiday — and what do I find? Talk about whilst the cat's away the mice will play?!?

Over at TeamPyro, Dan has a four part response to my set of questions on tongues and gifts which I bashed out quickly before I left. I have read all of Dan’s posts and every one of the comments. Sadly, it seems that there are few, if any, charismatics who read TeamPyro, or if they do, they seem too frit of Dan to respond!

I want to say right at the outset that I respect and admire Dan for taking the time to take me to task so comprehensively. I have never read a better theological discussion on “the other side.” It is my opinion that theology should be written in community, and to be honest, this kind of interaction helps me to understand how and why people whom I respect come to different conclusions than I do. Perhaps blogging may eventually lead to some kind of theological convergence on these and other controversial issues. I love the fact that in Dan I can interact with someone who is no straw man of my creation. Dan does, at times, extend what I said in my post further than I would have wanted to go myself before demolishing the morphed viewpoint, but even in so doing, it is helpful for me to understand how I am perceived by others.

I loved the broadly generous nature of his comments, and the discussion that ensued — for example, the way in which one of his commenters, Centurion, said, “Unfortunately, Adrian is the other side right now." It seems to me that behind that comment is a whole bunch of "other stuff" that could be said, and which would go something like this . . . “Adrian is someone who, most of the time, we're happy to agree with — if only he didn’t have those crazy charismatic ideas!” If I have “interpreted” this comment correctly, well then guys . . . the feeling is mutual!

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, there have been a few other responses; here are the ones I've found — by all means use the comment box on this post to let me know of other posts on blogs you know about — you can use the following code within a comment: <a href=”http://yoururl.com/”>your link text </a>

Other posts on the tongues debate:

• TrueGrit

• Sam Storms

• Dan Phillips' own blog, Biblical Christianity

• Wilderness Voice

• English Muffin (a fair few comments also here)

• Intellectuelle

• Centurion (over at TeamPyro)

• Lig Duncan (perhaps wisely) steers clear of the tongues issue, but has a definition of being filled with the Spirit with which I fully agree.

• Mathew Sims promises to join the fun too. (Incidentally, he is just TOO far ahead in his blogging through the T4G statement series — I will have to get back to that soon myself!)

• Charis doesn’t talk about the tongues issue, but has a great post on harsh words and gentle words which we would all do well to continue to remember as well . . . and as we have done so far in this debate!

I will, of course, have to find the time to answer Dan’s great posts. (As I have said before, I don’t have to agree with the conclusions of a post for me to think it's a great one!). I can't promise when I will get to them, however, as it is my intention (at least for the present) for this to be a relatively light week of blogging — sort of like easing my way back into "normal life" a bit slowly! I am sure that some of you will suspect that I will find the bait of these posts irresistible . . . but I plan to try!

Perhaps you, my readers, can help me resist the temptation — as of yet, the charismatic view does not seem to have been well represented in the discussions in Dan’s comment section or elsewhere in the blogosphere. I fear that many charismatics may have deserted TeamPyro whilst cessationists may have deserted this blog! So, my charismatic friends, now is your chance to show why I do not need to respond to Dan just yet! When I do get round to it, what should I say? How should I reply?

For that matter, any cessationist readers I have left are welcome to discuss any aspect of this matter here where I have none of the foibles of Dan about off-topic comments. Comment away — just keep it civil!

• 
  Legalism is More Deadly than Alcoholism - Piper Friday
  
  
  A provocative quote - check out the comments section!
  
  (tags: legalism)
  


• 
  "It isn't that they are just so abounding in love that they won't fight. It is that they are bereft of love. For if they truly loved their fellow humans, they'd be unable to rest easy as men and women are sold the poison of a false, damning 'gospel.'
  
  
  Dan Phillips, in writing about "when an apostle 'gets hot,' says this: "Count me in as heartily opposed to quarreling about adiaphora. But the Gospel is not in that category. Eternal life and death is not trivial."
  
  (tags: doctrine gospel pyromaniacs)
  


• 
  Stop Test-Driving Your Girlfriend
  
  Michael Lawrence, associate pastor with Mark Dever, answers "How do I know she's the one for me?" The problem, he says is that as a single Christian man, not only are you going to marry a sinner, but you are a sinner as well." HT Challies.
  
  (tags: challies marriage)
  




• Romans 14:20: “Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food.” Hold your personal convictions, even promote them, but do not require them of others and thus destroy the work of God for the sake of beer, music, and birth control pills."
  
  
  Ryan DeBaar adds some insights to the discussion of legalism. "The question I ask today is, in our practice of Christianity, how assertive should we be about a specific application of a Biblical principle?" HT Bob Hayton.
  
  (tags: legalism)




• 
  A First? Dave Warnock Agrees . . . With Me!
  
  
  "Everyone please note . . . I agree with Adrian! My own experience . . . "I struggle with writing in Bibles. Initially this was because I was uncomfortable with the idea . . . "
  
  (tags: legalism)
  




• "Legalism could be defined as any attempt to rely on self-effort to either attain or maintain our justification before God."
  
  
  Article over at Reformation Theology asks, "What is Legalism?" and provides nine defining characteristics. One that stands out is this: "Obedience that does not spring from a renewed heart."
  
  (tags: legalism)




• 
  Packer: "This doctrine [justification by faith] is the 'Atlas' upon which the whole of Christianity rests. Were Atlas to shrug, the entire structure of the Christian faith would fall to the ground and be shattered."
  
  
  Mathew Sims expounds on Article 12 of the T4G statement.
  
  (tags: blogging T4GB)
  




• "If the "strong drink" of Deuteronomy 14:26 is non-intoxicating, then the repeated warnings against "strong drink" in the Scriptures don't make much sense."
  
  
  A good point which helps to demolish legalistic arguments that all Christians must practice total abstinence from alcohol!
  
  (tags: ethics)

• 
  Answers to Common Questions About Creation
  
  For one year, Mark Driscoll preached through the book of Genesis, verse-by-verse. It was, he says, one of the most rewarding studies he has ever done. In this section, he attempts to answer common questions about the doctrine of creation.
  
  (tags: driscoll genesis)
  


• "When I think that my sins alone required the death of God�s Son to enable me to have a relationship with God, it produces the right responses of grief, wonder, amazement, conviction, humility, gratefulness, holiness, and commitment to God�s Kingdom."
  
  Bob Kauflin meditates on the Precious Blood. "Our culture can tend to talk about the cross in a way that magnifies our worth to God rather than our sin against Him."
  
  (tags: atonement worship)
  
  
• 
  UNDER SOVEREIGN GRACE - T4G: Affirmation and Denials, Part 12
  
  Mathew Sims' critique and commentary on Together for the Gospel's Articles X and XI. In it, he provides his "absolute favorite" quote concerning the doctrine of election.
  
  (tags: election salvation T4GB)
  
  
  
• Rob Rufus Sermon Downloads
  
  Download sermons from this preacher, who made a real stir at TOAM06 - the newfrontiers conference.
  
  (tags: sermon web)

Well, it was always going to be done, but I think I am the first to use the abbreviation TOAM - after all, we had T4G for Together for the Gospel, so this is almost as cool.

Here I am . . . all packed and ready and just about to leave for the conference. Some Christians are a bit dismissive of conferences and wonder what all the fuss is about. I say a conference is the closest thing to heaven we are likely to experience on earth!

The gathering from the nations. Old friends, brothers and sisters whom we have fought alongside in the past. Brave pioneers cutting swathes through the jungles of unreached nations. People like Tom Eaton who is church planting for newfrontiers in Japan. The reunions. Tears in some cases.

The anticipation as the first meeting opens. People singing in a massive crowd with different nationalities represented. The amazing weight of God's presence, which seems to be multiplied by the numbers of 2's and 3's who are present. The joy of being in a big group of people, but not feeling lost as they all say "Hi" to you. Even more than that, knowing that God can single each of us out and give us the conference we need.

Lives changed. Missions assigned. The Word preached. Truths grasped. Cynical hearts broken down. Hope restored. The Spirit poured out. Spiritual gifts received. Leaders created. Churches restored. A new beginning. Back to the real world. Souls saved. GLORY TO GOD!

This post is part of an attempt to bring Doctor Martyn Lloyd-Jones along for the ride, blogging through the Together for the Gospel statement. So far I have posted from the Doctor's writings on The Introduction and Articles 1 , 2 and 3.

I have also posted material from John Piper on articles 1 and 2 and have written myself on the Introduction as well as a combined post on Articles 1 and 2. If you haven't already done so, I would encourage you to read the statement in full - it is available as a pdf or Google�s HTML version.

This post is part of an ongoing bloggers challenge I have set to encourage us all to work through this statement systematically - thanks to Crossway for donating five copies of God is the Gospel to encourage your participation!

Together for the Gospel - Article 3
We affirm that truth ever remains a central issue for the Church, and that the church must resist the allure of pragmatism and postmodern conceptions of truth as substitutes for obedience to the comprehensive truth claims of Scripture.

We deny that truth is merely a product of social construction or that the truth of the Gospel can be expressed or grounded in anything less than total confidence in the veracity of the Bible, the historicity of biblical events, and the ability of language to convey understandable truth in sentence form. We further deny that the church can establish its ministry on a foundation of pragmatism, current marketing techniques, or contemporary cultural fashions.

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In this segment of MLJ Monday, the Doctor continues his exposition of the issues raised in Article 3 of the T4G statement. He addresses the questions of how to define 'truth'; and once defined, in practical terms, how to 'hold on' to 'truth'. What is the "standard" or "measure" for truth? And of what importance are the great confessions and creeds to this discussion?

"That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love may grow up into him in all things." (Ephesians 4:14-15)

We come now to the question as to how we are to hold on to the truth in love. What does it mean in actual practice? I cannot hold on to the air, I cannot grasp a mist in my hands and hold on to it. But I am told to "hold on" to something. Now it is but a matter of simple, elementary thinking to say that before I can hold onto anything I must know what it is. It must be something that can be held on to, something definite which can be described. And the Apostle says that it is some such thing, namely, truth. Obviously, therefore, this truth to which he is referring is capable of being defined. This, surely, follows of necessity. How can I judge these various "winds of doctrine" that blow round and about me if I have not got a standard? How may I know whether these winds of doctrine are true or false? How do I detect this "sleight of men" and their "cunning craftiness", or realize that they are "lying in wait to deceive" me and to lead me into error, without having some standard? In business we believe in having a gold standard, and a yard measure; we have standards in "weights and measures". We do so of necessity, for without them we would never know whether we were being dealt with fairly or being robbed; we would have no check on one another and business would be impossible. It is precisely the same in the spiritual realm and in the Church. You cannot avoid being carried about by every wind of doctrine unless you have a standard of judgment. You cannot hold on to something which is amorphous; you cannot lay hold on something which is as nebulous and vague and indefinite as the wind which blows in all directions.

By definition, the very term used, and the contrast with verse 14, insist upon our saying that the truth is something which can be defined and analyzed and stated in propositions. And yet, saying so, I am running entirely counter to what is being said at the present time, in spite of the fact that what I am asserting and arguing is based upon elementary logic and thinking, and upon honest dealing with the Word of God. But this, we are told, is fatal to brotherhood and fellowship and friendliness and unity, and by saying such things we are causing division. In the present century there is a marked dislike of creeds and confessions and precise definitions. Christianity has become a vague, indefinite spirit of good-will and philanthropy. This is stated quite openly in books and sermons, and the pronouncements of congresses and conferences. It is time we faced this issue and examined it in the light of Scripture. How can this modern attitude be reconciled with that which the Apostle is saying here? In the light of Paul's teaching how can such things as congresses of Christians and Jews, and congresses of world faiths, be justified on the grounds that we are out on the same quest, and that there are many different routes for reaching the summit of a mountain?

This modern idea, moreover, is not only a denial of Scripture, but also a denial of the entire history of the Christian Church. There are sections of the Church in which in every service the worshippers recite together the Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed, or part of the Nicene Creed. All the large Churches have Confessions of Faith; the Church of England has the Thirty-nine Articles, the Presbyterian Churches recognize the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Lutheran Church on the Continent has its Augsburg Confession, and many Churches use the Heidelberg Confession and Catechism, and subscribe to the Belgic Confession. In the light of this great fact of history, and without any desire to be critical, I am constrained to say that this modern attitude is arrogant. It is arrogant in that it dismisses virtually the whole of Church history and condemns all Creeds and Confessions.

Why and how did these Creeds and Confessions ever come into being? Although we know that the Apostles' Creed was not drawn up by the Apostles themselves, it was drawn up by the early Church in order that believers might have a succinct statement of what the Apostles preached and taught. But why did the early Church believe that that was necessary? Why were the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene Creed ever drawn up? These are very pertinent questions. Are they to be dealt with by saying that life was leisurely in those days, and that philosophers and theologians enjoyed discussion and argumentation and the systematizing of thought? Was it the case that legalistic and argumentative men turned the delightfully "simple" Gospel of Jesus into something that was almost the exact opposite? Church history reveals very clearly that such was not the case and that every one of these Creeds and Confessions was drawn up to save the life of the Church and to safeguard the truth concerning our Lord and His great salvation. False teachings and errors had crept in, as the Scriptures had prophesied would be the case, and as the Apostles had warned. The result was confusion in the Church. In the providence of God there were leaders in the Church filled with the Holy Spirit who saw quite clearly that if this kind of teaching continued the Church would be destroyed. So they met together in great ecumenical councils, which simply meant that Christian leaders came from different parts of the world to deal with the situation.

Unlike the modern ecumenical idea, they did not come together to say that they were all one and that differing views were of little consequence; they came together in order to state clearly what must be believed, and to state that those who refused to subscribe to such truth must be denounced as heretics and excommunicated. They felt that the whole life of the Church and the whole future of the Church was at stake and that there must be an end to the uncertainty and the confusion concerning vital doctrines. So they drew up their Creeds in which they defined what must be believed, and they drew a sharp distinction between right and wrong, and truth and error. History records the heresies and errors that came in about the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Arian heresy and others, but Athanasius and eventually others, stood against it, and condemned it. But all that is dismissed with a wave of the hand today. It is, I repeat, not only a denial of the teaching of the Scripture but also a denial of the most glorious periods in the history of the Christian Church.

You cannot "hold on" to the truth unless you know what the truth is. There are certain doctrines which are absolutely essential to the Christian faith. One is the authority of the Bible. Without the absolute authority of the Word of God in matters of faith and conduct, how can one discriminate between truth and error? If this is not acknowledged as the sole authority, then "every wind of doctrine" is permissible; but if that were so, then there is no Christianity and therefore no salvation. Likewise there must be no argument about the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is Son of God and Son of man, fully God and fully man. As we have seen, the early Church saw the crucial importance of this doctrine. The New Testament teaching is based entirely upon it. The great Epistle to the Hebrews was written to assert this and to show His pre-eminence and to maintain that "God hath spoken in these last days by His Son". It was because certain Hebrew Christians had become doubtful about this truth that the author wrote his great Epistle to them. There must be no discussion concerning the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the only Mediator between God and men. The Church is not to argue abut Him, His person, His miraculous birth, His sacrificial atonement, and His literal physical resurrection. If His bodily resurrection is not true and factual, says Paul to the Corinthians, "our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain, you are yet in your sins". It is as vital as that! Likewise with respect to the doctrine of the Atonement. Paul tells the Corinthians that the message which he was called and commissioned as an ambassador to preach was that "God hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Also, as we have had occasion to emphasize already, there is the crucial doctrine of justification by faith. Paul tells the Galatians that if they deny this by introducing any works as contributory to salvation, they have "fallen from grace". (Galatians 5:4). Let us remember that the false teachers who were troubling the Galatians were not actually denying the Person of our Lord, or His sacrificial atonement, but they were teaching that Gentiles must be circumcised in addition to believing in Christ. So specific is the truth that Paul cannot tolerate this false teaching and "withstood Peter to the face" for every having appeared to countenance it. Paul did not regard this question as to whether a Christian should be circumcised as a matter of indifference, and say that as long as one had any kind of vague belief in Christ all was well. He would make no concession at this point because to do so would be "to preach another gospel which is not another". Indeed, what we have already considered in verses 4-6 is absolutely essential.

---

All emphasis mine.

The above excerpt is taken from:

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, An Exposition of Ephesians 4:1-16, Christian Unity, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1980, "Speaking the Truth in Love," chapter 20, pp. 245-249.

This post is part of an attempt to bring John Piper along for the ride, blogging through the Together for the Gospel statement. I have already posted a quote from him on Building our Lives on the Bible, the subject of the first two articles. Today we will bring you Piper on "Truth and Pragmatism" - the subject of the third article of the T4G statement.

I have also posted from Doctor Martyn Lloyd-Jones writings on The Introduction and Articles 1, 2, and 3. I have also posted myself on the Introduction, as well as a Combined Post on Articles I and II. If you haven't already done so, I would encourage you to read the statement in full - it is available as a pdf or Google's HTML version.This post is part of an ongoing bloggers challenge I have set to encourage us all to work through this statement systematically - thanks to Crossway for donating five copies of God is the Gospel to encourage your participation!

T4G Article III

We affirm that truth ever remains a central issue for the Church, and that the church must resist the allure of pragmatism and postmodern conceptions of truth as substitutes for obedience to the comprehensive truth claims of Scripture. We deny that truth is merely a product of social construction or that the truth of the Gospel can be expressed or grounded in anything less than total confidence in the veracity of the Bible, the historicity of biblical events, and the ability of language to convey understandable truth in sentence form. We further deny that the church can establish its ministry on a foundation of pragmatism, current marketing techniques, or contemporary cultural fashions.

So, let's join John Piper as he addresses this issue in God's Passion for his Glory - a book he has made available as a free pdf on his site.

Americans, as a whole (and evangelicals are little different in this) are not given to thinking much, let alone thinking at the level Edwards demands of us. This is especially true about doctrine. We are pragmatic. We demand quick solutions. We define success in measurable quantities. We have little patience with doctrinal precision. And we pastors who are infected with the pragmatic virus tend to justify our indifference to doctrine mainly by the fact that such reflection is not what the audience is looking for. Besides, it is stressful for relationships.

The recent lamentations over the drift of evangelicalism into pragmatic, doctrinally vague, audience-driven, culturally uncritical Christianity are, in my judgment, warranted and needed in spite of the fact that, at the level of professional scholarship, there have been remarkable advances in the last fifty years.

As a whole, and in the dominant shaping forces of evangelicalism, the criticism of Harry Blamires in 1963 is probably more true than ever: "There is no Christian Mind . . . The Christian Mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness unmatched in Christian history."

The increasing abandonment of truth and moral absolutes in our culture, as militant diversity threatens all firm conviction, has dramatically influenced the evangelical mindset. The political spin doctors who specialize in deflecting attention away from truth onto feelings and relationships and styles have their counterpart in the evangelical tendency to avoid doctrinal disputes by casting issues in terms of demeanor and method rather than truth. Serious disagreements are covered over, while vague language and pragmatic concerns preserve hollow unity at the expense of theological substance and Biblical clarity and power . . .

Piper goes on to quote Ajith Fernando, who leads Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka:

"A major shift . . . has taken place in western evangelicalism where truth has been replaced by pragmatism as the major influencer of thought and life. This path is suicidal." He is heartened that voices are being raised, but then he says, "However, I feel that many evangelical leaders are so caught up in and blinded by this bondage to pragmatism that even though they may heartily endorse pleas to return to greater dependence on truth, endorsements make minimal inroads into their ministry styles and strategies." There is simply too little patience with the particularities of Biblical propositions that embody precious, life-sustaining doctrine.

Jonathan Edwards had a profound insight into this very state of affairs, and it has to do directly with the absence of God centeredness: "It is one great reason why speculative points [of doctrine] are thought to be of so little importance that the modern religion consists so little in respect to the divine Being, and almost wholly in benevolence to men."

In other words, the sickness that needs healing is the main hindrance to the remedy. This means that Jonathan Edwards' "grand style of feeling and thinking is not ours and is alien to our way of life." Edwards' utter seriousness - his "blood-earnestness," as Thomas Chalmers called it - puts him out of sync with our chatty, humorous, entertainment-oriented, cartoon-illustrated spirituality. Edwards' sense of the desperate condition of mankind without God is so weighty that it takes our breath away . . .

It may be that the theological impoverishment of the American church, and the precariousness of life, and the weariness with "successful" superficiality will make the voice of Jonathan Edwards more compelling than he has been for centuries . . .

Evangelical Christians, who believe God reveals himself primarily through a book, the Bible, should long to be the most able readers they can be. This means that we should want to become clear, penetrating, accurate, fair-minded thinkers, because all good reading involves asking questions and thinking. This is one reason why the Bible teaches us, "Do not be children in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in thinking be mature" (1 Cor. 14:20 RSV). It's why Paul said to Timothy, "Think over what I say, for the Lord will grant you understanding in everything" (2 Tim. 2:7). God's gift of understanding is through thinking, not instead of thinking . . .

. . . since our media-intoxicated culture is neither given to thinking, nor to straining Godward, the challenge and the potential of reading Edwards is doubled . . . In all this I long to persuade you to read and embrace Jonathan Edwards' The End for Which God Created the World.

Edwards is strongest where we are weakest. He knows God. He sees and savors the supremacy of God in all things. Our culture is dying for want of this vision and this food.

This post is part of an attempt to bring Doctor Martyn Lloyd-Jones along for the ride, blogging through the Together for the Gospel statement. So far I have posted from the Doctor's writings on The Introduction and Articles 1 and 2 .

I have also posted myself on the Introduction as well as a combined post on Articles I and II. If you haven't already done so, I would encourage you to read the statement in full - it is available as a pdf or Google's HTML version.

This post is part of an ongoing bloggers challenge I have set to encourage us all to work through this statement systematically - thanks to Crossway for donating five copies of God is the Gospel to encourage your participation!

T4G Article III
We affirm that truth ever remains a central issue for the Church, and that the church must resist the allure of pragmatism and postmodern conceptions of truth as substitutes for obedience to the comprehensive truth claims of Scripture.

We deny that truth is merely a product of social construction or that the truth of the Gospel can be expressed or grounded in anything less than total confidence in the veracity of the Bible, the historicity of biblical events, and the ability of language to convey understandable truth in sentence form. We further deny that the church can establish its ministry on a foundation of pragmatism, current marketing techniques, or contemporary cultural fashions.

The very concept of truth is under attack today. Some speak about truth as if it is alien from the Bible. This is, of course, far from true! Let's join the Doctor as he considers these words from Ephesians.

"That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love may grow up into him in all things." (Ephesians 4:14-15)

---

This phrase is, of course, part of a larger statement. It introduces the positive aspect of the Apostle's teaching with regard to the function of the ministry in the Christian Church. The object of the ministry is to bring us all to "a perfect man unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ". But . . . in order to attain to that obective, we must start where we are: and the first thing we have to do is to realize that we are children and subject to some of the characteristics of children; children that is, in a spiritual sense. So having warned us that we must not henceforth continue as children, the Apostle exhorts us to "speak the truth in love" and to "grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ".

Firstly, we must seek out the meaning of the word translated "speaking". While in a sense it is correct it does not convey the full meaning of the word used by the Apostle. The word he used is not normally translated "speaking". Or, to state the matter from the opposite angle, the words which are generally translated "speaking" are not the word the Apostle used here. The Greek word means "professing", so we may translate the phrase, "professing the truth in love". Many have urged that a very literal translation, though it is not a pleasant one, is "truthing" - "but truthing in love". What the expression conveys is that we are "in the truth" and that we are "walking in the truth". Perhaps the best translation of all would be "having or holding the truth in love". That, of course, includes speaking; it covers the whole of our deportment. We are to be true and to walk in the truth and in love. So what the Apostle says is that we must no more be children, tossed to and fro, and so on, but rather, holding the truth in love, we must grow up into Christ in all things.

I am tempted to assert that at the present time there is no single statement in the whole of the Bible which is so much abused and misquoted as this particular statement. This phrase, together with the phrase in the 21st verse of the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel, "That they all may be one", are the two favourite texts of the participants in the ecumenical movement and of those who advocate a great "World Church". Together they have virtually become a slogan. It is therefore most important that we should examine and consider this phrase very carefully.

It has become the favourite text of so many because it has been wrested out of its context. It is always extremely dangerous to take a phrase out of its context and turn it into a slogan. Every statement in the Scripture should always be taken in its context. It is to violate Scripture to treat it in any other way. We shall see the importance of this principle as we proceed with our exposition. As we do so we must be careful to bear in mind the Apostle�s fundamental concern in this entire section. When he says "speaking the truth in love" he does not mean merely being nice and loving. I am compelled to start with that negative because the text is commonly interpreted today in this fashion. This has become the controlling idea at the present time in discussions concerning church unity. Fellowship is put into the first position. We are told that nothing is as important as fellowship; unity in and of itself is the supreme thing. We are told that the lack of this unity is the main if not the insuperable hindrance to evangelism. We are also told that we have no right to expect revival in the absence of this unity. The explanation of the state of the Church and of the fact that the masses are outside the Church is that there is so much division in the Church. Indeed we are told that nothing today is more important than that we should all be one in one great Church and that at all costs we must put fellowship and unity in the supreme position. To that end, we are told that we must tolerate almost anything and everything; that as long as a man is nice and loving, and shows a friendly spirit and does good works, especially if he makes a sacrifice in order to do so, then what he believes or does not believe is comparatively unimportant.

What matters, we are told, is that a man should have "the spirit of Christ" and that he should desire to imitate Christ's example. That makes him a Christian! Doctrinal correctness, they maintain, has been over-emphasized in the past. A man may be shaky on the very Person of Christ, may not believe in the doctrine of the Atonement, or in the Virgin birth, or in the literal physical resurrection of our Lord, but if he has an open mind, and is tolerant of other opinions, and is kind and friendly and "gracious" and concerned about others, and especially about suffering and need and anxious to right all wrongs, political and social, he is a true Christian. What a man is, and does, we are told, is of much greater importance than his doctrinal views. Moreover, it is argued, nothing but a demonstration of this so-called "Christian spirit" will have any effect upon those outside the Church who have no interest whatsoever in doctrine. Indeed, to hold doctrinal views strongly and to criticize other views is virtually regarded as sinful and is frequently described as being "sub-Christian". This is how the phrase "speaking the truth in love" is being commonly interpreted.

It would be very easy to give some remarkable and almost astonishing illustrations of what I am saying. For instance, it is quite amusing to notice how a well-known reviewer of religious books, when he comes across any criticism of other views in the book he is reviewing, immediately criticizes the spirit of the author. That seems to be his one test of scholarship! "Scholarship" has come to mean that you find all views very interesting, and that there is something to be said for all points of view. If you want to be regarded as scholarly you must not say that one view is right and the other wrong; you must not criticize, for to criticize is to deny the spirit of Christ, and to be entirely devoid of love. "Speaking the truth in love" has come to mean that you more or less praise everything, but above all, that you never criticize any view strongly, because, after all, there is a certain amount of right and truth in everything.

We must therefore ask the question, Is this a right and a true interpretation of Paul's statement? Is this what is meant by "speaking the truth in love"? I answer immediately that it cannot be, for the reason that the Apostle does not simply tell us here to speak lovingly. What he says is "speaking the truth" or "holding the truth". We are not told by the Apostle to cultivate a vague, loving spirit, but to hold "the truth" in love. The very word truth, in and of itself, makes the modern popular exposition of the statement obviously and patently wrong. Furthermore - and this is where the context is so important - if the phrase merely denotes a loving spirit, how is it connected with what the Apostle has said in verse 14? If "speaking the truth in love", "holding the truth in love", means that we are to smile upon all views and doctrinal standpoints, and never criticize and condemn and reject any views at all, how do we avoid being - children, tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine"? This supposed "loving spirit" makes it impossible to use terms such as "sleight of men" and "cunning craftiness" and "lying in wait to deceive". The very text itself and especially the context, make that interpretation completely impossible; indeed it is a denial of the Apostle's statement. We must not hesitate to say so plainly. To put life, or "spirit", or niceness, or anything else, before truth is to deny essential New Testament teaching; and in addition is to contradict directly the Apostle's solemn warning in verse 14. It is to set up ourselves, and the modern mind, and 20th-century man, as the authority rather than the 'called apostle' Paul and all others whom the Lord has set in the Church to warn us against, and to save us from, this attitude which dislikes discrimination and judgment. Never was it more important to assert that friendliness or niceness or some sentimental notions of brotherliness do not constitute Christianity. You can have all such qualities without and apart from Christianity without "truth". So that, whatever else it may mean, "holding the truth in love" does not mean a vague, flabby, sentimental notion of niceness and fellowship and brotherhood.

Looking at it positively, note that the Apostle says "but holding the truth". The fact that he introduces this with the word but tells us that the verse is to be interpreted in a manner that emphasizes the contrast with verse 14. We are not to be "children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine" but the opposite of that. Instead of being like weather-vanes, turning round in every direction and believing everything, we are to "hold to" something particular and definite, even the truth. Instead of believing one thing one day, and then something different another day, we must be stable, and hold on to and walk in the truth as it is made known in the Scriptures. Holding the truth is the antithesis of being carried about by every wind of doctrine. How important it is to observe the context! Many problems and difficulties vanish the moment you allow the Scripture to speak for itself instead of wrestling statements out of their context and using them as slogans.

---

Emphasis is mine.

The above excerpt is taken from:

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, An Exposition of Ephesians 4:1-16, Christian Unity, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1980, "Speaking the Truth in Love," chapter 20, pp. 241-245.

• 
  
  "Driscoll says nonbelievers don't come to the church for the same reason that people don't gravitate to homes that are guarded by a couple of pit bulls..there are ways of guarding a house that are more discreet and that can give the house an inviting air."
  (tags: jollyblogger missional)
  
• Mathew Sims on the Atonement - T4G Article 6
  (tags: atonement T4GB)
• "I'd have to give Adrian's Blog a "D-" in salvation preparedness. There I was, in their midst for a whole week, and nobody tried to save me."
  Daily Duck makes the entirely valid point that in all our internal wrangling we have forgotten him - so tell me, how exactly should we explain the Atonement to him?
  (tags: atonement evangelism missional)
• John Reid Orders Abusers to be Moved From Near Schools
  In a bold stroke of rare common sense the man with the hardest job in British politics (sorting out the mess at the Home Office) has recognised that rights of kids trump the "rights" of paedophiles.
  (tags: news politics abuse)
• 
  
  ". . . when I go home at night and close my eyes and let eternity rise in my mind I see ten million more people in hell because of legalism than because of alcoholism. And I think that is a literal understatement . . ."
  Justin Taylor quotes Piper on why tetotalism should not be a requirement of church membership.
  (tags: discipleship legalism church culture)
  
• 
  
  "I am concerned that too many people who have the Gospel are lazy with it, compassionless, and not sufficiently motivated to spread it. I fear that this is me. Pray for me and Capitol Hill Baptist Church in this".
  Dever challenges us to pursue BOTH faithfulness to the Gospel AND relevance to our culture.
  (tags: dever T4GB evangelism missional gospel)
  

• Dave Warnock Gets to T4G Article 2
  Not surprisingly, he finds things with which to disagree . . .
  (tags: T4GB bible)
• "The Atonement is truly part of the hope of the Gospel: each of us was lost and condemned in our sins, but God provided a perfect sacrifice for us...He was full of wrath because we stole His glory and ignored His beauty. His wrath had to be appeased."
  "This is not a case of cosmic child abuse, but love on a grand scale," says Mathew Sims.
  (tags: atonement)
• Defending my Father's Wrath - God�s Son Bore God�s Curse in My Place"
  John Piper in World Magazine joins the Atonement debate.
  (tags: atonement)
• "We cannot survive as a communion of churches without some common convictions about what it is to live and to make decisions as the body of Christ."
  So says Rowan Williams, head ot the Anglican communion - Is this part of the death throes of a denomination that has dominated the Christian world?
  (tags: CofE church homosexuality)
• Reflection requires plain opposition of positive and negative be left behind. Thinking is not content with the abstraction of mutual exclusivities, but struggles to conceive of a structured wholeness nuanced to contain what appeared to be contradictories.
  Rowan Williams fails to realise that sometimes you have to make a decision--for example, on women bishops--as you cannot both HAVE them and NOT HAVE them at the same time!
  (tags: CofE)
• UN Failing to Deliver for Poor in Fight Against AIDS
  The UK's largest organisation of Christian doctors (Christian Medical Fellowship - CMF) has accused the UN of failing to deliver for the world's poor in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
  (tags: medicine news)
• World Cup is Focus for Human Trafficking and the Sex Trade
  Christian Medical Fellowship raises serious concerns about the potential for the sexual exploitation of young women and girls from developing nations during the World Cup.
  (tags: news sex)
• "I know the one thing that must not change is this, as one sinner saved by grace to other sinners, I say come to Jesus Christ and come no newness of life. It will change your sex life, for everyone. It will change every dimension of your life and that's b
  Al Mohler on Larry King Live about sexuality
  (tags: homosexuality mohler T4GB)

• Fide-O on Expository Preaching
  Dave Carlson is accused of exegetical errors over his posts on the T4G statement. Fide-O seems to be saying that if Dave would allow the text to speak rather than reading into it his own ideas, his opinions might change . . .
  (tags: preaching T4GB)

• "C.S. Lewis once wrote, 'Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.' But this is precisely what open theists deny."
  Mathew Sims has reached Article IV of the T4G statement - he's streets ahead of the rest of us!
  (tags: T4GB neoliberal postmodernism)

The Authority and Inerrancy of the Bible�T4G Statement, Articles I and II

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Article I
We affirm that the sole authority for the Church is the Bible, verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible, and totally sufficient and trustworthy.

We deny that the Bible is a mere witness to the divine revelation, or that any portion of Scripture is marked by error or the effects of human sinfulness.

Article II
We affirm that the authority and sufficiency of Scripture extends to the entire Bible, and therefore that the Bible is our final authority for all doctrine and practice.

We deny that any portion of the Bible is to be used in an effort to deny the truthfulness or trustworthiness of any other portion. We further deny any effort to identify a canon within the canon or, for example, to set the words of Jesus against the writings of Paul.

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Well, today we finally get into the meat of the Together for the Gospel statement which, if you haven�t already done so, I would encourage you to read in full�it is available as a pdf or Google�s HTML version.

This post is part of an ongoing bloggers challenge I have set to encourage us all to work through this statement systematically � thanks to Crossway for donating five copies of God is the Gospel to encourage your participation!

There is no more important matter to consider than the one before us today�that of the authority, reliability, and sufficiency of Scripture. I believe that these concepts cannot be separated�for you cannot have one without the other. That is why I have chosen to take both articles together.

If the Bible is not reliable, then we are the ones with authority, for inevitably we must sit in judgment over it, deciding which bits are without error and can therefore teach us doctrine, and which are human and fallible and can therefore be rejected and ignored.

In my church life, when I meet new people, I don�t tend to examine their doctrines very carefully initially. What I am eager to find in the early stages of a growing friendship is evidence of a certain humble attitude towards the Bible. For if someone humbly accepts the Bible, but has come to different conclusions than I have, I can live with that. Sadly, all too many of the people I interact with online and offline quite simply do not see the Bible the way I do.

On issue after issue, people twist or ignore basic Bible verses which categorically teach the opposite to what they believe. I am determined to avoid the issues of feminism and complementarianism for now, but suffice it to say, I do think that Lig is right when he says:

"The gymnastics required to get from �I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man� in the Bible to �I do allow a woman to teach and to exercise authority over a man� . . . are devastating to the functional authority of the Scripture."

I have not yet met anyone who holds to and proclaims an egalitarian position that also believes in an inerrant view of the Bible.

In this week�s MLJ Monday the Doctor explained that God needs to take the initiative in revealing himself to us, but that unless we want to create our own �gods,� we need a standard that is external to ourselves of which we can be sure. That standard is the Bible. As Lloyd-Jones said:

This is the beginning of the matter, the foundation, the base minimum, the absolute. We either take everything from this, or we have no authority at all. You either submit completely to it, or else one man�s opinion is as good as another�s � and that means that you have no authority at all. Before you can ever succeed in girding your loins about with truth, you have to come to God�s Word as a little child, or, to use the stronger word that Paul uses, you have got to come to it as a �fool�.

A common criticism of the view of Scripture which insists that in order for it to be authoritative it must be inerrant is that this is a relatively recent view. Matthew Sims expertly demolishes this view with one quote from Augustine:

For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it. As to all other writings, in reading them, however, great the superiority of the authors to myself in sanctity and learning, I do not accept their teaching as true on the mere ground of the opinion being held by them; but only because they have succeeded in convincing my judgment of in truth either by means of these canonical writings themselves, or by arguments addressed to my reason. I believe, my brother, that this is your own opinion as well as mine. I do not need to say that I do not suppose you to wish your books to be read like those of prophets or of apostles, concerning which it would be wrong to doubt that they are free from error. Far be such arrogance from that humble piety and just estimate of yourself which I know you to have, and without which assuredly you would not have said, 'Would that I could receive your embrace, and that by converse we might aid each other in learning!

As Sims puts it, �Augustine appears to say that he and Jerome believe the original autographs of Scripture were inspired, but scribal errors have crept into the MSS they now possess.�

What about those things the Bible itself has to say about its own reliability?

Jesus himself had some interesting things to say about the Bible:

�Scripture cannot be broken� (John 10:35)

For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. (Matthew 5:18)

It is hard to see how anything short of an inspired, inerrant, and infallible view of Scripture is consistent with these words of Christ. Indeed the problem with these words is they seem to claim more than even the most ardent evangelical contends is the case�Jesus seems to say that the texts themselves will be perfectly preserved.

Perhaps we will discover more and more manuscripts in the coming years and get to the point where we are 100 per cent sure that we have the intact text down to the last dot and iota. The truth is, we are not so very far from such a position today in all honesty�the areas where we are uncertain of the original Bible text are miniscule in the extreme. Certainly we can be more confident that we have the very words of the Bible today than for any other piece of ancient literature.

Does the Bible see itself as authoritative and inerrant?

Let�s just look at a few verses that demonstrate clearly that it does:

. . . knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. (2 Peter 1:20)

Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. (Proverbs 30:5)

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. (Isaiah 40:8)

What is to be considered as �Scripture�?

But what of the extent of Scripture, and the notion in the second article that some might seek to divide the Bible into competing bits? The Bible itself is clear that �Scripture� extends beyond the Old Testament to the New�Paul says in 1 Timothy 5:18:

For the Scripture says, �You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,� and, �The laborer deserves his wages.�

Now, the first phrase is a reference to an Old Testament Scripture, but the second is only found in one of the New Testament Gospels�Luke 10:7. Thus, by the time Paul wrote 1 Timothy it is abundantly clear that the Gospel of Luke was already considered as Scripture.

By the time Peter wrote his second epistle, he casually assumes that his readers understand that Paul�s letters, although hard to understand, are as much as �the other Scriptures� to be considered a part of the Christian�s Bible:

. . . our beloved brother, Paul, also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. (2 Peter 3:16)

The Bible itself is also clear about how it should be used.

Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. (Acts 17:11)

It is interesting that the Jews are commended for this search of the Old Testament Scriptures to confirm what the Apostles are saying to them�the Apostles certainly do not claim an ability to contradict the Old, and argue instead that their words are consistent with the Scriptures already given. This consistency with previous revelation led the Thessalonians to a remarkable conclusion�that what the Apostles were saying to them was itself the Word of God.

And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it, not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. (1 Thessalonians 2:13)

Thus, if even apostolic teaching must be compared to and weighed by Scripture, how much more our own today?

The Bible is intended to instruct us and encourage us. Let�s not rob ourselves of the confidence we need to have in it in order for it to do its job!

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. (Romans 15:4)

This is vital for a Christian, for the Bible is clear that it is the Word of God itself that leads to our salvation:

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

. . . you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God (1 Peter 1:23-25 )

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. (Romans 1:16)

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17)

What of those who abuse the Bible?

Paul is very clear about the unity of the Bible, and its consistent message, from which we must not deviate:

Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. (2 Corinthians 4:1-4)

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, 7 not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9 As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. (Galatians 1:6-9)

Today we are far too tolerant of differing perspectives and viewpoints of the Bible. If these words are to be considered true and reliable, we should expect a clear theology to emerge from them. I believe that on all important points of Christian doctrine, it does.

Again I say, I am looking for those who have such a humble attitude towards the Bible that they are willing for it to shape them, rather than the other way round, and who say, �Show me where I am wrong from this Book and I will change my position.�

Personally, I am so anxious to respect the very words of the Bible in light of all we have said that I will always stand by the need to use more literal translations of the Bible such as the ESV. It is not surprising that a high view of Scripture seems to have a direct relationship to the version of the Bible we use.

The Bible is not merely the rough impression of what God was trying to say�it is the exact and precise WORD of God to us today! Without confidence in its infallibility we will never build our doctrine on it. Once we believe it is 100 per cent true and reliable, how can we do anything else but submit ourselves to its teaching, even if it does not seem culturally relevant in places?

Perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible about the function of the Scriptures is found in Paul�s second letter to Timothy. I will end this post with those words:

. . . from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:15-17)

T4G � Article II

"We affirm that the authority and sufficiency of Scripture extends to the entire Bible, and therefore that the Bible is our final authority for all doctrine and practice.

We deny that any portion of the Bible is to be used in an effort to deny the truthfulness or trustworthiness of any other portion. We further deny any effort to identify a canon within the canon or, for example, to set the words of Jesus against the writings of Paul."

_____________________________

Today I want to quote what Lloyd-Jones has to say regarding the EXTENT of the truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture; i.e. does "verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible, and totally sufficient" extend to the whole of Scripture?

You must gird yourselves and your loins with truth. If you do not, you are defeated. And I am asserting and maintaining that truth can be known, that there is an authority. It is not reason, it is not feelings, it is not the Church, any church. It is the book called the Bible . . . .

We all therefore have to face this ultimate and final question: Do we accept the Bible as the Word of God, as the sole authority in all matters of faith and practice, or do we not? . . . Do I pin my faith to, and subject all my thinking to what I read in the Bible? Or do I defer to modern knowledge . . . It is inevitable that we occupy one or the other of those two positions . . . Either my foundation is one of sand that gives way beneath my feet, and I do not know where I am, or else I stand on what W. E. Gladstone called 'The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture'

Why should we return to the Bible, why should we believe it? The first answer, says the Doctor, is that the Bible itself claims that it is this authority. Now there is the stumbling point for many. But, says Lloyd-Jones,

"No man in and of himself can ever arrive at a knowledge of God. This is the whole basis of the New Testament teaching, as it was the whole basis of the apostolic teaching. I cannot understand how anyone can hold any other view who has read the first two chapters of Paul�s First Epistle to the Corinthians. The Apostle lays down the following as his fundamental position: �For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God�. Then he goes on: �For it is written� � he is quoting from the Old Testament � �I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent�. �Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world?� That is to say, where is the man who relies on modern knowledge and science and learning, and on his own ability and on what the philosophers are saying? Then Paul continues: �Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?� How? Paul answers, �For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom� � by philosophy, by learning, by knowledge and understanding and human reason � �the world by wisdom knew not God�. It had failed to find Him; but when the world had failed, it then �pleased God by the foolishness of preaching� � by what the world regarded as the �foolishness� of the thing preached, the �foolishness� of the Gospel and the message of the Gospel � �to save them that believe.� The Apostle states there the whole position; and there is no answer to it.

But people have often asked why, if God intended to send his Son, the Messiah, did He wait so long to do so?

God sent His Son into the world with His message after He had given the world a full opportunity to deliver itself . . . There is no question but that the flowering period of the human intellect in so many senses was reached in that great era of Greek philosophy which preceded the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. There you have man�s ability and thinking at its very best and highest; but it proved quite unable to rise to a knowledge of God . . .

�The world by wisdom knew not God�: and the reason for that is obvious . . . Paul says that �the princes of this world did not know and did not recognize our Lord. �We speak wisdom, says Paul, �among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought.� Human wisdom, even in its princes, its greatest men, is inadequate; it will never bring us to the truth. It is because God is what He is! And the moment you realize that truth, you see how man can never possibly arrive at a knowledge of Him. How can the finite encompass the Infinite? How can mortal man arrive at a real knowledge of the immortal God, the God who says, �I am that I am�, the God who is from eternity to eternity absolute in every respect, the God who is �light and in him is no darkness at all�? . . .But when we realize that man is not only finite but also sinful, and fallen, and unclean, and twisted, and perverted, the position becomes still more ridiculously impossible . . .

We are therefore in this position, that by all our efforts we can never arrive at this knowledge of God. Well, then . . . If I am to gird my loins about with truth, how can I find it? There is but one answer . . .God must give it [to] us. �It is high, I cannot attain unto it,� says the Psalmist (Psalm 139:6) But God, if He so chooses, can give us the knowledge which we desire. And the whole message of the Bible from beginning to end is just this, that He has done so . . . God has done this very thing! That is the whole glory of the message, that is the good news of the Gospel of salvation; God has been pleased to give us this revelation. That is the message of the whole Bible; that is what it is proclaiming from beginning to end. �In the beginning God . . .� It is an authoritative statement. How does Moses make the authoritative statement? It was given to him. So you find the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews saying that it is �through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God�. We know it �by faith�; it was given; it is a revelation.

Such is the claim of the Old Testament; and the Old Testament in this matter is as important as the New Testament. The two go together, the one leads to the other . . . the Bible is the result of God disturbing men by the Spirit, giving them the message and then enabling them to deliver it in speech or in writing. And the Apostles, writing in the New Testament, about these very things, fully confirm what the Old Testament claims.

But over and above the testimony of the Apostles Paul and Peter to the Old Testament writings, we have our Lord�s own attestation of them . . . He accepts the entire Book [Old Testament] . . . �And so He began to take them through the Scriptures � Moses and the prophets . . .� �The Scriptures testify of me� (John 5:39) . . . He teaches plainly the authority of the Old Testament . . .

The Old Testament Scriptures are authoritative because they are the Words of God. When you come to the New Testament the same holds good. There is the towering figure of our Lord Himself, with all that He says about Himself, and what He claims for His teaching. He does not hesitate to speak with authority; and the people recognized it. They said that �he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes� (Matthew 7:29) . . .�Before Abraham was, I am,� He says. That is His claim everywhere. He commands them to listen because of the unique authority that belongs to His Person, and therefore to His teaching. That anyone could read the Scriptures without noting these claims would indeed be inexplicable were it not that we know how sin blinds, and how sin fills us with such prejudice that we cannot see. The crime today is that people are sitting in judgment, not only on the Scriptures, but also on the Lord of the Scriptures! They say that He was wrong in His belief in the Old Testament and that �He was a child of His age�. They do not hesitate to say that he was wrong in certain claims which He made for Himself. People who speak thus abandon all authoritative utterance, for there is no alternative. The supreme and only authority is the One who is the Son of God and who has come out of the eternal bosom. He was �with� God. He has looked into the face of God. And He has come on earth and He has revealed God. �No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he that declared him� (John 1:18). And what do we know apart from this revelation?

This is the beginning of the matter, the foundation, the base minimum, the absolute. We either take everything from this, or we have no authority at all. You either submit completely to it, or else one man�s opinion is as good as another�s � and that means that you have no authority at all. Before you can ever succeed in girding your loins about with truth, you have to come to God�s Word as a little child, or, to use the stronger word that Paul uses, you have got to come to it as a �fool�. �If any man seemeth to be wise in this world�, he says, �let him become a fool that he may be wise� (1 Corinthians 3:18); which means �Let him say he knows nothing, let him say that his philosophy is of no value to him, let him agree that �the world by wisdom knew not God� and cannot know God, and that therefore he knows nothing, and is prepared to bend his knees and to look up and receive the divine revelation . . . If you want to be girt about with truth you have to come as a little child, acknowledging not only your weakness and insufficiency and inability and complete impotence; you have got to realize that the Spirit of God must work upon you and enlighten you and cleanse your understanding and give you an anointing before you can receive the revelation that God has graciously been pleased to give us.

_________________________________________

All emphasis is mine.

All excerpts for this post were quoted from:

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, An Exposition of Ephesians 6:10-20 � The Christian Soldier, �The Scripture of Truth,� Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1977, chapter 15, pp. 207-220.

• Freedom from Quiet Time Guilt
  "At one time or another, every sincere believer feels a deep sense of failure and the accompanying feelings of guilt and shame because he or she has failed to set aside a separate time for Bible study and prayer." HT Bob Hayton.
  (tags: bible prayer worship)
• "I recommend them all highly, without reservation. (And you know how rare it is for me to give anything an unqualified recommendation.)"
  Phil Johnson on the T4G sessions, which he has finished listening to on his iPod.
  (tags: T4GB pyromaniacs)
• New Attitude Audio
  Justin Taylor notes that the seven main sessions of the New Attitude Conference are now available for purchase ($7) through the Sovereign Grace Ministries store.
  (tags: SGM taylor)

In a sermon entitled Building Our Lives on the Bible Piper stresses the vital place of building our lives on the Bible - it seemed appropriate to share this quote with you as we have been looking at the place of doctrine and Scripture, thanks to the T4G statement challenge.

"We are a people of the Book. We know God through the Book. We meet Christ in the Book. We see the cross in the Book. Our faith and love are kindled by the glorious truths of the Book. We have tasted the divine majesty of the Word and are persuaded that the Book is God's inspired and infallible written revelation. Therefore, what the Book teaches matters . . .

That is God's word to us as we launch into EDUCATION FOR EXULTATION. Bethlehem, "Continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of . . . the sacred writings" - the Word of God, the Bible. Don't advance. Don't go forward. Don't proceed from this. Continue in this. Stay in this. Remain in this. This kind of conservatism will make you the most radical, counter-cultural, risk-taking, free people possible in Christ. If you leave the Word, you will, in the end, just conform to the world - to the spirit of this age. This may feel freeing for a moment. But it will make you the slave of every passing fashion - and they are passing faster and faster.

So God's word to us in this vision of EDUCATION FOR EXULTATION is: Continue in your absolute allegiance to the unchanging truth of God's Word, the Bible. Stay here. Abide here. Build children's ministries on it. Build youth ministries on it. Build adult ministries on it. Build church planting strategies on it. Build marriages and families on it. Lead elder meetings with it. And whatever else you do, John Piper, don't preach anything but the Word of God, the Bible.

Mathew Sims on the T4G Statement, Part 4

(Tags: T4GB)

Mathew Sims Gets to Part 5
. . . and I've only posted one . . . still this T4G statement is sure making for some interesting blogging!

(Tags: T4GB)

"If any single quote could encapsulate why I am not a Christian, this one, by C. J. Mahaney, has to be it. The sheer, hideous inanity of a god that demands a blood sacrifice from an innocent in repayment for the sins of the guilty is beautifully captured here. It is a theology that captures the worst aspects of an archaic moral worldview, one that promulgates the barbaric idea of blood guilt and blood sacrifice."
The gospel is veiled to the perishing . . . .

(Tags: mahaney atonement gospel)

Is Complementarianism Simply Analogous to Racism?
Dave Warnock doesn't waste another opportunity to tell us that it is - I find the connection he makes to be most bizarre, don't you?

(Tags: T4GB complementarianism racism)

The Life and Death of the Missional Leader
The audio from session one of Mark Driscoll's recent Resurgence Conference is now available.

(Tags: driscoll)

"There's no Christian life presented in the Bible apart from being connected to the people of God," he said. "Let's go home and let's live it!"
Josh challenges the NA attendees to go live it out!

(Tags: church SGM harris ... on May 30)

"Rather than being treated as a metaphor, the model of penal substitution has been given an objective reality which does not belong to it."
Herein lies the rub in the atonement debate. Do we hold (as I do) that there IS an objective reality to punishment and wrath and substitution, or do we think it's JUST a metaphor?

(Tags: atonement theology gospel cross chalke)

"... the phrase verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible is problematical ..."
Dave Warnock pits the T4G guys against the Evangelical Alliance and other statements of faith in his latest post - this time on Article I.

(Tags: T4GB bible)

Mark Dever has a great post over at the T4G blog which hammers home their reasons for prioritising the complementarianism versus egalitarianism issue in their statement. You might feel that the issue of whether or not women should hold the position of elder is a relatively minor point of theology. These guys clearly do not! I am going to take the liberty of quoting the last few paragraphs of this, but do go and read it all:

"Well then," you might say, "why don't you leave this issue of complementarianism at the level of baptism or church polity? Surely you cooperate with those who disagree with you on such matters." Because, though I could be wrong, it is my best and most sober judgment that this position is effectively an undermining of--a breach in--the authority of Scripture. As Lig, the paedobaptist, has often said, "If there were a verse in 1 Timothy saying, 'I do not permit an infant to be baptized . . .' we wouldn't be having this conversation about baptism! There is such a verse about women serving as teachers/elders!"

Dear reader, you may not agree with me on this. And I don