Archives for October 2007

In Victoria, we had bro. Bob Fricks, from the staff of Galilee Baptist Church in Kent, WA, filling our pulpit. One of my deacon’s reports “the preaching was a blessing for all. We had 38 attend and 3 more came after coffee. As usual there was more food than people and way to much desert…”

In Greenville, we heard a message from Dr. Bruce McAllister, a long time friend of mine. He gave an excellent message on Acts 20.24 and Paul’s commitment to the ministry. The challenge of the message was for young people to make the same commitment. The service was a great blessing, but I missed singing the “Amens” after the hymns. Things aren’t as formal here as they used to be. They still say the creed, though, and I still remember it without looking.

This evening we went to Cornerstone Baptist Church, pastored by Dr. Gary Reimers, another seminary friend. He preached a fine message on Psalm 32 on the subject of guilt and how to handle it. He gave an excellent exposition of the passage, bringing the poetry to life, real practical life in pointing the Christian to the source of real joy, which is a life lived openly before God, with nothing between my soul and the Saviour.

The day was a great blessing to me, bringing to mind the reality of the person of Jesus Christ. I wonder how many professing Christians really believe that there IS a living person who IS God and who IS personally interested in every detail of their life. When we are born again, we are born again by repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ (Ac 20.21). But faith means that we bow our knees and our hearts to a real person, living NOW. Faith isn’t just believing in a Jesus who was, but a Jesus who is.

I hope your day in Christ was equally profitable.

Regards
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

I will have light posting over the next week and a half – not that I am posting heavily these days. I am visiting with my ailing mother-in-law (and my wife who has been helping care for her these last three or four weeks). It is a great blessing to see my dear mother-in-law, though she is obviously uncomfortable and in failing health. And it is joy unspeakable to witness the grace of God in my wife as she lovingly cares for her mother. What a privilege to be married to such a woman!

I wanted to be sure to update you on last Sunday’s services in our church. We had a blessed day, including a couple visiting from a Baptist church in Capetown, South Africa.

Our first message continued the Romans series, Concerning His Son. The message focused on the person of the gospel. Romans 1.1-7 is one sentence in Greek, offering Paul’s salutation to the Romans. He establishes his credentials in verse one, closing with the matter of being a separated (‘marked out’) by the gospel of God. He tells us two things about that gospel in the next few verses – it is that which was promised before through the prophets (see here for summary) and it is that good news ‘concerning His Son’.

The word ‘Son’ stands at the beginning of verse 3 in the Greek, followed by two ‘who’ clauses, and is then renamed by the phrase ‘Jesus Christ our Lord’ at the end of v. 4. The KJV puts the word ‘son’ and the phrase ‘Jesus Christ our Lord’ together at the beginning of verse 3, while modern versions tend to put the words in the same order as the original Greek. Either way means the same thing, perhaps the modern versions have a slight advantage in preserving the original word order. To my mind, the impact of renaming the Son is heightened by holding to the original word order.

There is rich doctrinal content in the two ‘who’ clauses in vv. 3 and 4, but there is an eternity of value in the four words which name our Lord, so I took this message to spend some time thinking on each word. William Newell said: “The gospel is all about Christ. Apart from Him, there is no news from heaven but that of coming woe!” [Newell, p. 16] Here is our proposition: “The names of the Son express the essence of eternal life, communicated to man by faith.” First, as the Son of the Father, we see our Lord as a glorious person, the Eternal Son of an Almighty and Eternal Father, one in essence with Him, distinct in personality, sent by the Father on a rescue mission to a dying world. Second we see our Lord as the man Jesus – a jarring thought in contrast to the glory of his eternal being, a man with human limitations, dependent on the Father, the man whose name means ‘Yah is Salvation’. The two clauses of v. 3 and 4 speak to the transition between the eternity of the Son to the limitations of Jesus the man – made of the seed of David, declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection. These two events reveal the stupendous character of this man, Son of God, son of Man, our Saviour. Third, he is the promised Christ. The Messiah, the anointed one, the one set aside to the place of The Prophet, The Priest, The King, the one promised from Gen 3.15 on to be the answer to the sin problem of mankind. And last we see our Lord as our Lord! Lord means master, owner, one who has the right to dispose of his property as he will. But the term includes what I called ‘the precious pronoun’: our. He is our Lord. We hold him to be our Master by faith in his name, in his work on the cross in our behalf. I pointed out Phil 2.5-11. Someday every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that he is Lord, but for most, it will be too late. And here is my simple conclusion:

Our Lord …
Is he your Lord?

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Our afternoon message concludes our series on the metaphors of the Church. I repeated this metaphor with a new sermon and additional content on the idea It’s a building. I wanted to focus on the need for organization and administration that the building metaphor implies. A literal building is an organized structure if it is intended to last at all. I described the simple homes of Palestine during Bible times, most of which did not survive all these years, even as ruins, since they were made of mud bricks. Even simple structures like these required organization and working building systems to provide shelter for people at all. A local church, as a building requires organization as well. Some of that is mandated in the Scriptures: Pastors/Elders and Deacons. Some is exemplified: the committee for the care of ‘widows indeed’ in 1 Tim 4. All of this involves structure and organization. I used Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle as an example of a large church with multiple different kinds of ministries during Spurgeon’s day. Over 66 different ministries were in existence at the time of Spurgeon’s 25th anniversary as a pastor. In addition, the Tabernacle had 40 mission churches under its sponsorship and many Sunday schools and Ragged Schools as well. All of this effort requires organization and administration. This is an aspect of church life that I believe is a failing in our minsitry, or at least a weakness. This is primarily because I personally HATE administration. But it is something that we must get better at in order to improve our gospel impact in our community.

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In our Sunday School hour we are going through the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. This is a worthy document and has provoked much valuable discussion in our assembly.

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Well, all of that catches me up. I hope to find time to post a few things later. Traveling just doesn’t seem conducive to much blogging!

Regards
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

Our morning message saw us take a significant leap forward in the exposition of Romans. In message number 4, we rushed into the second verse of the 1st chapter! It was a daring gambit, but seemed to be succesful!

Seriously, Lloyd-Jones outdoes me. He had five messages on the first verse, I only had three. If you have the opportunity, I would recommend reading his fifth message on “The Gospel of God”. The message is worth the price of the book by itself. I was sorely tempted to make the same phrase my text this morning, but I determined to soldier on.

Our message today was entitled The Promised Gospel. The interesting thing about our verse is that Paul seems to pause before giving us the content of the gospel (the person and work of Christ, vv. 3-4ff.) to instead make a comment about the ancient character of the gospel. We might think the words about the promise coming through the prophets in holy writings is something of a throw-away, a ‘by the way’ type of statement. After all, the gospel is the central thing, and Christ and his work are the heart and soul of the gospel. But the reference to the prophets and the promise is a characteristic of apostolic preaching, especially Paul’s preaching. He mentions it at least three times in Romans itself, in the second verse, in 3.21, and in the second last verse (16.26). His comment is no incidental comment. He is establishing a notion that the gospel is the heart and soul of the ancient plan of God, even, I think, pointing back to that earliest hint of a promise found in Gen 3.15. It is important to realize that God’s promises are ancient, plentiful, and now fulfilled – note past tense of ‘promised’. It is important to realize that the Lord used the prophets to propagate the promise of the gospel. It is important especially to realize that God ‘put it in writing’, moving his prophets to record things they didn’t fully understand, carrying them along by the Spirit as a disabled ship is carried about by the wind. And it is important to realize that this good news is more than simply a word, but it is a real thing that can belong to us. “Gospel” is no academic exercise, it is the long-standing promise of God, fulfilled in Christ, and made available to any who would believe.

Our afternoon message continued the series on the Church with It’s a Temple. Some of my ideas for this message came from a post by an on-line friend, Ryan Martin. My focus was different from his, as Ryan was talking about what the church does and I am focusing on what the church is. Nevertheless, his post stimulated my thinking in this regard. Our understanding of the temple metaphor for the church must be informed by the OT temple and its meaning. As I understand the passages (and the OT), I think the primary meaning of the temple is holiness, and this holiness is meant to be reflected in the NT metaphor of a local church as a temple of the living God, a place that must be kept holy by those living stones who inhabit it. [I do see this metaphor very directly referring to the local church, not the universal church. It is not that it is impossible to refer the metaphor to the universal, but that is not what the NT does.] Under this proposition: “You are the temple of God; you are called to holiness.” I developed these points:

I. The holy temple is under God’s protection (1 Cor 3.16-17)
II. The holy temple is called to identify exclusively with God’s holiness and cleanse its premises (2 Cor 6.16)
III. The holy temple is the ground of holy living (Eph 2.19-22)
IV. The holy temple is intended to offer up spiritual sacrifices (1 Pt 2.5, 9-15)

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All in all, it was a good day, although our crowd was definitely down after our big high last week on Thanksgiving Sunday. Still, the gospel was preached and we saw some young disciples show up who haven’t been to church in a while. It was good to minister to them. Faithfulness and consistency take time to develop.

By the way, I thought of something in connection with the metaphor of the church as a temple in light of a discussion about mundane things like announcements and potlucks being part of worship services or not. The discussion occurred over at Chris Anderson’s place, I hope I am not simply an agitator over there.

Here is the thought: the OT worship in the temple included many different kinds of sacrifices. I am impressed with the fact that one of the most common sacrifices was the peace offering, at which the worshipper sat at table before the Lord, in fellowship with him at a ‘holy barbecue’, if you will permit the expression. I suggest that our fellowship meals as a gathered church are as holy to the Lord as the songs, prayers, offerings, and preaching that occupy the bulk of our services. And I further submit that to announce the occasion of such acts of the lively stones in the worship services of the living God are no matter to be dismissed.

But yes, we can make our announcements and our fellowships an extremely trivial and earthly thing. Let us labour to not make it so.

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3