When someone disdains to study the Word of God diligently, they are evidencing the idea that they really don't need the Bible, that they are clever enough or ingenious enough to come up with something that is better or maybe equal to what the Bible has to say. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. If you ask a handful of contemporary church leaders why people love being in their congregations, they might mention things like great music, friendly people, and an enjoyable atmosphere. It's easy to see that those are some of the main selling points for many churches today. Those are the reasons their leaders think you'll love to attend each week.
Well, you no doubt enjoy good music, and you appreciate people who encourage you who doesn't. But should those be the main things your church leaders focus on? John MacArthur explores that question today in a study he calls insight into a pastor's heart. And now here's John with the lesson.
We are going to pick up where we left off. This discussion of preaching, I started by saying if you're a pastor, you're a preacher above all else. That is what we are.
That is what we do. We are men utterly devoted to displaying God's glory by the exposition of God's Word. So I started by giving you at least one point in my little outline here, and that is perspective. And the perspective is that preaching is to be both deep and high. It is to be both profound and transcendent. And we talked a little bit about the fact that we have only one tool to accomplish that, one tool that takes us into the depth of divine truth and lifts us to the heights of praise, and that tool is the Scripture. God has revealed and preserved divine truth in a book which He is the author. We talked about the external Word, that it is outside of us, that it is not subject to our intuition, to our experience, as to its interpretation, it is not a clay toy. And we also suggested that the Holy Spirit is known only and accurately through the Scripture as is the Son of God, Christ Himself. We have that perspective then as a foundation. As a result, we then give our whole lives to the Word of God. We go deep into it and we lift our people high in praise.
B.B. Warfield said, no one had a profounder sense of God, no one had a profounder sense of God's glory than John Calvin, and that was the key to his theology and the key to his influence. The same was true with many others. Now let me go sort of beyond our talk about perspective, the Bible being the whole content of our preaching to preparation. Because of this perspective, because we understand that we have one tool which we will commit ourselves to all our life long, this is our calling to feed ourselves on the Word and then feed our people as a way of life. Since all true preaching must be expository, not every message has to be an expository message, but all true preaching, even topical preaching must be the product of exposition. The preacher is therefore called to study. He is called to study in preparation to preach.
Study is absolutely critical. The meaning of Scripture is the Scripture. God's message is not known unless it is understood. Now there are three obstacles, I would say, to preparation. Assuming you have the Bible, you have the available information, three obstacles remain.
Obstacle number one is pride. When someone disdains to study the Word of God diligently, they are perhaps evidencing the idea that they really don't need the Bible, that they are clever enough or ingenious enough to come up with something that is perhaps better or maybe equal to what the Bible has to say. When they choose to take a theological truth and cast it in the package of their own reasoning, taking the Bible out of what we call the Bible dress, that is an act of pride.
Fails to understand what I said I think to close our time the other day, God's sermons are far more powerful than man's and they are what God has designed for us to preach. And so if we don't do that, someone who is not a biblical preacher, someone who does not study diligently is evidencing pride. That is one of the obstacles to Bible study. You just don't feel that you need it.
You don't feel there's anything there that can take you or anybody else beyond where you can already take people. A second obstacle to Bible study is unbelief. If you don't believe the Bible, or if you don't believe the Bible is inerrant, or if you don't believe the Bible is accurate, or you don't believe the Bible is inspired, then it's understandable that you would not be committed to its exposition.
There is a third, I think, obstacle to diligent study and that is laziness. You are either proud, unbelieving, or lazy if you fail to diligently study the Word of God. And that's where Luther said the exegete should treat a passage no different than Moses did the rock in the desert at which he smote with his rod until the water gushed out. I can tell you personally that the Bible doesn't always yield up its treasures easily, does it?
It's hard work. Luther said languages are the scabbard that contains the sword of the Spirit. He knew that. It was that diligent study of the original languages that yielded to Luther the truth, the truth about Scripture, and the truth within Scripture about salvation. Back to Piper's book on sovereign joy, the legacy of sovereign joy, Piper says, where languages are not prized and pursued, care in biblical observations and biblical thinking and concern for the truth decreases. Why, he says? Because languages are the tools to think biblically.
And he's right. I mean, you have to get back to the languages. Now, it is not necessary that everyone who ever interprets the Bible know the languages, but if you don't know the languages, you better have access to somebody's information who does know the languages.
Better that you should know the languages so you know whether somebody who says they know the languages actually knows the languages. Luther said, if the languages had not made more positive as to the true meaning of the Word, I might have still remained a chained monk. The pope, the sophists, and their anti-Christian empire would have remained unshaken.
What was he saying? He was saying the key to the Reformation was what? Hebrew and Greek.
I mean, just so you know, he didn't just fall off the wagon one day, get hit in the head and come up with justification by grace through faith alone. His 95 Thesis came out of exegesis. The breakthrough of the Reformation can be credited to the power of original languages. And I told you, Luther spent his time doing that and Calvin, when he had a three-year exile from Geneva, went to Basil and spent three years mastering Hebrew.
R.L. Dabney in his book, Evangelical Eloquent, said the Great Reformation was emphatically a revival of exposition. The history of the church has turned on an accurate understanding of Scripture.
And the people who were able to be the human instruments for those great turnings were people who diligently applied themselves to the study of Scripture. This translates into reading. I have been at this for a long time and I think I read more now than I ever did. It's an insatiable thing with me. I get thirsty for books before I get thirsty for water.
My doctor keeps telling me I need to drink more water. But I get reading books and I forget about drinking water. This is what loads you up with the important information necessary for accurate interpretation. And along that line, too, reading insatiably the Scripture first and then interpreting the original, and then looking to books which explain the meaning and enrich and enhance your understanding of history and theology. And I have also learned to read selectively. I have to choose what I'm going to read very selectively. If you're going to be studying all your life and if you're going to be focusing on interpreting the Word of God, and you know, in some ways it's more difficult today than it was in Luther's day or Calvin's day or the day of the Puritans, although they were filling it up pretty fast, and that is because there's so much more material today.
You just have to be very, very selective and you have to read very rapidly, learn to read rapidly, learn to read what you want to read, what you need to read, not necessarily everything that's on the page. Then I...after I have read the Scripture, which I do continually and in preparation for a message, reading it continually and then getting back into the original and dealing with that, and then reading as widely, as high and deep as I can on the themes and subjects, whether it's in commentaries or related sections of theology or whatever it might be to enhance all of that, the work goes from all of that reading and absorbing to writing. And I am a real believer that you need to write whatever you're going to preach. You need to write it out. More than just an outline, you need to write it out because writing it out is a clarifying process.
If you're using a computer, you need to type it out or to put it into your computer. That process helps you to see the reality of the flow of thought. And so, for me, it's a first draft, second draft, third draft before I get it where I want it.
Now, I do that every week of my life and have for years and years and years for at least two messages and often more than that. And this is a lifetime of hard work, but the product that is yielded in that hard work brings glory to God and salvation and sanctification to people. And I, again, I was going back, you're getting the fruit of my recent reading, going back into Calvin and reading a little bit about Calvin's productivity. He wrote tracts. He wrote the Institute.
The commentaries are obviously many. Calvin wrote all of these things. At the same time, he was giving lectures. As a pattern, he preached ten sermons every two weeks, five a week, all of it Scripture exposition, all of it based upon his knowledge of the original languages. Everything he did was exposition of the Bible. Luther, between 1510 and 1546, preached 3,000 sermons, frequently preaching many days a week and frequently preaching many times a day. And for these men, there is no rest from studying, producing and preaching. Now Calvin's original institutes, I think he was about 23 when they came out, and there were five different editions of the institutes which he continually refined and refined and refined and refined and refined at the same time he was producing new material. At the same time, they were also engaged in debate. They were engaged in having to confront opposition, confront error and dialogue with people who were in those errors.
It is amazing to think about at the same time they were dealing with all their personal issues of life, wives, children, the death of children. I think it was Luther's wife who gave him six children. Some died and he preached to all of them on Sunday afternoon when he catechized them. In 1520, Luther wrote 133 works.
In 1522, 130, in 1523, 183, that's one every other day. So all they did was deal with the Scripture and preach and teach and write, and it took a tremendous amount of work. I'm not expecting all of you to do that. Some of you may approximate that, but I'm just saying it's that kind of work on which the history of the church turns.
And I go back to where I started with this point today. What keeps people from working hard in ministry is one pride. That is a serious thing, isn't it? To assume that the Scripture doesn't have that much to offer you in your sermons. That could be one excuse for not studying hard. The second one would be you really don't believe the Word of God.
The third one is what? Laziness. Now let me get a third point in here, perspective, preparation, and I know I'm sort of meandering a little bit, but this is one of the things you do when you have a lot to say.
You sort of edit as you go in your head. I want to talk about pace. I want to talk about pace. I'm often questioned as to why it takes me so long to go through a book.
And I always remember the...I can't remember his name, but I remember reading about a preacher in New England who was sort of an American Puritan who pastored a church, I think it was for over 20 years, and he came there and started in Isaiah and 20-some years later he died in Isaiah 8. Now this is true. I'm not saying that that really is a suitable pace that seems to me a bit slow. That would be sort of like Barnhouse's work on Romans, which is Romans and everything else in the Bible you need to know. It's this tangential approach, you know. Any word introduces a whole paradigm of biblical truth and off you go.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones can be a bit that way, can't he? I mean, I don't think it's absolutely necessary to take the Sermon on the Mount and develop it into a thousand pages. Certainly there's nothing wrong with doing that. But I do think pace, I think it is something just to say this, it's better to go slow than fast. Slower is better than faster.
Why? Because deeper is better than shallower. Because thorough is better than superficial. And listen to this, the goal is never homiletical. That is never the goal of a sermon. Homiletics is a very insignificant player in sermon preparation.
It is merely a frame to put the picture and it's not the picture. And yet there are people whose great satisfaction in their preaching is found in their homiletics. That is never the goal. The goal is to understand the text. And deeper is better than shallower and thorough is better than superficial and slower is better than faster. I heard a radio preacher yesterday as I was driving in...no, it was actually in the afternoon I was driving over to see the doctor and he was saying, we want to take the bird's eye view of this text. Well there's a place for a bird's eye view, that's the idea that you're simply looking at an overview of the text and he said, you know, these eight verses mean this and these eight verses mean this and these seven verses mean this and these five verses mean this. That is not an ending point, however.
That is a starting point, right? That is merely a recognition of context. But that could not be a suitable way to exposit a text. I visited a church, never forget it, I visited a church and the preacher was going through Matthew and the sermon that I heard was Matthew 24 to 28.
I never forgot it and it lasted about 40 minutes. If you're teaching an outline course or a survey course or you're introducing a book by giving a bird's eye view overview, that may be a way to start, but that is not a way to teach the Bible. You have to go slow because you have to go deep, you want to be thorough. I say to myself all the time, maybe I could speed this up so I can finish the New Testament before I'm dead. Some guy asked me recently, when you finish that, are you going to do the Old Testament?
I said, sure, be at 190 when I'm done. No, but, you know, I mean, it's sort of an interesting thing providentially should I survive. It will sort of get me where I need to be age-wise and finish what I had hoped to be able to do in my lifetime. That may be all I can say about that is maybe God has that in His providential plan. But my goal in preaching is never to fit anything into a time schedule. Sometimes preachers will say to me, do you plan your year? How do you plan your preaching year? I say I don't plan my preaching year, I plan for next Sunday. Sometimes I really don't know until I get into the text how much I'm going to be able to cover. If I took a book and broke it down, if I arbitrarily took a book like Philippians or whatever, and said, okay, I'm going to break this down into X number of sermons and preach those sermons over this many weeks and cast that in concrete, then I have imposed that overview on the text, right? I have imposed that. I really don't want to do that and it's very often the case that I find in the preaching of a sermon itself that I am exposed to things that I hadn't prepared or planned to say and it changes what I'm going to say the following week. So I never pre-plan the timing of my messages, the number of messages, or the weeks in which I will complete a book. I go with what I feel the text is yielding to me and I actually don't know what it's yielding to me until I get into it. But I am never under the sovereignty of the homiletics. I'm never under the tyranny of the outline. And I believe it is far better to go slow than it is to go fast. We don't need the quick look, we need the deep understanding.
Place is very important. In Acts 20, the Apostle Paul says that he kept back nothing, he held nothing back. John Calvin preached steadily through book after book of the Bible. He never wavered from this approach to preaching for 25 years there in Geneva, with the exception of a few high festivals and special occasions. One writer says, on Sunday he took always the New Testament except for a few Psalms on Sunday afternoons. During the week, it was always the Old Testament. The records show fewer than half a dozen exceptions for the sake of the Christian year. Listen to this. He almost entirely ignored Christmas and Easter. A man after my own heart, you know. They can chop up the church calendar with all these things and get you out of the flow of exposition, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Grandparent's Day, whatever day, this day, that day.
And, you know, some guys just bounce around from pole to pole on that. He almost entirely ignored Christmas and Easter in the selection of his text. To give you some idea of the scope of his pulpit in the sense of how he preached in terms of pace, he began his series on Acts on August 25, 1549, and ended it in March of 1554. After Acts, he went to the epistle of Thessalonians where he preached 46 sermons. In Corinthians, he preached 186. The pastoral epistle is 86, Galatians 43, Ephesians 48, and he did that between...he did that up until I should say, I don't know exactly when he started that, but he finished in 1549...1559, I'm sorry. Then in the spring of that year, he began the harmony of the gospels and he never finished it.
Five years later, he died...died in May of 1564. On the weekdays during that season, he preached 159 sermons on Job, 200 on Deuteronomy, 353 sermons on Isaiah, 123 on Genesis, and so on and so on. What I'm saying to you, gentlemen, is this is the kind of diligence, the kind of study, the kind of production upon which the history of the church turns. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current study here on Grace to You is giving you some insight into a pastor's heart.
Well, John, as both a pastor and Chancellor of the University and Seminary, you've spent a lot of time with men either preparing to be a pastor or who are just starting out in ministry, and so I'm wondering, what comes to mind as a common mistake that men make when they first become pastors? If you think for one minute that you're some kind of hero, you're done. Yeah, Jesus said those who would be first should be servant of all. Yeah, and whoever wants to be first should make himself last. We're not in the business of creating heroes.
Look, I'm being straightforward with this because I think it is the problem. You better go into the ministry meek and lowly and humble, like the Apostle Paul, who was the least of all things, who saw himself as the scum, the off-scouring. He was unworthy. He was a broken man.
He had suffered. He was persecuted. If you think you're some kind of hero, there is a short shelf life for that kind of leadership for sure. Yeah, the word minister means servant. You're a steward of something that doesn't belong to you, divine truth and the people of God. You're a steward of the Bible and you're a steward of the people. Feed the flock of God. You've given an oversight over the flock of God, which he purchased with his own blood. You have a blood-bought flock and you are the servant. Even the Messiah, the Messiah himself is the slave of God. Isaiah identifies him as the slave of God, the servant of God. And Jesus said, you know, let this mind be in you. Paul says it was in Jesus. You don't think more highly of yourself than you ought to think, but you think lowly of yourself as Christ thought of himself, who humbled himself, took on the form of a servant, made in the likeness of man, humbled even to death and death on a cross.
He came not to be served, but to serve. The virtue that provides the best opportunity for longevity and success in ministry is to be humble and to be the servant. Thanks, John. And friend, if you or someone you know is thinking about becoming a pastor, John's current study, Insight into a Pastor's Heart, is a great help. It clearly lays out God's plan for a flourishing ministry.
You can download it for free when you get in touch with us today. You can find all four lessons from Insight into a Pastor's Heart online at gty.org. And keep in mind, the website is also where you go to download any of John's sermons from more than 56 years of pulpit ministry.
It's over 3,600 sermons in MP3 and transcript format, and again, to download those messages for free, you'll find them at gty.org. And see how you can help your church become what God intends it to be, whether you're a pastor or a lay person. Let me suggest John's book, The Master's Plan for the Church. It will show you straight from scripture what God expects from your church and its leaders.
The Master's Plan for the Church is reasonably priced, shipping is free, you can order by calling us at 800-55-GRACE, or you can order from the website gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Watch Grace To You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, and then be back tomorrow as John helps you answer this question. How do you know if God has called you to be in full-time ministry? Join us when John returns with another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.
