The most powerful apologetic for the Scripture is just to preach it, because it so obviously discloses God.
It is its own defense. The word preached mediates to the people the majesty of God and the glory of Christ. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Today, you're going to hear John pull back the curtain on his pastoral ministry and help you see what every pastor's primary responsibility is. You may just get a whole new perspective on what your pastor does week in and week out. We call this series, Insight into a Pastor's Heart.
Now, John, what we'll be hearing for the next few days doesn't follow your usual verse-by-verse format, but it still should be a helpful time of learning. So what is it that sets these lessons apart, and why are they important not just for pastors, but for the people listening right now who sit in the pew on Sunday after Sunday? Well, it may seem to some pastors a little bit threatening, but I think church members need to know what God expects of their pastor. I think that ought to be out front so that they can evaluate whether they're being faithful. The Bible is pretty clear about what pastors are to be.
There's really no lack of information on that. In fact, it's replete throughout the New Testament. What are the qualifications of a pastor? What are the duties of a pastor? What is to be the character of a pastor? What is to be the direction of ministry that pastors take? That's all laid out in very, very clear specifics in Scripture, and it's one thing to communicate that to pastors and to have them step up and be faithful in that regard, but it's also very important, equally important, to teach congregations what their pastors ought to be, because the congregation, in a very real sense, has to hold that pastor accountable to be what God wants him to be. That's why we're launching today a very important study called Insight Into a Pastor's Heart.
It's a little different than our normal radio programs. It's an informal From the Heart series that I gave the men at the Master's Seminary. It'll explore questions that affect every Christian in every church and define what the pastor is to be over every church and in every pulpit. So for the next few days, we're going to see what the Bible says about a church and how the pastor handles God's Word. That's not secondary.
That's primary. Thanks, John. And friend, as the series begins, I want you to be listening for ways you can pray for and encourage your pastor. That's really an important ministry to him and to your church. And so now, here again is John with some insight into a pastor's heart. When I came out of seminary, I obviously was committed to do Bible exposition.
I had seen my father do it. He was the greatest influence on me, naturally, because I grew up under his ministry. I listened to him preach through the book of John, through the book of Acts, through the book of Romans, and a number of other books. I went away to seminary to learn how to do Bible exposition. I was a student of Dr. Roskup, Dr. Thomas.
When I was at Talbot, I was particularly interested in Dr. Charles Feinberg. I didn't know Dr. Roskup or Thomas when I went to the seminary, but I did know of Dr. Feinberg, and I knew of his commitment to the text of Scripture and to the Bible. And my father and I both agreed that he would be the man that we wanted to have influence us, and he made a great impact on my life. So I came out of seminary, committed to the exposition of Scripture, and that's what I began to do in 1969. Through all these years, I basically did Bible exposition. I think in many ways it sort of culminated when I did the study Bible. That was sort of the, I guess you could say, the high point of the years of Bible exposition, drawing every bit of material I could get from my own studies through the years with the help of the faculty of the seminary and some of the faculty of the college and some of my other friends in the ministry of grace to you, pulling together everything that I could get together. And even though there would be many more books that I could exposit in the years ahead if the Lord gives me the opportunity to do that, particularly in the Old Testament, that was sort of the pinnacle of it. And having done that, it doesn't mean that by any means I'm through doing that.
I'll do that the rest of my life. But I feel like the exercise, particularly those three years of working on the study Bible, gave me the most comprehensive understanding of the Scripture that I have ever had. And because of that, in more recent times, I have expanded my reading a little bit to try to read a little more in the historical area.
For all the years, and even now it's still to some degree true, for all the years of my life up until very recently, my focus was really always on the Scripture so that I was always reading the Bible, studying the Bible, studying the text of the Scripture, reading commentaries, reading theology that related to my understanding of Scripture to just continue to build that. It seems as though in recent, in the recent years, I've become more and more interested in filling in the gaps in my understanding of history. And so I've gone back to read books, particularly books that would reflect something of the impact of people who really were the fulcrum point at which history turned. Recently I read a little book by Christopher Catherwood called Five Leading Reformers.
I would commend it to you. And he has taken five leading reformers, the familiar ones that you would know, and distills down something of these men. At the same time, I have been reading a book called Evangelical Eloquence by R. L. Dabney. And this is a series of lectures that he gave on preaching.
Now R. L. Dabney would have been a hundred years or so ago, and the reformers of Costco all the way back to the 1500s. At the same time, I have read a book that I would commend to you, and I'll maybe largely do a book review of it for you this morning, A Legacy of Sovereign Joy by John Piper. John Piper is also a notable biographer, particularly when he gets a hold of the people that he really likes, such as Jonathan Edwards, or in the case of The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, he does a study of Augustine, or Augustine, and Luther, and Calvin. And he gets down to the nitty-gritty. There are some very human elements to those men.
But he gets down to some of the very human elements of these men. But the thing that I'm drawing out of this as I'm reading all of this is that at all points where these people began to turn the history of the church, it was based upon a breakthrough in their understanding of Scripture. It came about through exegesis. It came about through a commitment to exposition. And this is greatly encouraging to me because there is so little of it going on today. And the idea today is if you really want to affect society, put the Bible aside.
People can't connect with it and, you know, speak to them in cultural terms and tell them stories that they're going to be interested in and speak in relevant language and relevant paradigms and relevant experiences, etc., etc., etc. And those are the kind of people who in adjusting to the world will simply be a part of the world where it is and make no real difference. So, going back to these men upon which the history of the church has largely turned, men who have essentially been the prime movers in that form of Christianity to which we're all committed today, as over against that against which they rebelled, we find that they were largely expositors. If you are a pastor, you are a preacher, you are not an entrepreneur, you are not a CEO, you are not a quiz show host, you are not a barker in a carnival, you are not a salesman, you are a preacher of the Word of God. That is what you do. And I will put it very simply, you will do that the rest of your life if you stay faithful to your ministry. As John Piper put it, you are a man utterly devoted to displaying God's glory by the exposition of God's Word. That is what you do. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the most powerful apologetic for the Scripture is just to preach it because it so obviously discloses God.
It is its own defense. The Word preached mediates to the people the majesty of God and the glory of Christ. Now let me start with...I'll give you a few little words.
I'll start with a P just so you can kind of know when I'm getting to the next point. First word, perspective. This is my look at the preaching ministry and essentially back to what I said. If you are a pastor, you are a preacher more than anything else. That is what you do. That is what you do. And the first thing is to have a perspective on that preaching.
And I think this is so very important. Great preaching is both profound and transcendent. I told this to our church some time back. Great preaching is both profound and transcendent and most of the preaching I hear is neither. It isn't deep and it isn't high. It doesn't go down and it doesn't take me up.
It's a flat line in the middle somewhere. As a preacher, you need to be profound. That is, you need to go down deep into the text, down deep into the truth of the Word of God to mine out its immense truths. And then having mined out the depth of Scripture and revealed the wonder and majesty and glory of God in the unfolding of that truth, you can then take your people up so that they know what worship is. If your preaching is not profound, it is not transcendent.
You understand that? And worst of all, if it is culturally defined and man-centered, it is neither profound nor transcendent. Now if you're going to go down into divine truth in order that you might carry people up into praise, if you're going to go to the depths of divine truth and to the height of worship, you have only one tool to do that.
What is it? Scripture. That is the only tool.
There isn't any more. Your intuition isn't helpful. Neither would be somebody's visions or prophecies. Scripture is profitable. God has revealed and preserved divine truth in a book of which He is the author. You are to learn how to dig deep into that book so that you can disclose to your people the majesty of God revealed in the depth of biblical truth which will cause your people to be elevated to the heights of praise and honor to God, right?
That's what we do. Divine truth is not in a church. That's what Luther fought. It's not in a bishop. It's not in a denomination. It's not in experience. It's not in intuition.
It's not in ecstasy. Divine truth, all of it, is in a book, one book, the Bible. Martin Luther became convinced that God spoke only in that book.
This was absolutely revolutionary. And that what God said in that book sat in judgment on the church rather than the reverse. That book alone, Luther was convinced, provided the truth that saves, the truth that sanctifies, and that every time that book spoke, it spoke authoritatively. Now that's why I battle that whole issue of creation and evolution so strongly. That's why it is such a curse on the evangelical church that so many evangelical institutions believe in some form of evolution. What that means is they don't believe Genesis 1 and 2 because there's nothing exegetically in Genesis 1 or 2 to indicate anything other than that God created the entire universe in 24-hour days, six of them to be exact.
And once you deny the authority of Genesis 1 and 2, you have let the horse out of the barn, right? For the rest of the way through the text. Well, Luther was convinced that God spoke only in the book.
Piper writes this. He says, what is new in Luther, quoting Heiko Obermann, what is new in Luther is the notion of absolute obedience to the Scriptures against any authorities, be they popes or councils. This is what was revolutionary. So we think of Luther, we think of the doctrine of justification, preliminary to Luther's coming to the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, Luther had to come to the place where he believed that the Scripture was the only and the absolute authority, right? So more important in some ways than his doctrine of salvation was his doctrine of Scripture. If you're not there to begin with, then you're not able to accept authoritatively the Bible and set the limits at that point. In other words, writes Piper, the saving, sanctifying, authoritative Word of God comes to us in a book.
The implications of this simple observation are tremendous. In 1539, commenting on Psalm 119, Luther wrote, in this Psalm, David always says that he will speak, think, talk, hear, read day and night and constantly but about nothing other than God's Word and commandments. For God wants to give you His Spirit only through the external Word.
This phrase is extremely important, the external Word is the book, that is it is outside of us. The saving, sanctifying, illuminating Spirit of God, Luther says, comes to us through this external Word. When the preacher feeds his people the Word of God and nothing else, he is faithful to his calling.
And as he goes deep into the Word to the rich meat, he disdains the flat, the trivial, the shallow, the superficial, the human. He rejects formulas, he ignores human wisdom like the Apostle Paul who didn't come to preach with man's wisdom, clever speech. He knows what Jesus said in John 17, 17, sanctify them by Thy truth, Thy Word is truth. He knew that it was the Word, the Word alone that can separate people from sin unto God. And as a result of taking his people down deep into the Word, he is able then to lift his people high. And they become lost in wonder, love and praise because they have grasped the profound realities of the majesty of God that are revealed in an understanding of great truth. The reason Calvin had such an incredible sense of God, a profound sense of God, was that his entire ministry was exposition.
Many people think, John Calvin, they think of the Institutes which were written by his early 20s and refined five times through his life. But what many people don't know is that he was a Bible expositor. And he preached only Bible exposition from 1536 to 1564 in Geneva with a three-year hiatus when they threw him out of town. They threw him out in 1538, he came back in 1541. He had to go over to Basel and when he went over there, in order to better exposit Scripture, he spent those three years mastering Hebrew. Can you imagine being in exile and mastering Hebrew on your own because he knew that that's how you learn the Scriptures? He came back three years later and picked up in the next verse where he had left off when they sent him out three years before.
That's right. He was relentless. You go to the library, look at Calvin's commentaries, they cover the reigns of the Bible. 1536 to 1564, with the exception of those three years, he went in a little auditorium next to St. Peter's, the great cathedral there where he preached on the Lord's Day and other times. But every day in that Laudatoire, he was teaching the Word of God. He had five guys sitting in the front row taking down in dictation everything he said because no one of them could get it all. The five of them collectively would get it and that became his commentaries.
R.L. Dabney in his book on evangelical eloquence says, All the leading Reformers, whether in Germany, Switzerland, England, or Scotland, were constant preachers and their sermons were expository. We may assume with safety that the instrumentality to which the spiritual power of that great revelation was mainly due was the restoration of scriptural preaching. In other words, Dabney says the Reformation was born out of Bible exposition. You see, and what sent it in motion was they viewed the book as the only source of divine truth.
And with that, they eliminated all other sources of authority. They went back to the book and they hammered at the rock of that book until they had broken it and the water of life had flowed out of it. Dabney goes on to say, A perversion of the pulpit is surely followed by spiritual apostasy in the church.
You watch. You're going to live long enough to see what has been known as evangelicalism apostasize. You pervert the pulpit, take the word out of the pulpit, and you will send the church right down the drain. Dabney says, And it is exceedingly instructive to note that there are three stages through which preaching has repeatedly passed with the same results. The first is that in which scriptural truth is faithfully presented in scriptural garb. That is to say, not only are all the doctrines asserted which truly belong to the revealed system of redemption, but they are presented in that dress and connection in which the Holy Spirit has presented them without seeking any other from human science. This state of the pulpit marks the golden age of the church.
The second is the transition stage. In this, the doctrines taught are still those of the Scriptures, but their relations are molded into conformity with the prevalent human dialectics. That's a hundred-year-old book. God's truth is now shorn of a part of its power over the soul. The third stage is then near in which not only are the methods and explanations conformed to the philosophy of the day, but the doctrines themselves contradict the truth of the Word.
Again and again have the clergy traveled this descending scale and always with the same disastrous result. And so He says, May we ever be content to exhibit Bible doctrine in its own Bible dress. You can't improve on it because that's the way God chose to communicate it. You know, we're in that transition, aren't we, evangelicalism? There's still some Christian doctrine, but nobody wants to put it in the Bible dress. The Bible forms the whole content of our preaching. God set forth all its truths in such contexts, such proportions, and such relations that He knew suited the soul of man under the work of the Holy Spirit perfectly.
No other forms are as good. No other forms are acceptable to Him. Using anything other than the Word of God is infidelity. And that kind of preaching breeds infidelity to the Scripture among the hearers.
Can you see that? If you teach the true doctrine from a non-biblical perspective using reason, then people will learn that the way to come to truth is through their reason. And you have told them that that is a better way than through biblical revelation. So I'm back to where I started, 2 Timothy 4 to do what? Preach?
The Word. Be instant in season and out of season, and people say, well, what does that mean? Well, I don't know exactly what Paul had in mind, but I know this, there are only two possibilities, you're either in season or out of season.
Bottom line is all the time, and right now it's out of season, but that doesn't change the command, does it? Now, that's the perspective. Actually, I had seven points, but one of my points is that slower is better than faster. This is one of my points, isn't it? Do you know why slower is better than faster? Because slower is deeper than faster. That's why seminary isn't a weekend course.
That's why it takes three, four, five, six. That's why some of these guys were in school 15 years, because slower is better than faster. The second point, preparation. You start with perspective, and then you have to move to preparation. Now, if you don't understand how important preparation is now, I don't know what I could say to help you to understand it.
I just told you, you have to be able to tell people what's in the book, and just frankly, that's going to take some preparation, right? Since all true preaching must be expository, the preacher is called to study in preparation. I will tell you this, I have spent most of my life, since I graduated from seminary, I have spent most of my life studying, still studying, because there isn't any other way. I went to seminary to get the tools so that I could give a lifetime of study. Study is critical. The Bible is the field you will plow all your life.
It is the mine you will dig all your life, and it requires a radical commitment to diligence. You must preach the true sense of Scripture. Here's a little thought for you. The meaning of the Scripture is the Scripture. The meaning of the Scripture is the Scripture. You have to preach the sense of it as God intended it, and He only intended it to say one thing, and you have to discern what that is.
I'll close with this. Dabney says, the preacher is a herald, and that is God's Word which is committed to him as his instrument to herald. If his task is to deliver and commend God's message, what right has he to change it or to represent it as other than it is? Besides the risk of giving a fatal and specific wrong guidance to some soul in the very perversion of that particular proposition of Scripture, such a custom confuses the minds of hearers in their efforts to understand the Word and cultivates irreverent feelings toward its authority. You can't tell people the Bible is authoritative and then handle it willy-nilly.
It has to speak specifically, and Dabney is right. Dabney is right, you will cultivate irreverent feelings toward the authority of the Bible if you are inept in its interpretation. The falsehood, he writes, of that man is full of impiety who avowedly standing up in a sacred place to declare God's message says that the Holy Spirit has said what He has not said.
You don't ever want to do that. I mean, that's one way to look at it is don't ever stand in a pulpit and say what the Holy Spirit has not said. I would impress you, he says, with a solemn awe of taking any liberties and expounding the Word. I would have you feel that every meaning of the text other than that which God expressly intended it to bear is forbidden fruit to you, however plausible and attractive fruit which you dare not touch on peril of a fearful sin. You see, God's sermon is far more powerful than yours.
Make sure you give His. The primary task for every pastor, and really for every Christian, is to handle God's Word faithfully. John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, looked at that theme today as he gave you some insight into a pastor's heart here on Grace to You. Well, friend, there's a lot packed into this series, including two question and answer sessions that we are not going to have time to air this week, so to listen to the full series titled Insight into a Pastor's Heart, go to our website and download it for free. Our web address is gty.org, and again, the lessons from Insight into a Pastor's Heart are available free of charge, both the MP3s and the transcripts. To download them, just go to our website, gty.org. And when you visit gty.org, make sure you take advantage of the thousands of free resources that are there for you. You can read articles addressing current issues on the Grace to You blog. You can keep up with the reading plan for the MacArthur Daily Bible. You can read multiple daily devotionals from John, and you can download any of John's more than 3,600 sermons.
All of them are available free of charge in MP3 and transcript format. So jump into all the free teaching resources that are available to you at our website, gty.org. That address one more time, gty.org. And now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff. I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. If you serve in any kind of ministry, what should be your highest priority? John helps you answer that question tomorrow as he continues to give you some insight into a pastor's heart. Be here for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on the next Grace to You. .
