“Young people, if you develop in Christian life, in the maturity, you’ve got to get with it with the book and really live in it. Be taught in the Word. Understand it. And then when you do you will begin to increase your capacity for life. Increase your capacity for the things God would like to give you.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I have often thought of Dr. Williams concluding remarks and have actually used them as an illustration in my own preaching on numerous occasions:<\/p>\n
“Now you can’t … we can’t have a service tonight and I give the invitation and you come down and get matured here tonight. And [you] go out tomorrow and say, ‘Hey, a wonderful thing happened, I matured last night down there.’<\/p>\n
“There are some dough balls that do it that way, but you don’t do it that way. You’ve got to get with it and stay with it. Two years, three years, four years, five years, whatever it takes, mature in the faith. You can stand all the adversities of life. You can stand in the devil’s world, this generation in which we live and be a real soldier of Jesus Christ. The greatest need in your life is to mature in the Christian faith.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This message is simply a solid biblical exhortation to Christian growth. I have drawn on it personally again and again over the years. It really is a sample of most of the preaching I heard when I was developing and training as a young preacher.<\/p>\n
Today, a good deal of the carping criticism towards fundamentalism is given by a vocal set of young men who level many charges against fundamentalism including a failure of expository preaching. There are bitter men of my generation that join in this chorus. I am astounded that they do so. I don’t know who they were listening to back then. I suspect they weren’t listening to anyone, except their own rebellious hearts.<\/p>\n
While a student, I was exposed to the preaching and teaching ministries of some of the world’s finest expositors and Bible teachers. I was taught a love for the Word of God and a philosophy of ministry that put God’s Word first and careful exposition and application at the heart of biblical ministry.<\/p>\n
Was every preacher like this? Well, of course not. There are all kinds in the ministry, and God can use the fellow who is mostly topical just as well as the more expository preacher, if that man is surrendered to God and faithful.<\/p>\n
But overwhelmingly, if your heart was given to hear it, the message of faithful expository preaching was available in the 1970s. Believe it, brother, it was there. Better yet, dig up some of the tapes and give a listen. You will find in those long ago pulpits men who were concerned about building the spiritual lives of the people who heard them.<\/p>\n
I suspect that most of this complaint that fundamentalism lacks “expository preaching” is a complaint centered around a slavish devotion to the preaching of certain evangelicals who happen to espouse the latest theological fad. The fundamentalist movement is full of men who spend hours in the Word of God and then faithfully deliver it in their pulpits, Bible studies, home visits, and coffee shop fellowships. The charges against fundamentalism in this regard are baseless. Those who make them should repent of their belligerence and open their ears to the solid preaching that is available in the fundamentalist pulpits of the world.<\/p>\n
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oh, for a WayBack machine! This morning I took a little trip back in time, just over 28 years to be exact. I found myself sitting in the Founders Memorial Amphitorium at Bob Jones University listening to some men who are stars in my fundamentalist firmament. First, the rich, poetic speech of the late chancellor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-5h","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}