Bring Out the Book! (Part 2 of 2)

When you attend a play, it is the job of the actor to entertain you.

You're supposed to just sit back and enjoy the show. That shouldn't be your expectation in church, though. Whether you're preaching from the pulpit or sitting in the pew, each of us has an important job to do in church. Alistair Begg explores those roles today on Truth for Life.

We're in the opening verses of Nehemiah chapter 8. To preach is no special honor, but it is a great calling. Bruce Thielman says it this way, There is no special honor in being called to the preaching ministry.

There is only special pain. The pulpit calls those anointed to it as the sea calls its sailors, and like the sea it batters and bruises and does not rest. To preach, to really preach, is to die naked a little at a time and to know each time you do it that you're gonna have to do it again. Now, what we have in Nehemiah chapter 8, then, is a classic illustration of this kind of proclamation. So notice, then, first of all, all the people gathered expectantly. God gave Ezra the ability and the authority. The people gave him the opportunity and the invitation.

And what did they do? Well, they listened attentively. Verse 2, On the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, notice, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. Now, there is a principle here, loved ones. I'm not sure just how it all works out, but I know there is a principle here. Namely, that the idea that the only way to effectively instruct a congregation is to divvy it up on the basis of age and special interest is not a biblical principle. It's not necessarily a wrong principle, but it's not a biblical principle.

The way of instruction in the Old Testament was, first of all, parental instruction to the children, and then it was the instruction of the elders of the church to the families. Well, you see, you can't possibly expect that little so-and-so, who's only five or six, could possibly sit and listen to this great rambling dissertation, do you? Well, yes. Yes, I do, actually.

I say, well, you're weird. Well, yes, I accept that as well, but I still do. Does this mean, then, that there is no place for everything else that's going on just now?

No, it does not mean that for a moment. Well, I think we need to start where the Bible starts. For example, last Sunday night preaching in a church in Florida, I listened with great happiness as a group of young people sang in the evening service. Bless the people around, and it was a jolly nice song, and then they took off. They proceeded to walk right out the door and were history before I preached, which sent a nice message, a number of messages. I managed not to say anything, which was a miracle in itself of grace, and I never said anything Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, then Wednesday.

I couldn't help myself. I started talking about it by Wednesday, and I still haven't got it out of my system, but here's the deal. I know what it was about. I just think they were wrong. I know what they were saying.

This is what they were saying. Young people like that won't come to, I quote, evening service. Therefore, what we have to do with young people like that is take them out and give them basketballs and burgers and babes, and then we'll get them all, and then once they get the basketballs, the burgers, and the babes, then they'll grow up, they'll be strong and tough Christians, and then they'll all start coming to the evening service. Bunk!

Bunk! Because many of their parents don't come to the evening service to start with. They've already capitulated to it. If we think that we're going to instruct people the Sesame Street way from preschool to postdoctoral thesis, then we will live with the implications of all these dumb puppets, because the theory was that if you have the one, two, A, B, C, then the people will start to love education, and then once they leave the puppets behind, then they'll love it when they go post-puppet, but they don't. They don't go post-puppet, because the only way they know to get educated is entertainment education. So now we entertain them from the age of four to the age of seven. Now the teacher's got a real problem because she ain't got no puppets, so she better go get some puppets because she'll never keep them in there.

Now we got the junior hires. Well, they can't listen, so we get more puppets and bigger puppets, and then the senior, and so it goes on. Do you get a congregation like this? Conrogation? I don't mean this congregation, but I don't mean this congregation.

Seriously. What I mean is if you start with that group and you capitulate to that into adulthood, then you'll have a congregation of adults that don't have any notion in the world about thinking or reasoning or anything else. So the notion of them listening attentively is an interesting one.

Well, that's exactly what they did. Now, the young and old were always involved like this in the reading of the law. Deuteronomy 31, Moses wrote down the law, and he commanded the elders of Israel at the end of every seven years to do this. Deuteronomy 31.11, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place he will choose, you shall read this law before them in their hearing. Now, this is what you're to do, he says. Assemble the people, men, women, and children, and the aliens living in your towns.

Why? So they can listen and learn. Learn what? Learn to fear the Lord your God and follow carefully all the words of this law.

Their children, who do not know this law, must hear it and learn to fear the Lord your God as long as you live in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess. The other evening at a little hospitality time here in the fellowship hall on a Friday evening, a young girl asked my wife what she thought of the new approach to spelling. Caught her a little off guard. She said, what is the new approach to spelling? The girl said, well, the new approach to spelling is that you can spell any way you want, anytime you want. And that what you do is the child just spells and then the teacher looks at it and says, oh, isn't that nice, honey? Is that how you think it's spelled? And the child says, mm-hmm. And the teacher says, well, that's nice. I'm glad you like to spell that way. And you just go ahead and spell that way for a little longer. And somehow or another, miraculously, around the age of seven and eight, I'm told, this all kicks in and it all starts to work for you.

And you leave off the phonetic stuff and you start to, you leave the phonetic and move to the pathetic because it's not going to happen. And there is a whole approach you see to education, which is if you suggest to people that the way you learn is you learn things off by heart. And I know I'll get letters from educators like crazy, but I'm into it now in any case. If you learn things off by heart, you're not really learning them. If you experience them, you're learning them.

So you see, when you bring this mentality of education into a church context and somebody says, this is what the Bible says, this is what the Bible means, and this is the implication, the natural reaction is, I don't like that stuff. That's not what I'm used to. I'm used to just assimilating things at my own level in my own way. If I want to spell, I spell. If I want to add, I add.

If I want to do what I want to do, I do it. But there's no suggestion of that in the reading of the law. Read the law of God, says Moses, so that they may listen and they may learn to fear God. It takes us into another whole department. And despite the length of time involved back in Nehemiah 8, they did just that.

From early in the morning until the middle of the day. Their attentive listening was an indication of what was going on. Now, for a realistic experience of preaching to take place, loved ones, for it to be something more than just a knowledgeable fellow banging up against a box. Two things are involved. The congregation has to come prayerfully expectant, and whoever has the privilege of teaching has also to come prayerfully expectant.

Then when you have that meeting of expectations before God, then God will do what he has pledged to do through his Word. But if you have someone who speaks merely to hear their voice or to impress people, or if you have congregations that listen merely to be tickled and entertained, then there is no real proclamation, and there is no significant reaction. The people listened attentively.

Thirdly and second to the end, the people responded properly. The interesting thing is that they had a platform erected for this thing. They had a pulpit.

Large enough for Ezra and these thirteen men. Since they were reading from the break of dawn till the noontime hour, and they were reading from the law of God, it seems more than likely that Ezra was not doing all of the reading, but rather that he was sharing it, and so that different ones stood up and they read a wee bit, and then someone else stood and read another portion. And that in between the readings of the book of the law, there were pauses, and that's where these characters in verse 7 come into play.

The Levites. They make it understandable so that the individuals can apply it to their lives. That makes a lot of sense, I think. And certainly it establishes something of a principle. I don't know whether it gives us the basis of small groups, whether it provides for us the notion of Sunday school, just exactly how we would frame it, but there is a principle here that needs to be adhered to, understood, and applied. It certainly speaks to the issue of eldership in a local church. Because no individual who has the privilege of proclaiming the Word of God systematically consecutively, week by week, can possibly answer all the questions that come concerning the Word of God. But if you have a plurality of elders in a church who are, quote, apt to teach, then the questions that are raised by the congregation may be answered by these men, dispersed amongst the congregation, so that they may turn to the people and say, Do you understand what was just being taught? This is why, for example, in the book of Titus, and in chapter 1 and in verse 9, it says that an elder must be one who holds firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught. He's got to be a guy of absolute biblical conviction. He's got to believe it, understand it, apply it, live it.

Why? So that he can encourage others by sound doctrine or teaching and refute those who oppose it. And that is exactly, in some measure, what was going on here as a result of the construction of this pulpit. The people gathered, and they listened attentively, and they responded properly. Now, it is also of some interest to me—and I wouldn't want to make too much of this, but I would like to make something of it—that at the dedication of Solomon's temple, there was glory and beauty, there was drama, there was natural and supernatural dimensions to overwhelm the worshippers. But here, the focus of the people, fifty thousand of them when they gathered, was on a wooden platform and on a scroll. Or more properly, was upon that which was written in the scroll.

Okay? So the focus of the people was directed to a large wooden platform, and the significance about the large wooden platform was not the fourteen individuals who were on it, but was the book from which they read. Now, does this have implications?

Well, I personally believe it does. I think it has implications for church architecture. You see, it's when you give up the preaching of the word and turn it into a liturgical thing, that you no longer give preeminence to the book, and you create liturgical stations all around your place, because the liturgy has preeminence over the proclamation.

When you have a church where the proclamation is that which establishes all the form and function that flows from it, then you may have a church building just as plain as this. The absence of other things are to exalt the one thing. For it is only in the Scriptures that God has revealed himself savingly.

He has not revealed himself savingly in any created thing save his son and his book. Therefore, anything which creates in the mind of a worshiper that there is significance there as opposed to over there is a deviation. It follows up the first two commandments which we saw some time ago. So they gathered, and they responded by lifting up their hands and saying, Amen. Amen. We haven't been saying Amen so much in the last wee while here at Parkside.

Have you noticed that? It's not cool to say Amen out loud. Especially businessmen don't like to say Amen out loud.

Businessmen don't like to sing. That's why many of you don't sing. When the Spirit of God loses your tongue, you'll sing.

You'll surprise your wife, your kids, and yourself. But until he does, you'll be exactly the way you are. Until the Spirit of God loosens our tongues, we will either say Amen because somebody said to say it, or we will say it because it comes from our hearts. The people lifted their hands and they said Amen. Amen.

Right on Ezra. So be it. So you can't lift your hands here. Why not?

Whoever told you that? So it's not one of those kind of churches. One of what kind of churches? First church of the lifted hands? What is this? First community church of sit on your hands?

Nobody ever told you that. You meet your wife after she's been gone. How do you go for her like that? You say, I love you. I want you. Your children come and greet you with their tiny kids. They come at you. I love you.

I want you. The posture of a congregation is significant. They lifted their hands. They said Amen.

Amen. And they fell down. They bowed down and they worshiped with their faces to the ground. See, that's one of the great advantages in going into the African continent. You go into the continent of Africa, and by and large, they don't have any good church buildings like this.

Got a bunch of rickety old chairs and a few things and corrugated tin and everything else. And we go, my, my, can we really have church here? And boy, do they have church. But if they read in the Bible, it says, and they worship with their faces to the ground, they got nothing in front of them. So they just get down and worship.

They don't have to rearrange everything and fiddle it all around. If we want to kneel down here in this church, we got a big problem. You can't even kneel down. I mean, try and kneel down where you're seated. It's virtually impossible.

You'll knock your two front teeth out. Now, why did we do that? Well, we're not going to redesign the church this morning and maybe tomorrow, but not today. The reason we did that is largely because we've got the notion that people who kneel down, they don't really mean it.

Isn't that what we think? All those people who kneel down, they just kneel down because they don't know enough not to kneel down. Maybe they know something we don't know. Maybe they know that when a man kneels down and does something to his head and to his heart. If I asked every man right now to move to the side of the aisle and kneel down on the floor, it'd be an awesome sight.

Because our posture reveals our response. They all gathered. They all listened.

They all responded. They lifted their hands in worship. They bowed their faces in contrition, and they wept. They wept. Why did they weep? Because the Word of God struck them, hit them, hurt them.

The Book of the Law hit them where they needed hit. See, not all guilt is wrong. When God moves in our hearts and says, you know what? You haven't been praying the way you ought to be praying. That's good guilt. Because it's there not in order to make us feel bad.

It's there in order to remind us we better get back praying again. You haven't been witnessing to people the way you were witnessing to them. You're not sharing your faith. You haven't shared your faith in the last week, the last two weeks, the last month. Nobody around you has ever heard one thing about Jesus, proud of your lips, says the Spirit of God to me.

Alistair Begg, do you know that? Well, that's good guilt. So you have this notion that all guilt is wrong, and all guilt is not wrong.

The guilt which is there in order to show us our need of a Savior, need of repentance, need of faith, is good guilt. And the people listen to this thing being read, and they wept. It's been very seldom when I have preached that people have wept. And that has to do with the Spirit of God. And it's been very seldom that I have wept as others have preached.

But that is mostly to do with the hardness of my heart. Who will weep for the powerless state of the church? Who will weep for our hard hearts when our friends and neighbors do not know Jesus?

Who will weep at our lethargy and praise? They gathered expectantly. They listened attentively. They responded properly. And they went home joyfully. Nehemiah comes to them, and he says, Okay, guys, that's enough of the crying. Let's go.

We're out of here. Go out, get something nice to eat. And if you've had something nice to eat, send some to your friends. This is a sacred day to the Lord. The joy of the Lord is your strength.

Weeping comes in the evening, and joy comes in the morning. Let's go, and let's go gladly. We came expectantly. We listened attentively. We responded properly. We're leaving joyfully.

That's the way it ought to happen. This is a simple lesson on the place of preaching and the way in which God's people should attend upon worship. May God help us to learn from it. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life with the message he's titled, Bring Out The Book.

Alistair returns in just a moment to close today's program. As we learned today, prayer is an essential element in corporate worship for every believer, whether you're the one doing the teaching or the one being taught. In reality, many of us struggle to know what to say when we pray. You could probably relate to that, and if so, let me encourage you to download Alistair's audiobook, Pray Big. This book examines the Apostle Paul's bold expectant prayers for the Ephesian church. As you listen, you'll be inspired to pray with an increasing sense of awareness that there is nothing God can't do, that he really does hear us when we speak to him. This is an audiobook, we're making it available for free.

You can download it through the end of the month. Simply request it when you visit truthforlife.org slash Pray Big. We also want to encourage you to request a copy of a book called The Beauty of Divine Grace. This coming Sunday marks the anniversary of the Reformation. More than 500 years ago, there was a move among God's people, Martin Luther and others, drawing the church back to the idea that grace never comes to us apart from Jesus. He is the one who seeks us out and enables our faith. That's what the book, The Beauty of Divine Grace, is all about. As you read through the book, you'll learn more about what the Reformers discovered in the scriptures, that salvation is not the result of works, it's the gift of God through faith in Jesus Christ. Ask for your copy of the book, The Beauty of Divine Grace, when you donate today.

You can give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can arrange to set up an automatic monthly donation when you visit truthforlife.org slash truthpartner. Now here is Alistair with a closing prayer. Our God and our Father, we thank you for this wonderful day. We thank you for your book, the Bible, that you've given to us in order that we might understand and live by it. We thank you for our church and for all the blessings you've poured upon us.

We thank you for one another. We pray that you will help us as day passes day to remember these simple principles as we think about bringing our families and friends to worship. Help us, Lord, to gather expectantly, to listen attentively, to respond properly, and in your goodness to leave joyfully, knowing that you the Lord bless us and keep us, that you make your face to shine upon us and be gracious unto us, that you lift up the light of your countenance upon us and you give us your peace today and forevermore. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. We know that God's Word is life-transforming, but even solid biblical teaching will be ineffective if someone is not listening expectantly. Tomorrow we'll learn four things that can prevent you from fully benefiting from the preaching of God's Word. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the learning is for a living.