Monthly Archives: May 2012

Proverbs 11:1 (ESV)
A false balance is an abomination to the Lord,
but a just weight is his delight.

A false balance is an abomination to the Lord.

What sins does this address? Greed – the reason the balance is false is so that the merchant who weighs what is being sold can make more money. How the money is earned is not the issue to him. The issue is money and plenty of it. His problem is idolatry (Colossians 3:5). Greed and also  dishonesty, lying, hypocrisy, lack of integrity, callous disregard for others and more come to mind. And it results in quietly putting a thumb on the scale when the meat is weighed. It seems like such a small thing. Only the Lord knows how many times we have been hornswoggled without knowing it. It is why there are security commissions and fraud squads and insider trading laws. It is why lottery tickets have to be signed ( a lovely piece of irony there – lottery corporations ask people to sign their tickets so merchants won’t cheat them while cheating people out of their money with false claims of getting rich – but I digress.)

Of course, merchants are not the only ones who can make a false balance. Any false impression we make to benefit ourselves is a false balance. The Pharisees lived life in a false balance. Pray long and pray loud. Travel the world to make disciples. Let everyone know how much you give to the poor. Deny yourself and let everyone know it. Look down on everybody who does not live life the way you do. The merchant does not tell his customers that he has rigged the balance to give him more money. “This balance is rigged but you have to pay according to what it registers, so you’re just out of luck.” Not at all. He wants them to believe that he is an honest salesman and that he is giving them a good deal and that they will come back again because he is so good and trustworthy and deserving of their business.

And we will not announce to one another that we wrestle with some pretty serious sins and that sometimes we lose. We will not reveal that our thumbs are on the scale from time to time. That would make the customers go away. The customers? Those we interact with on a daily basis. The people we want to like us. The people we think will shop elsewhere for friends if they could test the scales.  The God we think will only be pleased with us if we perform really well.

This is not to say that we should be airing our dirty laundry for all to see all the time. What my personal struggles are, quite frankly, is none of your business, unless I sin against you. But you can be sure of this – I have some. And so do you. The false balance says that I don’t. The only way to get people to believe that I don’t is to rig the scales.

Verse 3 of Proverbs 11 says that the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them. What a waste. Spend your life trying to get ahead by giving false impressions and have it ruin you. Haman’s noose (Esther 7:9-10).

Or know the freedom of sins forgiven, and the absolute liberation of coming clean with God and at least one other person who will help keep you accountable – and honest. How good God has been to give us such people. More evidence of great grace born out of great love and lavished on us with incredible generosity. Grace that gets our thumbs off the scales is great indeed.

Revelation 14:6-7 (ESV)
Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people.  [7] And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.”

An angel flies over the Apostle John’s head and he has the eternal Gospel to proclaim. Let’s keep that in mind. The angel has the eternal Gospel to proclaim. The next phrase of the text is this “And he said with a loud voice…” Now then; you fill in the rest of that sentence. The angel has the eternal Gospel to proclaim and he says with a loud voice __________.

What does He say? In a boomingly loud voice he shouts “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life!!” Umm – no. “Accept Jesus into your heart!!!” “Raise your hand and repeat after me!!!” Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Fear God, Glorify God, Worship God”. The Gospel that this angel shouts in a very loud voice begins with God.

He first says to fear God. This is where the Gospel begins because what the fall has done has removed from us the fear of God (See Romans 3:18). When God is not feared then people will feel no compunction to do whatever enters their depraved little hearts to do. They do not fear because they do not believe that there is a God who is holy and just. If they believe in God at all they believe in one who will see that they are fundamentally good and will look on them with great kindness.  The Gospel begins with the news that there is a holy and just God who should be feared. Jesus says plainly that we should fear the One who can throw body and soul into hell – right there in Luke 12:5 – in the red letter parts.

Then the angel calls on people to glorify God. Our sinfulness has removed from us the satisfying desire to glorify God and replaced it with the pathetic substitute of glorifying anything that promotes me or my goals or psyche or whatever happens to be at the top of my list today. We are a self glorifying bunch. There is not a one of us who does not, by nature, live to be glorified. This is the result of the fall. The first temptation was to be like God. God gets the glory and that is how we show our idolatry more than in any other way. Give-me-glory.

Then the angels calls for the worship of God. We are made in the image of God and as His image bearers we are made to worship. And we will worship -  Something. But outside of embracing Jesus Christ it will never be God. It will be us or the things that benefit us or satisfy us. And outside of Jesus Christ what satisfies will always be something other than Him.

Fear God, glorify God, worship God. And the Gospel – the good news in this is that Jesus Christ has done everything to bring us to do just that – from our hearts, for His glory. An act of unfathomable grace.

Without the grace of God showered on us by God the Holy Spirit to bring us to faith in Jesus and obedience to Him we will never heed the call of this  angel proclaiming this great Gospel. We were made to fear God, glorify God and worship God. Jesus came to make this possible. Jesus came to do this for a vast numberless multitude from every tribe and people and tongue and nation. And he succeeded in every possible way – through His life, death, burial, resurrection and intercession. He will bring His finished work to fruition when He returns and brings everything back to what it should be. This is the Gospel.

Narnia, we are told, while it was in the grip of the White witch, was in a state of always winter and never Christmas. What a dreadful thought. Meant to communicate to children especially just how horrible the place God had made good, had become.

There are lots of dreadful thoughts. In Revelation 14 we are given a description of hell that ought to terrify anyone who seeks to live in our very confused world today. When you hear the word “hell” what image pops into your mind? Fire, pain, torment, agony, darkness, loneliness. These are all pictures that reflect in some measure the Bible’s description of hell. But there is one in Revelation 14:11 that is even more frightening to us in our world of instant communication, multi-tasking attempts to get more done than any single person can ever succeed at. A seven word phrase that describes our culture’s current hellishness but will be unbearably so when real hell arrives. “… they have no rest day or night…”. Narnia was always winter and never Christmas. Hell is always tired and never resting. Constantly tired. To do lists that never get close to being done and never able to take a break and replenish one’s energies.

This should not surprise. Coming to Jesus is receiving from Him – rest. He is our Sabbath rest. We come to Him and He gives us rest. Hell is not entering into the rest that God offers. “They shall never enter into my rest” is God’s judgement upon the disobedient (Psalm 95:11). Hell is for those who seek to work their way into heaven. And the reason there is no rest there is because they never rested in Christ in life. The reason there is no rest there is because an eternity of work can never pay the price for sin. Hell is people receiving justice. It is Haman’s noose. Haman was the man who built a gallows for Esther’s uncle Mordecai and ended up swinging from it himself. People who end up in hell are those who sought to win the favour of God through work and end up finding out that God has given them exactly what they wanted – endless work and no rest.

I do not know what terrifies you about hell. But this is one of the most terrifying things I can think of. Constant exhaustion and eternal absence of rest. Always pushing on to the next project only to find that the previous one is  never done. Always thinking that rest is just around the corner, only to find that the corner has been hiding more work. Always hoping that if one does just a little bit more, God will be pleased. He will be satisfied and then there will be rest. And it never happens.

Let us go to a world that is tired and confused and yet unwilling to rest in the only thing that will give them hope and tell them to stop working. Working for the right to be accepted by God. Working to make themselves something. Working to get approval from – anyone. Jesus has done it all, we say to them. Rest now in Him and forever, or you will never rest at all.

Contrast this horrible fate of the wicked with that of those who die “in the Lord”, in verse 13. They “rest from their labors.” Those who do not seek rest in Christ and who never worked for Him will have no rest – forever. Those who now rest in Christ for their salvation and use all their strength, not to win God’s approval but as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, will rest from their labours. Horror and glory in such a brief passage. Let us take the Gospel of rest in Jesus Christ, to a world that is constantly tired and stressed and  thinking that the only good that will come is what they will earn for themselves. At the same time longing for a real break. Let us be tireless in our efforts to offer rest. Our eternal rest will come when God rewards us for our labours.

I found this article by C. Michael Patton over at Credo House and thought it worth passing on to you. Hope you like it.

Martin Luther is credited with returning the church to a proper theology of the cross. The theology of the cross is much more than preaching that Jesus died and rose from the dead as Saviour. The theology of the cross is an emphasis on the shock of the Gospel. It states that God works in the opposite way in which we would expect Him to work. Want a giant killed? You do not send in an inexperienced, young, untrained sheepherder to accomplish the job. No one would do such a thing. And that is why God did it. Want to rescue your people from the clutches of a superior force who outnumbers you, is smarter than you and has held your people in fear for many years? Do not hire the coward who is threshing grain in a wine press out of fear. And if that is who eventually gets the job, do not reduce his troops to an absurdly small number and send him into battle with water jugs and horns. But that is what God does. He calls murderers, schemers, liars, cheats, children, women, the uneducated, the undesirables and those who do not want the jobs they are called to. And when God wants to save the world from its sin He does so in ways that seem to deny the power of what is happening.

What do people see as they look at Jesus on the cross? They see a man hanging in agony. He is blood drenched from the beatings. His body drips blood, sweat and the spit of his mockers. Blood drips from the wounds in His head from the crown of thorns that was thrust upon it, from His side that was pierced with a spear, and from his hands and feet because they are nailed to wood. He is a pathetic mess. Yet Paul will tell us that on that cross Jesus is making a public spectacle of His enemies (Colossians 3:15). This is the theology of the cross. God will accomplish the greatest victory ever won by becoming a man; by becoming a poor man; by becoming a defeated, beaten, forsaken man. It defies everything we know about how to get the victory.

We are the people threshing wheat in a wine press for fear of our enemies. We are the stammering shepherd on the back side of the desert. We are the “are nots”. Our work is less about gifts than it is about the power of God to work through common clay pots. The reason we take a back seat to no one and live and speak with passion and conviction and confidence, is not because we have learned how to do things so well. It is not because we are superiorly gifted. It is not because we have discovered really good theology. It is because God uses the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are. It is because He puts the treasure of the light of the Gospel of God in ordinary clay pots so that the power will be seen to be God’s. It is so that He will be glorified and not us. And no matter how well we know this lesson and no matter how much we have had this pounded into us, we still fall prey to the allurements of power and fame and believing that if we build it they will come. We are tempted to look with envy at the mega pastors of the reformed variety and feel vindicated that our day has come at last and that maybe we can get in on the parade, not as mere spectators but as those who are being spectated. It is a denial of the cross. It is to forget that the waterers and planters are nothing. It is to believe that when we are strong then we are strong. It robs preaching of its power and the preacher of his passion and faith in the message and the work of the Holy Spirit to win His chosen ones through the foolishness of the message preached. We need to rehearse to ourselves the theology of the cross and find that it is a fountain of water that will sustain us more than all our machinations and understandings of how things ought to be done.

We are in danger of our own type of prosperity Gospel these days simply through our infatuation with those who have, by the undeserved grace of God, been used of Him to save their tens of thousands. Who does not want their buildings bursting at the seams next Sunday? Who doesn’t want the baptistry in use every Sunday? These are not bad desires. But we need to keep on our guard lest we find in these things the indispensable elements for the success of our work. We are called to display the manifold wisdom of God and that wisdom is the cross of Jesus Christ – an event that wins by becoming nothing, triumphs through defeat, and defeats death by dying. I thank God that I have been put into a church full people not considered much in the eyes of the world. Many of them leave church every week to dysfunctional family lives, poverty, welfare, minimum wage jobs, and mental illness. It is not possible to stand before this group of people on any given Sunday, look out at the smiles and the demonstrative worship and listen to shouts of “amen” and applause for one another and not preach with passion. Why are so many of these people so happy? Their problems are immense. Just a small group of people armed with nothing but water jugs and horns – and the power of God. It is a church full of “are nots” and it is glorious. God is using this church with all its problems (and we have a ton of them), bad theology (and we have a ton of that), illiteracy (far too much of that too), mental illness, on top of all the normal problems and sins of a church, for the salvation of people in this community. We are not seeing much in terms of people coming to faith in Christ. But we are what God has called to preach the Gospel to them. The people of this church have found out, after eighteen years of sitting under its current senior pastor that he is not as smart as they once thought, not indestructible, does not have all the answers, cannot administrate well at all. An “are not” pastor preaching in an “are not “ community to an “are not” people. This is not what Rexdale needs. But it is how God, congruent with the way He has worked throughout all of history, will win His chosen Rexdale people. I cannot imagine anything that could possibly put more heart or passion into the preaching of the Gospel. We dare not fall into the trap of “if only” thinking. If only we had had the support of the Board. If only they put into practise the lessons in the messages we preach. If only they got along. If only they had listened. If only they had taken the truth seriously. If only they would witness …. .

Ezekiel 37:1-14 – The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones.  [2] And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.  [3] And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”  [4] Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  [5] Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.  [6] And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.” [7] So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.  [8] And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.  [9] Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”  [10] So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. [11] Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.’  [12] Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel.  [13] And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people.  [14] And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.”

Can the bones we preach to live? Does your heart believe that as you go to the pulpit this Sunday that God can make the bones live? Do we believe it when we go to work in the morning? Do we believe it at our schools? Do we believe He has got us where we are so that He will save people through us? We need to believe that God has us where we are because He intends to save people. He has not sent us out on a fool’s errand. The bones we preach to are not more dead (and not less either) than the ones Ezekiel preached to and God has not brought us into this valley for nothing. We need to preach believing that our call is not Isaiah’s, until God tells us that it is. In other words, we need to preach with the belief that God intends to save people through our preaching. Heart preaching that reaches the heart is preaching that believes that the Gospel is the power of God and it will save.

Hope, may I add, in the biblical sense of that word. Hope that knows that God cannot lie, has made great and precious promises, keeps His promises and has called us to serve him. Hope that is defined, not as mere wishes like we hope for certain things for Christmas. But real hope that knows that God will do for us what He has promised even though we do not have it yet.

1 Tim. 4:16 Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.

That is, you will be the means of their salvation. It is not necessary to suppose that the apostle meant to teach that he would save all that heard him. The declaration is to be understood in a popular sense, and it is undoubtedly true that a faithful minister will be the means of saving many sinners. This assurance furnishes a ground of encouragement for a minister of the gospel. He may hope for success, and should look for success. He has the promise of God that if he is faithful he shall see the fruit of his labors, and this result of his work is a sufficient reward for all the toils and sacrifices and self-denials of the ministry. If a minister should be the means of saving but one soul from the horrors of eternal suffering and eternal sinning, it would be worth the most self-denying labors of the longest life. Yet what minister of the gospel is there, who is at all faithful to his trust, who is not made the honored instrument of the salvation of many more than one? Few are the devoted ministers of Christ who are not permitted to see evidence even here, that their labor has not been in vain. Let not, then, the faithful preacher be discouraged. A single soul rescued from death will be a gem in his eternal crown brighter by far than ever sparkled on the brow of royalty.
Yes, yes, I know there are things said in the above quote that irritate our sensibilities. I do not believe that the mark of the faithful minister is necessarily “many” converts. But what this quote says about labouring for the salvation of one soul is worth putting the whole thing in.

Brokenness and thankfulness and joy can reside in the same heart at the same time in the same person. The people of God are called by God and commanded by God to be joyful always even as they have broken hearts. Those people in the pews need to see the possibility of that joy in the pulpit and they need to know that this is the mark of their heart. This is true regardless of the personality of the preacher. I do not get off the hook regarding joy simply because I have a depressive personality. Anger at sin and stupidity and ignorance does not excuse us from being joyful. Agony created by the circumstances of our church or personal lives is not to erase the deeper seated joy that no amount of tragedy can take away. Our work is for the joy of our people (II Cor. 1:24) and we will never accomplish that if we are curmudgeons. Anger and righteous indignation are easy, especially when there is so much theological nonsense, evangelical stupidity and religious pluralism in the Christian community. We may look to Jeremiah for justification for our angst but the God who calls us to Jeremiads also calls us to produce the fruit of the Spirit that is joy. It is not an either/or prospect. It is both/and. There is much to produce joy in us even as we have broken hearts for God’s glory, the souls of the lost and the spiritual growth of our people.

Heart preaching will preach in faith that God has people in this place and He has not sent us on a fool’s errand. He has not placed us where we are, for nothing. I left St. John’s Newfoundland in the fall of 1986 after five years of labour planting a church and seeing almost no fruit from the efforts. I can look back on three converts and a church of thirty people in the five years I was there. Shortly before I left I surmised that I had not done much and that I wish  more had happened. My fellow elder responded by saying that it was no small thing that there was a group of people who still believed the Gospel and had not given in to all that came at them tempting them to give up. No small thing that God put me in St. John’s for five years just to be the tool that He would use to lead three of His children chosen from before the foundation of the world. No small thing that God could have done it through a hundred other means but in His providence chose to bring me back to my homeland to do it. There is no joy greater than knowing that the doors of your church are still open because God is going to use you to win some of His chosen ones to Himself through you.

Preaching means that God uses human means. We need to believe that God can save people without us. The fact that He chooses to use us is not a testimony to our ingenuity but rather to the fact that God uses the foolish to confound the mighty. We know that preaching the Gospel is not a matter of positive thinking, but we should also know that it is also not a matter of insurmountable pessimism either. It is a poor preacher who is convinced that nothing will result from the preaching of the Gospel. We believe that God saves sinners through the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and we should deliver it with the conviction that the people we are preaching to or the person we are witnessing to is not hearing it from us by accident. The God who works out everything after the council of His own will, has put that person and those people under the hearing of our speaking and we should leave room for the possibility that the reason He has done so is to save them.

Some of you may have read the blog post by Russell Moore a few months ago regarding the future of the evangelical church. I copy a portion of it here now for you because it fits.

The next Jonathan Edwards might be the man driving in front of you with the Darwin Fish bumper decal. The next Charles Wesley might be a misogynist, profanity-spewing hip-hop artist right now. The next Billy Graham might be passed out drunk in a fraternity house right now. The next Charles Spurgeon might be making posters for a Gay Pride March right now. The next Mother Teresa might be managing an abortion clinic right now.

But the Spirit of God can turn all that around. And seems to delight to do so. The new birth doesn’t just transform lives, creating repentance and faith; it also provides new leadership to the church, and fulfills Jesus’ promise to gift his church with everything needed for her onward march through space and time (Eph. 4:8-16).

After all, while Phillip was leading the Ethiopian eunuch to Christ, Saul of Tarsus was still a murderer.

Most of the church in any generation comes along through the slow, patient discipleship of the next generation. But just to keep us from thinking Christianity is evolutionary and “natural” (or, to use Dr. Henry’s term “genetic”), Jesus shocks his church with leadership that seems to come like a Big Bang out of nowhere.

Whenever I’m tempted to despair about the shape of American Christianity, I’m reminded that Jesus never promised the triumph of the American church; he promised the triumph of the church. Most of the church, in heaven and on earth, isn’t American. Maybe the hope of the American church is right now in Nigeria or Laos or Indonesia.

Jesus will be King, and his church will flourish. And he’ll do it in the way he chooses, by exalting the humble and humbling the exalted, and by transforming cowards and thieves and murderers into the cornerstones of his New City.

How we need to believe this as we approach our pulpits every Sunday and as we go out to wherever it is that we go, to give the Gospel to the lost in our communities.

Jesus compassion for the lost multitudes led Him to call upon His followers to pray. Paul’s anguish for his fellow Jews (9:1-3) led him to pray that they would be saved (10:1). Real heart preaching will come from hearts that are broken because of the blindness, slavery and deadness of the people to whom God has sent us. And that brokenness will lead to fervent heart felt praying.

Ezekiel 9:3-6 – Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub on which it rested to the threshold of the house. And he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writing case at his waist.  [4] And the Lord said to him, “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.”  [5] And to the others he said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him, and strike. Your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity.  [6] Kill old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one on whom is the mark. And begin at my sanctuary.” So they began with the elders who were before the house.

Those spared the punishment of God in Ezekiel’s vision are those who grieve over the sins of Jerusalem. Their hearts were broken. Heart preaching will preach from the brokenness that results from preaching and pastoring and witnessing to those who choose rebellion and sin, to those who think that their rebellion is not rebellion at all, to those who turn grace into licentiousness and to those who just don’t care. Heart preaching will weep over the enslavement that sin exerts over the lost. It will mourn for sinners, for the glory of God denied and for the openness people show for all things except Gospel truth. It will grieve over believers who after years of faith in Christ and hearing countless sermons and serving on Boards and teaching Sunday School and even daring to vote for who should be their pastor, they are yet babes in Christ.  It will feel the stabs of pain that result from dealing with saved people whose knowledge of Scripture is barely past the kindergarten level and for those who know much of its teaching but whose mastery of the Word has done nothing to bring them one step closer to the Kingdom of heaven.

A broken heart hurts. But it is necessary for the work of Gospel delivery and true pastoral care. Do not doubt this. Do not think that a heart that is immune to the pain and suffering and lostness and ignorance and intransigence of your people is better suited to help them. Do not think that a heart that is able to talk of eternal life and have people reject it and leave no scar on the heart is what preachers need. We need just the opposite. We need hearts that break and stay broken. We need to feel the agony of souls going to hell. We need to be like our Saviour whose heart broke over those who listened to Him and who now invites them to come and be saved.

I prayed for years for God to take my hard heart and turn it into a heart that cares and cries and mourns and aches. “Make me feel” was my prayer and God did. He gave me feeling through all kinds of difficulties and hardships in the ministry and in my personal life. There are times when I wonder if I really asked for all this. But I did, and God was gracious enough to give it to me and I am very grateful. I needed a heart transplant and God gave it to me and it was not pleasant. But I would not replace it for anything.

Let us not waste our trials. God has given them to us for all kinds of reasons, the least of which, is not getting a heart of compassion that will be more useful to Christ in the delivery of the Gospel to lost sinners. There will be no true heart preaching if that heart has never been wounded and broken. There will be no heart preaching if Paul’s attitude in Romans 9 and 10 is not ours. There will be no heart preaching if we do not ask God to grant the kind of heart that delivers it.

Romans 9:1-3 – I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— [2] that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.  [3] For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.
Romans 10:1 – Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.

Prayer is a statement of dependence and prayerlessness is an even louder statement of independence. There is no one as utterly dependent upon a work of God in his calling than the preacher, and wise is the preacher who grows in his understanding of that simple fact. Those of us who have given ourselves to it will be judged with a harsher judgement and that fact alone should garner more prayer than the average saint will muster. Heart preaching begins on the knees. This is such a well worn truth that we should hardly need mentioning it, but like the corner stone on most of our church buildings claiming that this structure is here for the glory of God, it is a valuable truth that is soon never noticed once the dedication service has taken place. If we are ever going to preach sermons that reach the hearts of our hearers it will be because we have agonized in prayer seeking guidance and help from our God, imploring Him to do in the hearts of our hearers what we cannot. Those who are young, as well as those who listen to them, may be tempted to think that the tools they received in their training is all they need for the work. Mastery of the languages, hermeneutical prowess, homiletical genius and systematics expertise can become great deceivers of those who come out of seminary armed with them. They will not replace the need for concentrated, heartfelt, pastoral prayer for the blessing of God upon their preaching and for fruit that matters to come of it. And how many of us who have been at this for a scary number of years fall into thinking that our years of experience are all the preparation we need? It is easy to think that we have preached certain texts and doctrines so long that we could do it in our sleep. Perhaps God will graciously cause those in the congregation to do just that before more harm is done.

The prayerful heart in preaching is the heart that knows that without a movement of the Holy Spirit upon the hearers of sermons nothing at all will happen and so God must be petitioned to bless the preaching with fruit. There is the Leadership magazine cartoon of the preacher standing behind the pulpit preaching and in front of him is a brick wall, and who of us has not felt that? Without prayer that brick wall will win. It will win our hearts. It will create cynicism, despondency, depression. It will bring on a sense of failure and uselessness.  Patience will suffer and so will the willingness to persevere in our calling. Prayerlessness  may even create listeners who credit the lack of fruit on the preacher – and if we are not marked by prayer for all aspects of our preaching, including converts, then they may be proved right.

Matthew 9:35-38 – And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.  [36] When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.  [37] Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few;  [38] therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

It is a striking, significant thing that what Jesus calls the disciples to do in light of the magnitude of the harvest, is to pray. “Look, there are many lost people in desperate straits. They are lost without direction – Pray for people who will help them find me.”

Heart preaching begins, not in trying to figure out how to get the truth to the hearts of the lost, but making sure that it reaches and comes from ours. It is a glorious truth that the Gospel is not dependent upon the power or life or motives of the preacher.

Philippians. 1:15-18 – Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will.  [16] The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel.  [17] The former proclaim Christ out of rivalry, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.  [18] What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.

But we dare not make this the norm or we would be here encouraging men to be false in their motives for the sake of winning the lost to Himself. The Bible is clear that those handling the Word of God are to work at being approved of God with no need to be ashamed. We are to watch our lives and doctrine closely with the promise that if we do, we and our hearers will be saved. Our hearts are crucial in the matter of preaching the Gospel.

Heart preaching is passion for the God of whom we preach, the Truth of the Word that He has spoken, the salvation of the lost, the sanctification and edification of the church. It is difficult to comprehend how any man can stay in the pastorate for the long haul without this passion, and perhaps this is why so many do not make it.

Heart preaching is Jeremiah in Jeremiah 20:9
If I say, “I will not mention him,
                or speak any more in his name,”
            there is in my heart as it were a burning fire
                shut up in my bones,
            and I am weary with holding it in,
                and I cannot.
This, it needs to be noted, is said by Jeremiah when everything has gone south for him and he is charging God with misleading him. “If I had known things were going to turn out like this, I would never have signed on”, seems to be his attitude. But he cannot stop. He cannot stop because God has called him to preach and he cannot keep in what God has told him to let loose. Heart preaching is preaching that identifies with this in at least some measure. It is part of our response to a call to deliver the Word of God.

There are many today, as there has always been, who believe they have a message from God that everyone should pay attention to. They have a burning in their hearts, for sure, but it is not based on the Scriptures. Mormons speak about knowing they have the truth because of a “burning in the bosom” that confirms it for them. Many of us encounter Muslims who have a great passion for a false book and a false prophet. Eliphaz himself, the counsellor of Job even had divine approval, as far as he was concerned.
 Job 4:12-16 (ESV)  
        ”Now a word was brought to me stealthily;
            my ear received the whisper of it.
        [13] Amid thoughts from visions of the night,
            when deep sleep falls on men,
        [14] dread came upon me, and trembling,
            which made all my bones shake.
        [15] A spirit glided past my face;
            the hair of my flesh stood up.
        [16] It stood still,
            but I could not discern its appearance.
         A form was before my eyes;
            there was silence, then I heard a voice:

Too much heat and not enough light is a far too common malady. It has produced a Christianity that has little use for the Word of God and little use for sound doctrine based upon that word. But it should not deter us from praying a fire into our hearts for the Scriptures from which we preach, for the God of whom we preach and for the people to whom we preach. Heat without light is nothing more than warm darkness, and we should take all legitimate measures to ensure that we do not have the disease.  But we who are more prone to light without heat need to take care that we do not give people something to see while leaving them shivering. Jeremiah had the right thing and we should desire the experience for ourselves before parsing our way out of the necessity.

“It is dreadful work to listen to a sermon, and feel all the while as if you were sitting out in a snowstorm, or dwelling in a house of ice, clear but cold, orderly but killing. You have said to yourself, “That was a well-divided and well planned sermon, but I cannot make out what was the matter with it;” the secret being that there was the wood, but no fire to kindle it. A great sermon without the heart in it reminds one of those great furnaces in Wales which have been permitted to go out; they are a pitiful sight. We prefer a sermon in which there may be no vast talent, and no great depth of thought; but what there is has come fresh from the crucible, and, like molten metal, burns its way.” (Spurgeon)

We have no use for mere excitement in the pulpit. Far too often it is no more than forced, orchestrated emotionalism that is a detriment to the Gospel. But that should not make us shy away from a real movement of God upon our own hearts. Preaching in a manner that gives the impression that the truth has never lifted us to great heights of wonder is shameful. We must long for and pray for hearts that feel, and then demonstrate the wonder of the Gospel. It is a heart for God and all that falls out of that. We must be men who preach from the very marrow of our souls because our hearts will not let us keep quiet.

In January, I delivered a paper at the Grace Pastors Fellowship, a ministry of the Sovereign Grace Fellowship of Canada. The paper was entitled “Heart Preaching”. While it is mainly talking to pastors about preaching, I think it may have some relevance to any Christian who is concerned about delivering truth to people. So, over the next little while I will be posting snippets from it. You can listen to it here if you care to.

Andrew Bonar, in his biography of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, tells the following story regarding an encounter he had with M’Cheyene:
I remember on one occasion, when we met, he asked what my last Sabbath’s subject had been. It had been ‘the wicked shall be turned into hell.’ On hearing this awful text, he asked, ‘Were you able to preach it with tenderness?’
It’s a telling account. It speaks of M’Cheyne’s love for souls, his pastoral heart, his conformity to Christ and his awareness that it is easier to rage against sin in anger than warn sinners with love.

We are going to consider the matter of heart preaching. I was not given great detail about where to take the title of this lecture today and I had enough wisdom not to call those who gather to decide on such things. Finding out with exactitude what was being asked would have hemmed me in far too much and so on the basis that it easier to get forgiveness than permission I chose to take this matter to two places.

Heart preaching is preaching that comes from the heart.
Heart preaching is preaching that goes to the heart.

II    Heart preaching is preaching from the heart

A Passionate Heart

Heart preaching is preaching with passion. My dictionary defines passion as:
“any intense, extreme, or overpowering emotion or feeling. A strong desire or affection for some object, cause etc.”
How we need passion in the pulpit! The people we shepherd and preach to, need to know that the truth of God has rivetted our hearts to Him and His truth. They need to hear from men who have spent much time with God, not because they had the duty of laying out Scripture to them for forty-five minutes, but because it was their great joy and delight to be allowed the privilege. The blessed man is the one who is in the Law of the Lord and on that Law meditates day and night – not because he has to, but because he gets to. We hold in our hands that which will still be around after heaven and earth pass away, and we have been permitted by God, who could deliver it much better than we can, to preach it to people so that they will know the God who became flesh and grow into conformity to Him. It is a stunning reality and we ought not to be able to practise preaching without our hearts being smitten by the wonder that God has called us to it.
Luke 24:32 – They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us
while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”

How we need to have our hearts set afire over the Word of God because we met with Him in the study closet and encountered the Word in a way that gripped us. I do not believe that we should be content to know a piece of truth and know how to exegete it and know how to explain it and illustrate it and apply it. We need to feel it. We need to feel it powerfully, deeply, personally, movingly. We need to feel its truth. We need to feel the conviction that the Holy Spirit brings when we encounter an exposing of our sin in it. We need to have it grip us so that we call out with the Psalmist “O how I love your law!!”  (Psalm 119:97, 159). That cry did not come from a heart that was dry and matter of fact. Something grabbed him that caused him to cry out of his love for God’s word.