Archives for 9.18.07

It is time for my regular sermon summaries, wherein I think my messages over. This way, I get to preach them twice, once to everyone in church, and once to myself as I try to summarize them.

The morning message concluded our short series on Discipleship and Child Training. I got the main ideas for this message from an outline by Wayne Mack, referenced in earlier posts. The message was entitled The Necessity of Discipline. We covered first the necessity that the disciple-maker be a disciple, then we discussed the notion of ‘admonition’ or ‘correction’. Disciple-making is the process of challenging and changing the thinking of men who are habitually in the mode of flesh-dominated, world-influenced thinking. From that mindset, we must admonish in such a way as to develop biblical thinking processes.

But there is something else needed – discipline. This idea is contained in the word ‘paideia’, the word translated ‘nurture’ in Eph 6.4. We went to Heb 12.4-13 where the word is much used and translated ‘chasten’ or ‘chastisement’. Here is our proposition: “Effective Christian training, whether it be children or disciples, requires discipline to form disciples.” In understanding the nature of the discipline we are talking about, we looked at the word ‘paideia’ and the accompanying words in Greek. The word refers to a process whereby the Greeks employed slaves to educate their children, including putting the child completely under the authority of the pedagogue who instructed, corrected, and disciplined the child in order to educate him. Our Hebrews passage is an expositon of Prov 3.11-12, which says, “My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD; neither be weary of his correction: 12 For whom the LORD loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.” So when we speak of the nature of discipline, it refers to the bands and restrictions placed on the disciple for the purpose of changing his mind and behaviour. The Lord employs this kind of discipline repeatedly, in both testaments. The discipline is intended to make us willing to yield. God could put so much pressure on you to make you do his will, but he doesn’t do that – he puts enough pressure on you to give you the opportunity to yield to his will willingly.

In our world, the solution to bad behaviour is often thought to be ‘more education’. But our society frowns on discipline of any kind. They are willing to multiply words, but that is all that worldly education amounts to, words heaped upon words. Whether you listen and learn is left up to you, no one will make you learn. No one will discipline you in the modern educational system. They will just ‘talk to you’. The current generation is the most “talked to” generation in history, and seems to be among the least restrained and most undisciplined. Could it be that what is lacking is logical, just, loving, firm discipline?

~~~

The afternoon service was much more satisfying to me than last week. Our title was It’s a Body with this sub-title, “it functions by interdependence [servant-fellowship]”. What I am trying to do with this series is to preach my philosophy of local church ministry. This idea, the idea of the body, is an important metaphor for the church. In the message, the first thing I did as a means of extended introduction was to read every passage in the New Testament talking about the church as ‘the body’. That meant we had about ten texts for our message instead of one. I offered a summary statement in each passage to give a bit of an idea of the overall doctrine. Then, for the body of the message, we concentrated on the ideas presented in 1 Cor 12, where Paul is arguing with the Corinthians about their strife over tongues. In essence, they are missing the point of the body. They are being too individualistic, too self-centered. That is not what the church is about, it is about interdependence, or what I call ‘servant-fellowship’. The concept of interdependence is given in 1 Cor 12, the key to interdependence is given in 1 Cor 13 – the love chapter. This is where we need to be, and this is the kind of spirit the Lord himself taught.

The Lord’s teaching really illumines what I am trying to produce in the local church. There is a term that is widely bandied about by many teachers these days: ‘servant-leadership’. I understand what people are trying to say with this term and I agree with it to a point. But I think the term misses the Lord’s teaching. See Lk 22.25-27 and Jn 13.12-17. Jesus totally de-emphasizes the leadership bit. He puts all the weight on ‘serve’. Is it possible that we make a subtle error by including the concept of ‘leadership’ in the mix?

Here is the emphasis in the Bible: “serve” and “among you” – not ‘servant-leadership’ but ‘servant-fellowship’. Proposition: The local church as the body of Christ lives by the bonds by which it is connected through the indwelling and interacting Spirit of Jesus Christ.

How is that lived out in a local church? Well, we love one another and serve one another. I spoke of several ways we do this. I mentioned ‘The Baptist sacrament: fried chicken (or is it coffee?)’ – in other words, taking meals together. I mentioned specific things we have done in our church: a barn raising for one of our members, a current ministry some of our folks have of bringing others with them to church (the Duncan bus, from a town 45 minutes north of the church building), or seniors shopping days where some of our folks are serving our older saints who no longer drive, or meal ministries to those who are sick and unable to feed their families, or even cutting the lawn and building maintenance. All of this is done by people who love one another and who are responding to the prompting of the Holy Spirit to serve one another.

The body also functions in serving one another by excising cancerous cells. This can involve surgery, chemo, or radiation. It can be painful, but it is necessary. These are means by which we serve one another.

The whole challenge to our church body is to be a body. Some sort of hang around on the periphery, holding to themselves and refusing to wholeheartedly join in. They are missing the point and need to get hold of the concept of ‘body’ and ‘servant-fellowship’.

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

PS… I have been laying linoleum today in my bathroom renovation project. In the process I have been filling up my mind with posts I want to put out on the blog… Three more to go, but they will have to wait till tomorrow.

I have mentioned my method several times on the blog, most recently in the last post. I know that some don’t like this approach, but it is the way that I have found to be most satisfying and I have found it to be productive with our people.

What I mean by the term “glacial” is that we progress through the Scriptures S-L-O-W-L-Y. The Word of God is rich, full of meaning and profitable in all. I don’t do this all the time, but in my major book studies, this is the method I have adopted.

Lloyd-Jones, the subject of our last post, was the king of glacial exposition. I meant to mention this in the last post, but sent it out too quick. As I read his sermons on Romans, I see him working an idea over, producing the fruit of his meditation on the word or phrase he is dealing with. To me, good exposition does that. One of my men asked me some years ago how much time goes into preparing a sermon. Of course, the answer is ‘that depends’, but I really am most satisfied with my messages when I have spent a good many hours on them. That would involve research: re-translation [in the NT], word studies, many commentaries carefully picked through, then several hours ‘writing’.

The writing process begins with a selection of the portion I want to preach, then an attempt to develop a central proposition for the sermon. The proposition is critical for the message, but sometimes it eludes me until after I have developed the outline a bit. Sometimes the proposition comes quickly, sometimes it is an agony of re-reading my material, thinking over the point, muttering to myself about what I am trying to say, scratching out a ‘preliminary’ outline on the back of an envelope (or other piece of paper at hand), scratching out the outline and trying again. Sometimes I find that I have to start developing the points in order to get a clear idea of what I am trying to say.

I like to write out a good deal of what I intend to say, though it is in outline format, rather than manuscript. I write fairly detailed notes in case I want to come back to the passage at some point and preach the message again (or use the message to create a new message).

I see the fruit of this in Lloyd-Jones work. He has mulled the text over and has a lot to say about it. He has read a good deal of the literature. His sermons are full of expositional comments that reveal he has an excellent working knowledge of the text. Then having mulled it all over, he delivers it to his people with incisive application calling men to respond to the meaning of the Word he is giving them.

As a result of this kind of work, books like Lloyd-Jones sermons are well worth reading for devotional purposes, whether or not you are a preacher preparing sermons. [And whether or not you agree with his theology! (I do not, at least, not all of it.)]

In any case, if you take time with the Word and let it burn into your soul as a preacher, you should have a lot to say about whatever passage the Lord lays on your heart.

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

I am working away on Romans in preparation for a new expository series starting next Sunday and ending ??? when? who knows? I have been serious about studying Romans the last few weeks, after a summer of sort of ‘casual’ study [i.e., not much]. I am getting fired up. I plan to preach on the first word of the book next Sunday: “Paul”. You’ll have to wait for me to post a summary to see where I am going with this.

Well, one of the things I am doing in preparation is reading Lloyd-Jones. I have always liked his books but it wasn’t until recently that I really understood that they are sermons. I mean, I guess I knew that, but I just realized that I was reading his books as books when I should have been reading them as sermons. They are much more alive when you read them that way.

A few months ago, Dr. Minnick wrote a column in Frontline on recommended books for Romans. For me, this was timely [and expensive!] One of his recommendations is the collection of Lloyd-Jones sermons on Romans. This set is fourteen volumes of sermons, one per chapter up to chapter 14. L-J’s pastoral career at Westminster Chapel ended in the middle of Rm 14.17. [For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.] He preached on ‘the kingdom is … peace’, but didn’t preach on ‘joy in the Holy Ghost’. The next Monday, I think it was, he was diagnosed with cancer which led to lengthy treatment and his retirement from the pastoral ministry. He said later that the reason the Lord hadn’t let him finish the verse was that he wasn’t spiritually ready to preach it yet. The whole series begain Oct 7, 1955 with the last message in the spring of 1968.

I haven’t purchased the whole set of fourteen. It’s a little much to buy them all at one whack. But given that I prefer the glacial method of exposition, I think I can afford to purchase the set piecemeal. So far I have chapter 1 and chapter 2.

All of that leads me to this, and this one is for you, Chris Anderson! I am in L-J’s sermon #3 (still in verse 1), where the Doctor is expounding on the phrase “a servant of Jesus Christ”. Among other things, he has this to say:

It does not matter what Paul is writing about; sometimes he has to write a letter because people have sent him questions, or because there have been difficulties. It does not matter at all what the occasion is; he cannot begin writing without at once introducing us to Jesus Christ. To Paul, He was the beginning and the end, the all-in-all. He had nothing apart from Him. I would maintain, therefore, that a very good way in which we can test our own profession of the Christian faith is just to apply this test to ourselves. Is Jesus Christ in the forefront? Is He in the centre? You will find that in this introduction the Apostle mentions Him at least five times. I had occasion to note recently that in the first fourteen verses of the Epistle to the Ephesians he mentions Him fifteen times. He cannot get away from Him, as it were; he must keep on mentioning the Name. He uses the terms ‘Jesus Christ’, ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’, ‘Christ Jesus our Lord’, and so on. Watch him in his epistles, he is always using the Name, and it evidently gives him great pleasure to do so. And the question, I repeat, is, ‘Is this true of us? Is Jesus Christ in the forefront of our minds, and our hearts, and our conversation?’ I mean — and here I am talking to Christian people, to believers — when we talk to one another, are we always talking about some experience or some blessing we have had, or are we talking about the Lord Jesus Christ? I have no hesitation in asserting that as we grow in grace, we talk much less about ourselves and our experiences, and much more about Him.

Now that is good. I expect it is a little convicting as well. I realize that we must talk ‘small talk’ in our conversations, it’s just a part of life. But I wonder how much we talk of Christ? And I wonder what that says about our level of spiritual maturity?

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3