Yeah. It's a privilege to be speaking at what I imagine may well be the first William Perkins conference in the history of the Christian church and to have this opportunity to give the opening address. It's also, those of you who go to conferences and speak at conferences know the routine that it's the person who knows least on the subject who is allowed to speak first. so that he doesn't have apoplexy listening to the other speakers stealing all the material that he had and knowing the other speakers. This is not, in my case, false modesty, but simply the truth of the matter. And so I've been given the opportunity of speaking to you this evening on what seems to me to be absolutely central to William Perkins as a man and as a minister, how he would have thought about himself and introduced himself to us if we had asked him what was special about himself, I think he would have said, I am a plain preacher. That is the burden of my life and the burden of my ministry. So, I want us to read a couple of passages from Scripture that will set this in context. First of all, from 2 Corinthians chapter 4 and the opening verses, and then from 2 Timothy chapter 3 towards the end and into the beginning of chapter 4. 2 Corinthians 3 through 5, as you will know, is an extended explanation, defense, exposition of Paul's ministry that is under attack in the church in Corinth over against the super apostles. He is speaking about the marks of a genuine apostolic ministry. Therefore, since through God's mercy, We have this ministry. We do not lose heart. Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways. We do not use deception, nor do we distort the Word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly, we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake. For God who said, let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. And then very well-known words again from the end of 2 Timothy chapter 3 and to the beginning of chapter 4, which incidentally is surely one of the worst chapter breaks in the New Testament in Paul's letters, because it's very clear linguistically even, that there is a very intimate connection between the end of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4. Paul says, 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16, all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, I give you this charge in view of His appearing and kingdom. Preach the Word. Be prepared in season and out of season. Reprove. Correct. Encourage. with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." These words had tremendous relevance in the 17th century. They had tremendous relevance at the time of the Reformation. They have tremendous relevance today. Paul is saying to Timothy, people will not want to hear preaching. What is the remedy? Preaching. And so there is a very special resonance in thinking this evening about William Perkins as a preacher. So let me, for your help, it's Friday night, it's probably been a long week for you, let me give you a little road map of where I plan to go this evening so that if you lose the way a little, or even if I lose the way a little this evening, we will be able to come back and find our signposts. William Perkins dates, as you probably know, 1558 to 1604. Therefore, a man whose life spanned almost exactly the Elizabethan era. And I want us to try and think together about four aspects of Perkins, the plain preacher. First of all, to think of him and the impact of his preaching ministry. Second, to think a little about Perkins' understanding of the task of the preacher, what is the preacher about. Thirdly, to look a little at Perkins' emphasis on the plain style of preaching, which he both illustrated and commended. And then, fourthly and finally, to look at what I think of as Perkins' grids, his grids not for those of you who come from the American South, his grits, but his grids to guide all preachers in every age begin with the impact of his ministry. One morning in the autumn, the fall of 1990, I was sitting in the office of a seminary professor in Seoul, Korea. He was looking after me as I was there to give some guest lectures. He had to go out on an errand for 15 minutes. He just encouraged me to sit and read in his study. And I espied on the far wall among the bookcases three hefty folio volumes. Even from where I was sitting, because the dates were embossed on the back, I immediately recognized these three folio volumes as the works of William Perkins in Seoul, Korea. He returned 15 minutes later. And I said to him, Professor so-and-so, how on earth, how on earth did you manage to find a folio set of the works of William Perkins? You could buy them perhaps in England for a king's ransom. You could not buy them in Scotland for any kind of ransom. They were both almost unknown and they were invaluable. He gave a suspicious little smile and he said to me, would you like a set? Now those of you who are familiar with the Asian culture recognize that the words spoken to someone from beyond the family or the land which respond to a comment of admiration. The words, would you like, are some of the most difficult words to negotiate. Some of you have foolishly admired the ties of gentlemen in the Far East and found yourself faced with a man who suddenly is tireless and you have his tie. in your hand." And I found myself in some difficulties. I don't think I was quite coveting this set of William Perkins, but I tried my best and I said, as un-nuanced a way as I could muster, like a set. He said, would you like a set? I said, like a set? He said, I can get you a set for $90. $90. In those days, by the exchange rate in 1990, that would have been about 50 pounds. Much cheaper than the first four volumes of William Perkins, incidentally. Oh, he said, I can get you one this afternoon. He went round the corner to a backstreet printer in Seoul, Korea and brought me back a bound reproduced set of the works of William Perkins for ninety dollars. It was a kind of stunning expression of the impact of the ministry of William Perkins. that here in another part of the world that spoke another language, it was possible to do what you couldn't do in the British Isles, purchase a set of the works of William Perkins. And yet in some ways, given the fact that this was the late twentieth century, that was not to me the very best illustration of the impact of Perkins' ministry. The best illustrations of the impact of Perkins' ministry came much more proximate to his life. His impact on Richard Sibbes, for example, who when he heard the bell toll over Perkins' death rejoiced in heart and naively. that his conscience would no longer be pricked by the very presence of the man and the ministry of the man here in Cambridge. And Sibbes, of course, was to be drawn himself to Jesus Christ and to have this extraordinary influence among the Puritan brotherhood, so many of whom in one way or another would trace their lineage back to William Perkins. Robert Bolton came to Cambridge from Oxford where he was a student to hear William Perkins and he wrote of him in those days that he was a barren, empty fellow and a passing mean scholar. But it was not long before he would also write of William Perkins, because of the power of his ministry, that he was as learned and godly a divine as our church hath for many years enjoyed in so young a man. And perhaps the most striking testimony of all, and probably the best-known testimony of all, the testimony of Thomas Goodwin. Ten years or so after Perkins' death comes up to Cambridge in 1613 and writes, the town was then filled with the discourse of the power of Mr. Perkins, his ministry still fresh in men's memories. That is not something that can be said of many ministries. Ten years later, the memory of the ministry of the Word is still fresh. So, what explains this ministry? Well, as I say, he was born in 1558 in Marston Jabbitt in Warwickshire, a few miles north of Coventry. We know relatively little as far as I know. I certainly know little about his upbringing. It looks as though in his youth at some point he may have suffered an accident as a result of which he had a lameness somewhere in his left side, perhaps just in his left arm. He came up to Cambridge and studied at Christ's, graduated in 1581, became a fellow and remained a fellow until, of course, his marriage in 1595 when he was under the laws of the university in those days, no longer able to continue his fellowship. A striking prejudice against married scholarship, if I may say so. Much more significant than that, he was appointed as the lecturer in Great St. Andrews in 1584. Most of us, I'm sure, are familiar with the concept of the lecturer in Elizabethan England. It was one of the Puritans' genius inventions to provide ministry outside of the ordinary services of the Church of England that would be free, in a sense, from various constraints on them and give the people in an area the opportunity to sit under a genuinely biblical ministry, even if The local parish minister, the rector, the vicar, was not himself an expositor of Scripture or a man of evangelical convictions. And Perkins continued in that ministry until 1604. Remarkable longevity in the exposition of Scripture. And the evidence of it is found, of course, in these three massive volumes and the many volumes that are now being reproduced. It was a powerful, passionate gospel ministry, and its impact, the atmosphere of its impact, apparently still lingering in the town ten years later. Few people, however, would have predicted that that would be William Perkins' future. I remember a girl in a church in which I ministered coming up to me very brightly because she had met at a bus stop a Sunday school teacher of my childhood who, discovering where she went to church, informed her that Sinclair Ferguson was, of all boys he had ever known, the least likely boy to go into the Christian ministry. And something of the same was probably true of William Perkins. The story that of course is best known about him is that one of the things that seemed to awaken him was overhearing a woman say to her recalcitrant child, hold your tongue or I'll give you over to drunken Perkins yonder. And so clearly, as a young man, he had a reputation for wild living. At the same time, in God's providence, at some point, the great Lawrence Chatterton became his tutor. Chatterton was in many ways one of the great heroes of the early Puritan period, his influence enormous. When he resigned his lectureship in his later years, there were, I think, over 40 gospel ministers who signed a memorandum to him. with appreciation of the fact that their gospel ministry depended on His mentoring of their lives. Indeed, their spiritual lives had been the fruit of His ministry to them. And although the lineage is not traceable, I don't think, in Perkins' case, I think it's not possible to doubt that Lawrence Chatterton had an extraordinary influence on him. But by whatever means, Perkins was brought to a living faith in Christ, and he began to do the kinds of things that zealous, young, evangelical, Puritan-minded ministers did. He sought to evangelize. to evangelize the poor, to evangelize the prisoner, to evangelize the condemned. And at 26, as men of disarmament saw the maturing of his Christian experience, he was given this appointment as a lecturer, an indication surely at that age of both his abilities and of his spirituality. And as I say, his influence was to prove immense in the Puritan Brotherhood, his tutoring of William Ames. One thinks of Ames and the chain of influence on Johannes Coxias, his influence on Sibbes, and the influence that Sibbes himself then in his ministry would have in his preaching ministry, personal ministry, written ministry. on people like Baxter, the way in which this chain touches John Cotton, the way in which John Cotton's life, along with Sib's life, touches Preston and touches Goodwin and touches Owen. And we see here, I think, one of the great illustrations in history of the manner in which when God purposes to do a fresh work of grace, While there may be individuals who seem to be though the chief, sometimes the only instrument of blessing, there's always a network to which they are connected of burdened men, burdened preachers of the gospel, praying towards its advancement and encouraging one another, conscious that they are being caught up in a work of God that is far bigger either than themselves or their own ministry. And William Perkins stands in so many ways at the fountainhead of this. And the fruit of his ministry, as I say, is in these three massive folios. He is, of course, best known for some of those works. for his great work, The Greatest Case of Conscience, which deals, in his view, with the greatest question of all. How do you know that you really are a Christian believer? His exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, the best loved, least read, and least understood part of the best loved part of Scripture. Most people who say, I don't have much time for Paul but I love the Sermon on the Mount cannot possibly have read the Sermon on the Mount, cannot possibly have listened to the sermon to the end. And so, this is a passage of Scripture in which Perkins in a profound way expounds the gospel, his exposition of Galatians, and perhaps the book for which he is kind of best known because of the title, The Golden Chain. And certainly in the scholarly world, as far as it has dabbled in Perkins. I mean the scholarly world that tends to be critical of the evangelical tradition, the one thing that the scholarly world knows is William Perkins' ocular catechism, itself a kind of genius idea. drawing on Theodore Beza's work, but putting into visual representation how the gospel works, tracing the causes of salvation and damnation from eternity to eternity, and so frequently demeaned in the neo-orthodoxy of the middle part of the twentieth century. because of A, its focus on the divine decrees, and B, as was so often said, especially in the Barthian school, the absence of Jesus Christ. Talk about not read the Sermon on the Mount to the end. One only needs to look at Perkins' ocular catechism to see plainly the spine down the middle of the whole picture. is Jesus Christ Himself in His two states, in His three offices, and the way in which every aspect of the application of redemption is found in Jesus Christ. And so, we can, I think, be confident in saying that William Perkins was a profoundly Christ-centered preacher. Actually, one of the most staggering promoters of that idea is John Bunyan's version of the same. His map of salvation actually is surprisingly lacking. in its focus on Jesus Christ in His humiliation and His exaltation and in His three offices. I'm sure if you asked John Bunyan if he had done that deliberately, he might well say, you know, I am ashamed to say I didn't even notice that. But we do think about Bunyan as Christ-centered, don't we? Even those scholars would compare Perkins with the great Bunyan, and yet it is Perkins who focuses all of our attention on Jesus Christ. And as we will see before we conclude this evening, Jesus Christ was the heartbeat of his ministry. Let me turn secondly to William Perkins' understanding in the light of this, in the light of his own experience, his understanding of the task of the preacher. Tomorrow I'm sure much will be said about Perkins the theologian. I do not mean to distinguish Perkins the theologian from Perkins the preacher, but what we are looking at here is not Perkins in the architect's office, but Perkins in the hard hat sight of ministering the gospel to men and women. Perkins, interestingly, belongs more or less to the mid-period between the recovery of biblical preaching in the Reformation, think of 1517, and the writing of the Westminster Confession, the Catechisms, the Directory for Public Worship, and the Directory for Church Government, 1517 through 1647. And he kind of spans the middle period. And in that sense is a representative in his preaching of the burdens of the Reformation and a forerunner in his understanding of the way in which the Westminster divines would formulate what they felt to be a biblical understanding of preaching. So he harvests the past and he contributes to the future. And the future, I'm thinking here of the Westminster Assembly beginning in 1643, the future very clearly harvests the ideas of William Perkins. Let me illustrate that by two questions and answers from the larger catechism. the lesser known of the two catechisms. The shorter catechism is meant for your children to memorize. The larger catechism is meant for you to memorize. That's why it's the larger catechism. Here is larger catechism question 155. It's about preaching. It's about the Word of God. And the divines say, the Spirit maketh the reading but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual means of enlightening, convicting, and humbling sinners." You notice those words? The Spirit maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual means of enlightening, convicting, and humbling sinners. I do not know how many. I'm a Presbyterian. I've been at many presbytery examinations of candidates for the ministry, of men moving from one church to another, and the question always arises, do you have any exceptions to the standards? I am yet to hear a candidate for the ministry or any minister take an exception to Larger Catechism 155, and I've sometimes wondered why they haven't. Do you really believe that the Spirit especially makes the preaching of the Word effectual for salvation. Well, why would one not? And I rather suspect the answer would be this, because I have no personal experience of that through my own preaching. Now why do I say this harvests the fruit of Perkins' thinking and Perkins' experience? Because Perkins had plenty of experience of people being humbled, their consciences touched by the gospel and brought to faith in Jesus Christ through the preaching of the Word. And if we were to be stimulated to pray this evening for anything, this is one of the things for which we should be praying. Ah, but preaching is discounted today. Ah, yes, preaching was discounted in the Apostle Paul's day. Ah, but today we live in a visual era. Drama is needed. Do our contemporaries not know who invented drama? Preaching has never been a mode of communication of the gospel that man has appreciated, but the divines in line with William Perkins are saying here, it is the God-honoring means of salvation. And therefore, our task is not to say preaching isn't cutting the mustard anymore. Actually, our responsibility is to say my preaching isn't cutting the mustard anymore, and I need to be down on my hands and knees before God to pray that He will send His Holy Spirit in order that the Word may be preached effectually to enlighten, convict, and humble sinners. Larger Catechism 159 very clearly picks up the notes that Perkins sounds. Those who are called to preach should preach diligently in season and out of season, plainly, plainly, not in the enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. And that, my friends, is pure Perkins. And what makes Perkins rather distinctive in all this, he shared these convictions with others, was not only that he illustrated this in his own preaching ministry, but he sought to instruct others in that style of ministry. that humbling, convicting, enlightening, and converting style of preaching. And it was for this reason in 1592 he published his famous book, The Art of Prophesying. It was originally written and published in Latin, an indication that it was clearly intended not for the man or woman in the pew to read and then point their finger at their minister. It was deliberately intended for the preaching guild and was only translated into English and published in 1606. I find that the title raises eyebrows today in our Is it a dominantly charismatic age? The art of prophesying. But here Perkins clearly follows Calvin and the other Reformers in his understanding of prophecy. For example, here is Calvin on 1 Corinthians, to that point, I take prophesying to mean here explaining the mysteries of God for the enlightening of those who hear. And if you examine the prophetic ministry in the Old Testament, it carries such a wide range of nuance that it certainly seems to me that Calvin in this context is quite right. is not dominantly the foretelling of the future, but the foretelling of the mysteries that God has revealed in His Word. And this was the notion that gripped William Perkins. God has placed these mysteries in His Word. My task, as it were, is to pull away the curtains and say, behold what God has done. to pull the Word up before the people that they may be surprised by the grace of God that overturns all their natural expectations. And it's fairly clear to me from my limited knowledge of Perkins that Perkins had really grasped the importance of this principle, that if the preaching of the Word doesn't surprise the preacher, it's not going to surprise the congregation. And if the congregation are not surprised by the Word of God, then they have lost its central significance. They have come to assume that of course we are the kind of people who would be saved by grace. What is so surprising about that? The moment we cease to be surprised by the Word of God is actually the moment that we have ceased to take in to our souls what the Word of God is actually saying. And Perkins is full of this notion of the way in which the Word of God takes us, and because it takes us by surprise, it shakes us. He understood from the lives of the prophets that there were two dimensions to the Old Testament prophetic ministry. The Old Testament prophet was a man who preached, and he was no less a man who prayed And he saw that these two things belong together. He saw that when the apostles themselves say in Acts 6, 4, we must give ourselves to prayer and the Word of God, that was not an accidental connection, nor was it accidental that the order was prayer and the Word of God, that these two things so belong together that without both of them there never will be a genuinely prophetic ministry that opens up the mysteries of the gospel and of the Word of God. But God has given us means by which as preachers we are intended to do this, and the means essentially are the hard work of exegesis and the even harder work of application. the hard work of exegesis, and the harder work of application. And so what Perkins does in The Art of Prophesying is to give us in miniature both a hermeneutical manual, a basic hermeneutical manual, basic principles in the interpretation of Scripture, and also a homiletical manual. when we translate or transpose exegesis into preaching application to the mind and to the conscience. And these two things cannot be separated, the hermeneutics and the homiletics, the exegesis and the application. And of course, he roots this in the closing verses of 2 Timothy chapter 3. Granted, this is a great place to land for thinking about the authority of Scripture because it is theopneustic, God-breathed. Paul's point in 2 Timothy 3 is to say that it's precisely because of its nature that it's given for certain reasons, and therefore the preacher is to employ the Word of God in order to pursue the very reasons for which the Word of God was given. Perkins' conviction is this, that since such passages emphasize that Scripture by nature is both perfect and pure, That conviction becomes the groundwork of the authority of the preacher's ministry. That without that conviction, the authority of the preacher's ministry is thereby diminished. may say a personal word here. I was wonderfully helped as a young Christian whose parents did not attend church. I did not have a Christian background, and they did not attend church until after I became a Christian believer. And I had a minister who was a great help to them and a great help to me. But once he saw my convictions developing, he became a little nervous. And I'll never forget him saying to me, Your view of the inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy of Scripture does not really make a great deal of difference to your preaching. And I believed he was wrong from Scripture, but I had no evidence from experience until I had the experience. and then very clearly noted the difference in the ring of authority, in the boldness, the confidence mingled with humility that emerged from a ministry that was rooted in the Word of God in its full authority. Now Perkins did not believe that a conviction about the perfection and purity of Scripture itself guaranteed that our exegesis was correct. He was too sensible a Christian reader of the Bible to confuse these two things. But he did emphasize that without this conviction there would be a lack of authority. It's only if there is an authoritative word from God that he believed the preacher can actually preach with authority. And this made a tremendous difference to his ministry and makes a tremendous difference to any ministry. That's actually simple logic, never mind theologically true. There's another element to all this in which I think Perkins is actually harvesting the understanding of the early Reformers, one might even say their communication theory. The early Reformers understood that as preachers they were speaking to the marred image of God, fallen man. They were not minds addressing minds. They were men addressing men and women. But those to whom they preached had genuinely fallen in every dimension of their existence. And if the purpose of preaching was to correct in the sense that Paul uses that language, that is to say, transform, heal, restore. If that was the purpose of preaching, then it must impact the whole being. If you think about that at the extreme eschatological measure, if you happen to be interested in the theology, the resurrection of the dead from the dust will take place by the preaching of the Word. It will be a Word that will raise the dead. The final Word of the true prophet, the true preacher, the true revealer of the mysteries, Jesus Christ. So Perkins was convinced that the preacher addresses the whole person, and therefore that preaching should not be thought of simply as teaching from a pulpit. That preaching was more than teaching, but never less than teaching. That preaching was the communication of the revelation of God's mind to our mind, in order to illumine the understanding, but it was by means of illumining the understanding to touch the affections, to put it in these categories in which the Puritans and many afterwards worked. The goal did not stop at the mind. that the transformation of life was not simply a mathematical exchange that took place in the brain, but was the touching of the affections so that by the touching of the affections the will might be melted and liberated and genuine transformation might take place. And of course it was out of this tradition. Perkins, Westminster Divines, the Puritan Brotherhood, that Jonathan Edwards made his, to many people, stunningly surprising statement. that his goal in preaching, the great intellectual figure of the eighteenth century, still in the United States, often recognized way outside the Christian church as perhaps the greatest mind ever to walk on that soil. Now, he was walking on British soil, of course, at that time. that his goal in preaching was to raise as high as possible the affections of his people. And you can sense from Perkins' preaching, even in its written form, that this also was his goal. As Rabbi Duncan famously said about Edwards, we could say the same thing about William Perkins. His doctrine was all application, and his application was all doctrine. And so, he seeks to bring the Word to bear upon people in order that through the appeal of the truth to illumine the mind, to create the burning of the heart within of the Emmaus Road kind, the strangely warmed heart of listening to someone reading the preface to Luther's epistle to the Romans. in order that in concert with that, the will might be bound and the whole life transformed as the conscience is brought before God as judge, declared righteous, and thereby cleansed and released into joy. And for Perkins this meant that if this were to be done truly, it needed to be done by the preacher through a careful study of the text and could not be done by a display of sophisticated learning. He certainly believed and says that it is an art to conceal art in preaching. And this belongs to the foundation of the plain style. The plain style draws on 2 Corinthians chapter 4 that we never proclaim ourselves but Jesus Christ, and that our posture, as Paul says in what in many ways is a rather paradoxical statement in 2 Corinthians 4, isn't it? We don't preach ourselves, and then he says, ah yes, ourselves. You are slaves for Jesus' sake. You are slaves for Jesus' sake. So, for Perkins, this is the posture of the preacher. The posture of the preacher inwardly is, I am your bond-servant for Jesus' sake. There is, therefore, in Perkins' understanding of preaching, a kind of humiliation that takes place in the preacher. as he preaches, self-exaltation must go because God must be glorified. And so, it isn't that Perkins is one of those type A personalities who delights to rip up the consciences of his hearers and exalt himself above them, nor to impress his hearers by his learning to show his superiority, but someone who is willing to become their bond servant for Jesus' sake to make clear that it is God and not man who is speaking, because this he sees as belonging to the essence of what Paul calls the demonstration of the Spirit and power. My fellow countryman mixed in his theology, though he eventually was, James Denny, was dead on center when he said, no man can show in his preaching at one and the same time that he is wise and that Jesus Christ is mighty to save. And so we mustn't think of this tremendously powerful ministry of William Perkins the way we sometimes think about preachers. that there was any self-exhortation. There was always this humiliation involved, because the preacher needed to be a man whose tongue had been instructed by listening to the voice of God. The preacher would be a man who preached with the power of the Holy Spirit, so long as, as John Owen would later say, the word came to him with power, humbling him. in order that it might go through him to others, humbling them." Well, I must hurry on lest I get caught up too much in this point to a third point I want to make, and that is Perkins' particular emphasis on the plain style of preaching. And here again we can go back to these words from 2 Corinthians 4, especially 1 and 2, that we read together. What takes place in Spirit-filled preaching for Paul, for William Perkins, is there is a phanerosis takes place. There is an unveiling takes place, and it's multidimensional. This is part of the mystery of preaching, this multidimensional phanerosis. There is, by the careful exegesis of the text and its homiletical handling, the unveiling, the laying bare of the Word of God. There it is, and we see it in all its plain purity. And when seen in all its plain purity, the conscience of the hearer is unveiled. We live in a day when everyone is having, seeking, or wishing they had counseling. We have lost the day when the church believed and preachers believed that the deepest and most intimate counseling takes place under the preaching of the Word of God. It is there, I remember from the dim and distant past, an advert for, I think it was a toilet cleanser, excuse me, going from the sublime to the ridiculous, I think it was Domestos, that reaches the parts that other cleaners never reach. No human counselor can ever reach the depths that the Holy Spirit, the counselor, reaches in our lives by the preaching of the Word. And so Perkins understood that what the preacher is there to do, in a sense, the imagery I tend to use, although I don't know that Perkins ever used it, is that we are nurses in the operating theater. And our task is to hand as clean and sharp instruments to the surgeon. Now I know that if you're a surgeon, a younger surgeon, that doesn't work any longer for you because you're cutting people up like that. But if you'll forgive the imagery of a coming on really elderly man, you get the point. This is the connectedness between the hard work of exegesis. and the pleasure the Spirit takes in applying the Word of God to the conscience. But not only in applying of the Word of God to the conscience, but in that dynamic there is a third dimension of unveiling. The Word is unveiled, the open manifestation of the truth, the conscience is unveiled and laid bare because Jesus Christ is unveiled. And this should be, this was for him, as I will eventually show you, and should be for us, the heartbeat of our prayer for gospel ministry. If we are not ourselves gospel ministers, and if we are gospel ministers, this should be the heartbeat of our ministry. I remember well sitting for a fairly prolonged season under a ministry, a faithful evangelical ministry, going through one of the Gospels in which in every pericope the homiletical use of the exegesis was essentially, where are you in this pericope? And I found myself saying again and again, I am not in that pericope. The point of that pericope is, where is Jesus Christ in that pericope? Once I found Jesus Christ, once you've preached Jesus Christ to me from the pericope. To an amazing degree, our generation has fallen prey to the individualism, the subjectivism, The project of the self with which our world in the West is now awash, Perkins comes like Domestos to us, and he wants us to preach Christ. And you see, that's the harder part of the exegesis and the application, because we're sinners. And it's five times easier to have blood on the back wall of the church because you have ripped up the consciences of people than so to preach Jesus Christ that people are drawn to Him in faith and see His majesty and glory and splendor and power. And so this for Perkins is the third dimension of the phanerosis, but there's a fourth dimension of the phanerosis, and actually I think it's related to the sense of humiliation and unworthiness that preachers experience, and that is that the preacher himself is unveiled. The preacher himself is unveiled. as he exhausts himself in the Word into the people. And this is perhaps the supreme difference between thinking about preaching as teaching and understanding that when we preach, we preach not only ourselves with Jesus Christ. We say, I'm giving myself to you with Jesus Christ. That's the way He is pleased to communicate through His Word. This is the apostolic fashion. We not only gave Christ to you, we gave ourselves to you. And you see, without that, this is one of the reasons why the Puritan spiritual life was crafted the way it was, because without that, We produce a congregation of people who feel that they are well instructed and do not realize often that they have been very undernourished. There is a difference between educating your children and feeding your children, and Perkins clearly and wonderfully grasped it. And that element of self-giving that is always present where there is genuine pathos in ministry, was clearly evident to his hearers in Perkins' ministry. Thomas Fuller says about Perkins, listen to this, he could pronounce the word damn with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo on his auditors a good while afterwards. Was that because he shouted? No, it was because the self-giving of loving concern for lost sinners was being given to lost sinners in the very way He enunciated His words. This, for Perkins, rather than the so-called witty preaching of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, was the great issue. because the goal of preaching he saw was not the aesthetic pleasure of the hearers by the employment of rhetorical devices, but the eternal destiny of the hearers that gave the sense of pathos to his preaching. I do think this is something to say to us today. Some bright young student somewhere is bound to write a doctoral dissertation on the transformation of descriptive language in relationship to evangelical preaching in the 20th and 21st centuries. Someone in the United States did a most interesting doctoral dissertation on the transformation of political rhetoric in the United States from the beginning of the 20th century towards the end. And it was a real analysis of a transformation that had taken place in rhetoric because of the transformation that had taken place in culture that hardly anybody noticed. One of those, the word that is so often used to describe preaching today, the talk or the teaching. We will worship for half an hour and then Pastor Joe or the Reverend John or Willie will come along and he will give his talk or he will teach us. I think William Perkins, if he were present, would say, is that all I'm going to get today? Am I just going to be given information in my little talk? Is there not more to Jesus Christ than information? Is he not a person? Is he not to be given to me in the gospel?" And in that sense, Perkins is very much the fountainhead of what for so many years were the characteristics of evangelical preaching. And so for him, like the later Westminster divines, the instruction of the mind to bring illumination involves the application of the truth to the conscience, appeals to that conscience, exhortations, dehortations, not simply instruction about how you solve the puzzles that you see in the Bible, but a word that gets to the affections. and brings you to a new sense of devotion and love to the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I'm in danger now of testing your patience, so let me move finally to the fourth point, and that is where Perkins seeks to help us. And so, fourthly, I want to think for a few minutes about what I've called Perkins grids to guide all preachers, Perkins grids. certain danger in being Scottish speaking to a half-American, half-English audience here. Grid. I hope you understand what I mean. I was educated theologically in an arena where there were no lectures on preaching. I think it was supposed that you caught preaching by some kind of strange osmosis. And being nurtured in that context, I thought of preaching grids. as dastardly inventions of nasty American professors of homiletics to give them something to do. The idea that your fellow students would sit there with a grid and tick them off and put you in a box and so on, I found rather horrific until I realized that actually the Lord Jesus used preaching grids and the Apostle Paul had preaching grids and William Perkins certainly had preaching grids. Jesus' preaching grid, it's the parable of the sower, isn't it? You're always going to have these four kinds of soils if you're a gospel farmer. Paul's preaching grid, well, it's there in 2 Timothy 4. The Word is given for this, so use it for this. I mean, you just need those few words written on your desk as you're a preacher. brought into your instinct as a preacher? Am I really expounding the Scriptures? Am I really rebuking and correcting and equipping and training in righteousness? I need to bring my thinking about my preaching so that it's aligned with what the Word of God is given for. And Perkins certainly had a use of that apostolic grid. He has an interesting way of putting it. He says that the task of the expositor is to bear down on the teaching of the passage as one who is untwisting and loosening a weaver's web, unfolding the meaning and then providing diagnosis of the congregation's needs. To give another personal illustration, when I was being examined as a candidate for the ministry, I was asked what I would do if I were turned down, and I rashly said, the thought has never crossed my mind. And then I said, I think I'd be either an investigative journalist or a detective. And a preacher needs to be both, doesn't he? He needs to be a detective. He needs to understand that what he is about is searching out the sins and hearts of men and diagnosing their needs. And having diagnosed their needs, and this for Perkins and this whole great thing, transitioning his hearers from where they are by nature. or even in grace, to where they need to be according to God's Word. And he understood that the chief instrument for doing that is the very Word that we use as we preach. That's very contrary to contemporary evangelicalism, incidentally, where you need to look somewhere else than Scripture, preferably to a Christian book, to find out how you're supposed to do it. And if you look, as I looked recently at the top-selling books in the Christian world, I was looking at the United States, but it's probably true also in the United Kingdom, the top sellers are all about that. But what Perkins is seeking to do is to so work with Scripture that the Word of God itself will do the work. His perspective on this plain preaching, His grid is not the Word exhorts you what to do and then you need to go somewhere else for that to be taught to you and for that to be accomplished under your own steam. But the very preaching of the Word itself, the Word has performative, creative, transformative power. That's why Jesus prays that we may be sanctified by the Word. And as the Westminster Divines understood and stated rather clearly in their directory for public worship, in which they have a few marvelous pages of counsel about preaching, this is the greatest challenge. And the reason it's the greatest challenge is because it's the greatest challenge to the preacher in his own life. the transition from what the Word exhorts us to be, to become that by the power of the Word of God through the Spirit transforming us into the likeness of Jesus Christ as we gaze upon His face in the Word of God. So, grid number one for Perkins is obviously the apostolic grid. Grid number two is one that he invented himself. And essentially it's just a development of Jesus' parable of the sower. Preaching, he says, should be characterized by a consciousness that there are various kinds of hearers in the congregation. And he gives us a list of seven. Unbelievers who are ignorant and unteachable, whom we need to lead into the Word by the manner in which we preach the Word. hearers who are ignorant but teachable, whom we need with patience, as Paul says, to catechize with appropriate biblical truth. Thirdly, those who have the knowledge of the truth of the gospel but have never been humbled by the gospel, whose consciences by the preaching of the Word we need to touch in order that they may be stirred up, and it's in that context that Perkins believes the use of the law is so significant. Fourthly, those who have already been humbled. And here he says special disarmament is needed because being humbled is not the same thing as being converted. And here by the gospel we need to show how the kindness of God leads to repentance. Fifthly, there are those who already believe. And they must ongoingly be brought back to basic gospel truth from which we are so often diverted, justification by God's free grace in Christ, sanctification through the Spirit, perseverance by God's power. To be brought to see that the law of God is given to the believer as a friend rather than an enemy. because it was written into man's heart in the Garden of Eden as his best friend. Before he had Eve, he had the law of God written in his heart, which is why what the Spirit does in the fulfillment of the promise of the new covenant is right, guess what, into your heart. And the distance that there is in our contemporary world from appreciating the law of God as friend, I mean in the evangelical church, is an indication of how far we may have strayed from this rich, orbed dimension of gospel preaching. Those of you who are really old, my age, will remember O. R. Johnson. Some of you will know his name only because of his joint translation with J. I. Packer of Luther's Bondage of the Will, donkey's years ago. O. R. Johnson later became the director of what was originally known as the Festival of Light. And I've never forgotten as a very young assistant minister in the center of Glasgow in Scotland, where he had come to speak, I was probably twenty-four, and still to this day I have no idea why he said this to me. But he did say this to me, the hardest part of my task is persuading evangelical ministers of the ongoing relevance of the law of God in the Christian life, which is staggering. Because if we're new covenant Christians, what's written in our hearts is the law of God, and it's our friend in Christ. That's why as a friend, it sometimes pokes our conscience, because faithful are the wounds of a friend, and Perkins realized this. And so, sixthly, he says there are always going to be those who have fallen back. And again, we need both to diagnose the causes of that backsliding and learn the various prescriptions for that backsliding. Not least, he says, the exhortation of James, that we confess our faults to one another. not that he is reinstitution, confession, or penance as sacraments. but because he understands that's how the body of Christ functions, because the Word of God functions within the fellowship of the body of Christ. And so he holds this great truth out, teach your people that all sin except the sin that refuses to see in Christ salvation, every sin is pardonable, that grace is promised to all who believe. and that sin can never abolish grace, and even to comfort them by teaching them. Remember how the Puritans loved to use this picture of the inner workings of a watch or a clock where things seem to go in different directions in order for the clock to tell the right time and say, so it is with the purposes of God. He is able to turn even evil into good. And then seventhly, he reminds us that congregations will always have both believers and unbelievers, always. And so he summarizes all this in closing the art of prophesying, encourages preachers to read the text clearly from the Scriptures, to explore the meaning of it once it has been read in the light of the Scriptures themselves, to gather profitable points of teaching from the natural sense of the passage. And then as the preacher is gifted, and preachers are variously gifted, to apply the teaching thus explained to the life and practice of the congregation in straightforward, plain speech. Most of you will remember how John Stott used to speak about a double listening. Listen to the Word, we listen to the world. Perkins certainly believed in a double listening, but as we saw at the beginning, he also believed in a double speaking, that the prophetic ministry of the gospel involved the preacher speaking to man on behalf of God, but also speaking to God on behalf of man. And perhaps this is why Thomas Fuller was also able to say about Perkins, his sermons were not so plain, but that the pious learned could admire them, nor so learned, but that the plainest did understand them. And the explanation of this? Well, he tells us himself, even though it's taken me a long time, and thank you for your patience in getting to it. He says, the heart of the matter is this, preach one Christ by Christ to the praise of Christ. And so, if we are ministers of the gospel, let's commit ourselves to that. And if we have a ministry of the gospel in our fellowship, let us pray that this will be true of all those who minister the Word to us. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for the opportunity to think about the past, to learn from the past. We thank you that you have taught us that we see Your attributes more clearly together with all Your people. And we pray as we try to see what You do through preaching, not only by reference to one another and to living examples, but by looking back to see what you gave to the church in the past, with whom we are connected as brothers and sisters. We pray that something of the same passion, and yes, the same fruitfulness, will reemerge in our own time. Not least do we pray for in this town, as well as many other towns, where there are young men preparing for gospel ministry, that you would make them a brotherhood, that you would fill them with your Word. that their ministries might be marked by the pathos and the surprise of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that you would not only in your grace give occasional fruit, but that it may be a fresh experience that especially the preaching of the Word is made effectual to salvation. This we pray in Jesus' name.