I never study the Bible to make a sermon. I study not to make a sermon, I study to know the Word of God and the God of the Word. I seek the truth for my own soul. I study for my own soul.
I go deep because that's where I want to go so that I can be exalted in worshiping the Lord. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. When Charles Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers, would lecture a class of seminary students, he would tell them to do any other job besides preaching if they could help it.
Why? Because, quote, �If the man can help it, God never called him, but if he cannot help it, and he must preach or die, then he is the man.� Well, it's that sort of pressing call that steered John MacArthur to the pastorate more than 56 years ago. And today, John offers some insight into a pastor's heart. He's going to look at the primary task of any preacher in a lesson that can help you better understand and encourage the work that your pastor does. And so with that, here's John. 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. 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. 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. More 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 in, 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. 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 because 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.
Pace 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. Someone said on the clearest...one of the clearest illustrations of this commitment to preaching expositionally was a self-conscious choice on Calvin's part that on Easter Day, 1538, after preaching, he left the pulpit of St. Peter's, banished by the city council, returned in September 1541, three years later, and that's when he picked up the exposition of the very next verse. Why was he so committed to this?
Three reasons are suggested for this by John Piper. He says three reasons are suggested as to why he was so committed to what Piper calls sequential expository preaching. One, Calvin believed that the Word of God was a lamp that had been taken away from the churches. He said in his own personal testimony, "'Thy word which ought to have shone on all thy people like a lamp was taken away, or at least suppressed as to us. And now, O Lord, what remains to a wretch like me, but earnestly to supplicate thee, not to judge according to my deserts, that fearful abandonment of thy word from which in thy wondrous goodness thou hast at least delivered me.'" Calvin decided that the continuous exposition of books of the Bible was the best way to overcome what he called the fearful abandonment of God's Word.
This is that kind of time, isn't it? When there is a fearful abandonment of God's Word. And the sad truth is, men who have been trained to do Bible exposition are joining those who have abandoned the Bible.
And what needs to happen today is the very opposite. The continuous exposition of books of the Bible was the best way to overcome that. Secondly, Parker, writing about Calvin, says that Calvin had a second reason why he did sequential expository preaching. Calvin had a horror of those who preached their own ideas in the pulpit.
Where do you think he developed that? Oh, he developed that because he was so profoundly involved in the Scripture. He said, quote, when we enter the pulpit, it is not so that we may bring our own dreams and fancies with us.
End quote. He believed that by expounding the Scriptures as a whole, he would be forced to deal with all that God wanted to say, not just what he wanted to say. And sequential exposition through the Bible guarantees that you will say everything that God wants said. Thirdly, third reason for sequential expository preaching on Calvin's part is this. Calvin saw the majesty of God in the Word of God. He really believed that the Word of God was the Word of God and that in it the glory of God was revealed. In Sermon number 61 on Deuteronomy, he challenged pastors of his day and ours.
He wrote, "'Let the pastors boldly dare all things by the Word of God. Let them constrain all the power, glory and excellence of the world to give place to and obey the divine majesty of this Word. Let them enjoin everyone by it from the highest to the lowest. Let them edify the body of Christ. Let them devastate Satan's reign. Let them pasture the sheep, kill the wolves, instruct and exhort the rebellious. Let them bind and loose thunder and lightning if necessary, but let them do it all according to the Word of God.'"
A fourth P in my outline now, personal...personal. And I'm just trying to help you to see how I view this preaching. To me, this whole opportunity to study, the perspective is there, the preparation is there, the pace is there, but coming down through that, this is a very personal thing for me. I've said this through the years, I say it again, I never study the Bible to make a sermon, never. I never approach the Scripture to make a sermon. The sermon is the last thing that I do. I study not to make a sermon, I study to know the Word of God and the God of the Word. I seek the truth for my own soul. I study for my own soul. I go deep because that's where I want to go so that I can be exalted in worshiping the Lord. It's always been this way and I don't really know why...why people are motivated the way they're motivated.
I don't know why I am motivated the way I am. I remember as a very young boy, I was in junior high and I had this kind of aching down inside of me to understand the Bible. My father preached the Bible faithfully, but that was seemingly not enough for me. I just had this aching inside for something that I thought was there that I hadn't yet known. And I was about in junior high.
I was a typical junior high guy. I was in trouble like everybody else, but God had planted something in my heart. And somebody gave me a book called The Imitation of Life by Thomas A. Kempis, which is really a mystical book. But I began to read it.
Imagine a junior high kid getting a hold of that. And I started reading it and it took me to depths of contemplation about God that I had really never, ever seen. And then somebody gave me a book by E. M. Bounds, you know that book, on prayer. And that talks about people wearing holes in wooden floors with their knees and that kind of thing, and hungering for God. And I'm this kid reading these mystical things and wondering what kind of depth of understanding of God these people had.
I have come to know that not all that was going on in these mystical approaches was necessarily valid, but that was what captivated me. And that nagging need to know the Scripture took me into college. And first thing I did was I took a Greek minor. All I could get in college was a Greek minor, but I took a minor in Greek because I figured if I'm going to learn the New Testament, I'm going to have to know the original language. So as a freshman, I took ten units.
As a sophomore, I took six and I finished up with 24 or 26 units in my college. The last third and fourth year of Greek, I was the only student in the class. I was tutored third and fourth year Greek because I still had this...and it wasn't that I wanted to know Greek. It wasn't that I wanted to memorize all that stuff.
It wasn't that I wanted to go over all those cards and everything and the whole language is hopelessly irregular. And none of us particularly enjoy that, but it was that I knew that that was the key to unlock what I needed to know and what I wanted to know. My heart was hungry to know. And then I went off to seminary and I got a hold of a book called The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock, and I got submerged in that at the beginning of my seminary and I still haven't been able to come up. That thing goes on and on and on.
I mean, you can drown in that. And there was just something inside of me. At the same time, I had all the normal issues of life and, you know, very involved in all kinds of activities and carrying on, but down inside was this somewhat strong appetite to know things. And then I came across some psychological study when I was in seminary that said that the drive to know was stronger than the sex drive or the drive to eat according to some psychological test.
Well, some people might question that. I'm not sure that I'm in a position to say that, but it does indicate that it's a strong, strong desire and I think the Holy Spirit had cranked it up a few notches in my case. And so when I got into the...when I graduated from seminary, I was...see, I graduated from college when I was 21, I guess. I graduated from seminary at 24, so I was too young to be any good to anybody. So I...no church would want me. I didn't want to be...particularly be a youth pastor because I wanted to exposit the Scripture. In those days, a youth pastor...well, I'm just telling you, in those days, a youth pastor, they handed you a volleyball, you know, and said, you're the youth pastor.
Plan a beach party. The paradigm of a youth pastor was not anything like we established. So I said, I just want to preach. I just want to preach.
I just want to exposit the Word. But nobody wanted me. So I wound up going on the road. I began to speak all over everywhere and to young people's groups and...but I was frustrated because they always wanted to hear the same stuff and you get those ten sugar stick sermons and you give them in your sleep. And I was very unsatisfied and at one point I began to ask the Lord, please get me in a place where I can learn the Word.
I need to be studying the Word all the time. A church contacted me and then decided I was too young and then Grace contacted me and, of course, they had two pastors who died and they wanted a young one and so that was my primary qualification. Really, it was the truth.
They had two widows on their hands and that gets expensive. So they said, you know, we want a healthy young guy and so forth. So I came here and I was so excited because I was going to be able to study every day because I had this appetite. I've never lost that. To me still what drives me is not the sermon, but what drives me is the revelation, the discovery.
In fact, now I'm going to tell you the real secrets. Preaching is not my greatest joy. It's work. And in all honesty, many Sunday mornings when I get up, if I had my choice, I'd just as soon not preach. I'd rather go hear somebody else.
I'd like to come and just sit and worship the Lord and hear somebody preach. It's work. And sometimes I'm tired. Sometimes I don't feel well.
Sometimes I have a stomach ache. And it's not easy to go to someplace like Belarus and teach the entire New Testament nine hours a day for six days in a row. That part of it is work. What has never worked to me is the discovery. That's the joy.
That's the exhilaration. And I always study to discover. And that's why my information is better than my homiletics. I confess. I confess. My content is better than my homiletics. I was doing a pastor seminar in Montreal.
I went up there for about nine trips up there. They started a seminary. It's a French seminary, Seminary Biblique des Quebec.
Quebec, French, is the only place in western civilization where there is a first-generation church. Well, what happened was churches were starting to explode and they didn't have any mature people to be pastors. So they threw a seminary together and they got the brightest young men who felt called to preach and they made them pastors over these little congregations and they were...churches were starting like 25 a week or 25 every few weeks and just boom, boom, boom, boom everywhere as the French people began to respond to the truth. Anyway, so they wanted to pull these guys out of their churches because they didn't have any training so they'd pull them out for a week here and a week there and a week here and a week there and a week here and a week there.
And some of us would go up. Don Carson, who by the way speaks fluent French because he's a Quebecois, was born there and myself and others would go up and get these guys and we'd have these guys who were baby Christians, maybe been saved four or five years. They were the pastor and they wanted to just suck in all the stuff. And I remember I did a week on expository preaching. I told them how to do it, you know, just really the way to do it.
And then we had a Q&A on the final day and the first question this guy gets up and he says in French, this is a simultaneous translation with electronic, you know, ear thing. So he says to me, he says, Pastor MacArthur, he says, we have heard what you have said and we have listened to your tapes because we can speak some English and we want to know why you don't preach the way you have told us. So I said, well, yeah, I know that is a problem.
You know, I know how to organize. I just also can't get past the...I can't get past the dynamic of preaching and I will not be confined by homiletics. So what starts out as something well organized, skillfully crafted, turns into a meandering series, but that's because I am always the servant of the content, never of the outline. So I said, you know, look, I will tell you that content is king and homiletics is the servant, that's all. And that's because I study to know the truth. Well, just another thought and you can follow it up yourself. There's another P in the list, power, power. You never want to go into the Scripture without before you go there, go to the throne, open my eyes that I might behold wondrous things from my Law.
Where's that found? Psalm 119, open my eyes that I might behold wondrous things from my Law. That's your prayer, men. That's your prayer. Or you could pray verse 27, you know what that one says? Make me understand your precepts. Or verse 34, give me understanding that I may observe your Law. And there's several more, verse 35, 36, 37.
And who is the agent that you're calling upon? The Holy Spirit who illuminates. More I could say, but I'll leave it at that. This has been a constant lifelong persistence for me.
That's another P you can put in the list, persistence. Nothing's ever been able to change it. You know, and what I mean by that, you know, everything it seems through my ministry, I've lived long enough now to know everything comes against the place of the Word of God in the church, everything. Everything that is bad for the church ultimately has to pull the Word down, right?
It all wants to pull down the Scripture. But you just have to be absolutely relentless against your own weakness. I don't know if you've ever read this, Calvin suffered tremendously with physical problems, migraines, spitting blood, gout he had, and he also had kidney stones, which gave him, he said, this is an interesting old paragraph from Calvin, they gave me exquisite pain at length, not without the most painful strainings.
I was delivered and my degree of suffering was somewhat mitigated, but such was the size of the kidney stones that they lacerated me and the hemorrhage could only be arrested by an injection of milk through a syringe. He really suffered and yet he was so relentless and so persistent. There's another P and then I'll let you work on this one, persecution. I certainly can't stand with some of those men in the past, but I'll tell you this, if you preach the word faithfully, you're going to get a negative reaction.
You're going to get some hostility. But the Apostle Paul said to Timothy, suffer hardship along with me as a good soldier of Jesus Christ, right? That's John MacArthur continuing his study here on Grace To You, titled Insight Into A Pastor's Heart. This series was first delivered to students at the master's seminary where John serves as chancellor. Friend, what happens Sunday to Sunday in the pulpit should be of serious concern to the people sitting in the pews. The preaching sets the tone for the entire church and that's why we've aired this series. It's helpful to pass along to young men interested in pursuing pastoral ministry and is helpful to current church leaders for their encouragement and edification. Keep in mind, the Insight Into A Pastor's Heart study, along with a lot of content that we didn't have time to air on the radio, is available on four MP3 downloads and that includes two Q&A sessions that John had with students from the master's seminary. To download the entire series, get in touch today. All four downloads are available for free at GTY.org. You can get the MP3s and the transcripts, and in fact there are over 3,600 of John's sermons and other Bible study tools available for free at our website.
Take advantage of everything that's there for you at GTY.org. And keep in mind, we would love to hear how John's verse-by-verse teaching has encouraged you or your pastor. Perhaps the lessons these last few days have helped you better understand how you can serve your church or helped you know how to pray for your church leaders. If that describes you, email your note to letters at GTY.org. Or if you prefer regular mail, write to Grace to You, P.O.
Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for making this broadcast part of your day, and join us again tomorrow to hear John explain why he loves the church and why you should love it as well, even though you may have been hurt by someone in a local congregation. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
