Our reading this evening is from the New Testament from the book of the Acts chapter 2. We read from verse 14 down to the end of the chapter. Acts chapter 2 and verse 14. Let us hear the word of God. Then Peter stood up with the eleven raised his voice and addressed the crowd. Fellow Jews, and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you. Listen carefully to what I say. These men are not drunk, as you suppose. It's only nine in the morning. No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel. In the last days, God says, I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." Men of Israel, listen to this. Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs which God did among you through him as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge and you with the help of wicked men put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him, I saw the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices. My body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your holy ones see decay. You have made known to me the paths of life. You will fill me with joy in your presence. Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried. And his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life. We are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit, and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet, he said, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand. until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Therefore let all Israel be assured of this. God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, brothers, what shall we do? Peter replied, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call. With many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, save yourselves from this corrupt generation. Those who accepted his message were baptized and about 3,000 were added to their number that day. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes. and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved." Amen. This is the infallible Word of God. I've been bringing a series of messages on Sabbath evenings, I suppose the cross between a lecture and a sermon, and our subject has been Reformed Presbyterianism today. What does the Reformed Presbyterian Church stand for? What is at the heart of our life and our witness? What is important to us? What do we have to offer to the world? We come this evening to the eighth of these studies. And the title of the study is Nourished by the Word. Nourished by the Word. We seek to be a people who are nourished by the Word of God. As we have said before, it is no accident that at the center of every reformed building of worship is a wooden desk with a book on it, the Bible. The center of our buildings isn't an altar, it is the scriptures. And that's deliberate because it's a symbol of what is central in our worship and in our lives. And when we look at the early church, the New Testament church, we find that that was the pattern. They were a Bible-centered people. We read from Acts 2.42, and if we were to have a text tonight, this would be it. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. This was their great priority as a people saved by Christ. To be fed with the word of God. In Acts chapter 6 we find the church leaders being distracted by a multitude of responsibilities and duties. They're too busy. They're not able to do what God has called them to do. And so they elect deacons, as we would call them now, to take various responsibilities. And they say, we will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word. That is why the heart of our service is the preaching of the Word of God. This is not just an accident or a tradition. It's not just because ministers like to stand up and speak. It has got a theological foundation. Now you may say well surely that's true of all Christians. Unfortunately for much of history it hasn't been true. It's becoming less true in our own day. And we may be entering a new dark age when Christians lose the Bible once again. And we need to understand how distinctive the centrality of the word and of the preaching of the word is of our inheritance and our present mission. And I want to look at it with you under four headings. And to think first of all of the church deprived of the Word. The church deprived of the Word. We don't know historically when the church began to lose the Word of God. You'll find evangelicals today who have a sort of a naive idea that the church had the word of God and was pure until about 100 A.D. and then the church lost the word of God and was impure until about 1500 A.D. when Martin Luther came along with the Reformation. But of course that isn't the case. There have been great preachers In the early history of the church, one of the very greatest preachers probably of all time was a man called John Chrysostom. His name Chrysostom was a nickname. It means with a golden mouth. And John was called the Golden Mouthed One. because he was such a superb biblical expositor. And in the city of Antioch and in Constantinople, he preached the word with tremendous power, changing many lives. Many of his sermons have come down to us from that early period. 89 of his sermons on Matthew, 90 of his sermons on John, over 250 of his sermons on the Pauline epistles. He preached through Genesis and Psalms and Isaiah. I often look at his sermons when I'm preparing a message. He was a great preacher. Augustine, the North African theologian, was also known as one of the most effective preachers of his age. He preached through the Sermon on the Mount, the Gospel of John, 1 John, the whole book of Psalms. Even in the middle ages, when there was much error and confusion, God still raised up mighty preachers. Bernard of Clairvaux was not only a Christian poet, he was an outstanding preacher. Francis of Assisi became concerned that the common people didn't know the word of God. And so he founded an order of travelling preachers to the poor, the Franciscans. And these men were sent out with the gospel to the towns and villages and countryside of Europe. And they went everywhere bringing the word of God. Thomas Aquinas was the great scholastic theologian of the Middle Ages. But Aquinas was also known as a powerful preacher. So it's not as if the Word of God ever vanished. But these were lights in the spreading darkness. And as the centuries passed, the darkness spread and the church moved away from the Word of God. And instead of the Word being central, the Mass or the Eucharist became central. A sacrifice on an altar in an unknown language in Latin. And the people lost the Word of God. Instead of the Word they had images and relics, pictures if you like. It was a time of dark superstition. And when we read the history were filled with sorrow at the tragedy of a whole continent which had been deprived of the word of God. By 1400 AD there was gross ignorance of the Bible throughout Europe. Most people couldn't read. There were of course no printed books. And the teachers themselves were ignorant. Many priests could neither read nor write. They just mumbled a few Latin prayers that they had learned off by heart. The Bishop of Gloucester was a man called John Hooper. He was to be burned at the stake in 1555 for his faith. But earlier in his life he sent out a questionnaire to all the clergy in his diocese He asked them three questions. Question one, what are the Ten Commandments? Question two, what is the Lord's Prayer? Question three, what is the Creed? Fifty of his clergy got about half the questionnaire right. Eight of his clergy couldn't answer any of those questions. They didn't know what the Ten Commandments were. They didn't know what the Lord's Prayer was. They didn't know what the Creed was. These were the teachers. These were the teachers of the people of God. The flame of true faith was flickering. The Word had been taken away from people. The Church had lost it. Deprived of the Word. Let's think for a moment, secondly, of the Church reformed by the word, reformed by the word. What happened in the early 1500s? People rediscovered the Bible. It was as simple as that. Martin Luther towards the end of his life was asked for his explanation of the massive change which had literally transformed the nations of Northern Europe. His answer was very simple. The Word did it all. The Word, the Word of God did it all. Luther translated the whole Bible into German, into the language of the people. He embraced the brand new technology of printing, which had just been invented. It's interesting that for three quarters of Christian history, the people of God haven't had printed books. And this was one of the greatest events in human history, was the invention of printing, where for the first time, thousands and thousands of identical copies of a book could be produced. The printing presses poured out editions of the Bible. It was the best seller. All over, particularly northern and eastern Europe, the Bible spread into many different countries. One of Luther's opponents grumbled that the common people loved the Bible. He thought this was a terrible thing. Another one said, cobblers and old women are studying it. Why link together cobblers and old women as people who shouldn't be studying the Bible particularly, I don't know, but he did. William Tyndale, who was strangled and burned in 1536, turned the Bible into English. And really, most of our modern translations of the Bible are still based on Tyndale's work. And Tyndale said to a bishop who criticized him for what he was doing, If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth a plough to know more of the scripture than thou dost. Tyndale wanted to bring the Bible to the people of God. It was an era where many great preachers were raised up throughout Northern Europe. Let me just focus on one, John Calvin. He's known to us as a great theologian, and so he was. But before he was a theologian, he was a preacher. When I read what John Calvin did, I really need to go and have a lie down. Calvin, of course, preached twice every Lord's Day, and every other week he preached every day in St. Peter's in Geneva. He preached consecutively. He was exiled from Geneva for some years. When he came back in 1541, he just took up his series at the exact point where he had left it. I don't know if he said, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, but that was the gist of what he was doing. Calvin preached through the whole book of Psalms, through all of Paul's letters, He preached 189 sermons on Acts, 65 sermons on the Gospels. He preached through Jeremiah, Lamentations, Daniel and the Minor Prophets, 174 sermons on Ezekiel, 159 on Job, 200 on Deuteronomy, 342 on Isaiah, 123 on Genesis, preached through Judges, 1 Kings, 107 sermons on 1 Samuel and 87 sermons on 2 Samuel. In his spare time he wrote commentaries on all the New Testament books except Revelation and then lectured through most of the Old Testament at college and his notes were transcribed into commentaries on the whole Bible. John Calvin was a preacher. He had the highest view of the Word of God. Why was he a preacher? Was he an arrogant man? Did he just enjoy the sound of his own voice? Not in the least. Calvin taught that in the preaching of the Word, God himself speaks to his people. God himself speaks to his people. It is the highest possible view of this ordinance. I quote Calvin, a man preaches so that God may speak to us by the voice of a man. God governs his church by the external preaching of the word. This was at the core of the reformation and this was the movement which shaped our own church and many other reformation churches and this is why we are as we are today, reformed by the word. But I want us to think fairly about the church diverted from the Word. The Church diverted from the Word. Because we're seeing a paradox in our own day. We're quite free to read the Bible. No one in the Western world has been martyred for reading the Bible for a long time. Not yet. Bibles are easier to obtain than ever before in history. But we need to understand that there are subtle pressures on the church which are nudging people, God's people, away from the centrality of the word of God. And they are nudging them towards spiritual starvation and even darkness. The culture in which we live at the beginning of the 21st century is a visual impatient culture. It's a culture of sound bites, it's a culture of images, it's a culture which seeks to be entertaining. The medium of television is having a profound effect on human beings, much of it very damaging. I'm not talking about the particular programs, I'm talking about the medium itself as a medium. It is damaging the ability of people to reason, to think, to reflect, to work through things. It spoon feeds us with images and we become passive spectators. And in this culture the teaching of the scriptures is standing against the tide. We are also living in an age which strongly dislikes anything authoritative or dogmatic or absolute. It is a time for sharing It's a time for saying, let me pass on to you some interesting insights which you might like to think about. It's not an age which welcomes, thus says the Lord. This is true, anything which contradicts it is false. This is the difference between right and wrong, truth and error. And that atmosphere in which we live, without us realizing it, without meaning to be affected by it, can actually alter our perspectives. And there is something in ourselves which agrees with that. Many of us are by nature lazy. Mentally lazy. We avoid the effort of sustained thinking, of learning, of understanding. People are self-centered. They are more eager to talk about themselves than to listen to God speaking. So much so-called Christian fellowship in our day is merely a self-indulgent reflection on my thoughts and my ideas. People are interested in experience, nothing wrong with that. But an unbalanced emphasis on experience can nudge us away from the Word of God. There is also, we have to say, a great deal of pathetically poor preaching. Preaching which is tedious, lifeless, and unrelated to daily life. So that people get sickened with it, and they reject the thing because it's badly done. And so we're seeing, even in our own province in Northern Ireland, a move away from the centrality of the Word of God preached towards entertainment-centered, experience-centered worship. Whole denominations are moving away from the centrality of the Word of God. We cannot take the Bible for granted. We've got to realize that the devil wants to divert us from the Bible at all costs. And in many quarters he is succeeding. How well do modern evangelicals know their Bibles? There's a tremendous danger. It's happening around us. It's happening in evangelical churches. It's happening in churches that call themselves reformed. It is happening. It is upon us. And we need to realize exactly what's going on. And often it's very attractively packaged and presented as a wonderful thing and a way to reach the world. But it's the church turning aside, as they did in the Middle Ages, from the verbal to the visual. When God reminded the people in Deuteronomy, when Moses reminded the people in Deuteronomy of how God had dealt with them, he said to them, you saw no form, you heard only a voice. God spoke to them. God speaks to his people. And when we lose the centrality of that, we're heading for a new dark age. Deprived of the Word, reformed by the Word, diverted from the Word, and lastly and briefly, and it brings us back to the beginning. We are to be a people nourished by the word. We must not allow ourselves to be diverted. There are more helps today than ever before in human history. There is no excuse for any Christian not thoroughly understanding the word of God. And I hope that you're all students of the word. I hope that you read commentaries on the books of the Bible. I hope you don't content yourselves with a few moments looking at a verse or two every day. There are many, many very, very helpful commentaries on scripture. Easy to understand, easy to read, suitable for beginners, for people who haven't done it before. speak to me or to any of my fellow elders. We have every facility we need. Here is an area where the tradition of our church is healthy and is sound. Tradition isn't always healthy, not even Reformed Presbyterian tradition. Some of our traditions may hold us back, but here is a tradition that is thoroughly biblical. We have as a church kept preaching central. We have kept our ministers free to prepare to preach. Our ministers are not running around during the week doing a hundred different things with no time to study and to think and to meditate and to prepare. Our denomination has lifted a lot of burdens off our ministers that other men have to carry. But the condition is this, that we give ourselves, that we give ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word. One writer on the Reformation writes, the exposition of scripture became one of the biggest planks in their platform of Christian revival. Listen how he describes the sermon to the reformers. The sermon was an act of worship, the fruit of prayer, the work of God's Spirit in the body of Christ. It was the doxological witness to the grace of God. It called Christians into communion with God and sent them out into a life of Christian service. We should all be readers of the Word. We should be students of the word. It will make us strong Christians. It will thoroughly equip us for every good work. I don't think this is a danger we do face as a congregation. But I'm bringing this message so that it will never be a danger. Never. We've got to resist all pressures to move away from the word of God. Like newborn babies, says Peter, crave pure spiritual milk so that by it you may grow up in your salvation. A few of us here can think back almost 30 years, just over 29 years, when this congregation moved out into Newton Abbey. With very little Very little in numbers, very little in resources. We had no building, we had no history in the area. We had the Bible. We had the Bible. And we were absolutely convinced that God honours His Word. And I'm not Martin Luther, but if you asked me to describe the last 30 years, I would say the Word did it. The Word did it. It's the Word that gathers a people. It's the Word that converts a people. It's the Word that draws people. It's the Word that builds people up in their faith. We have this Word. We have it in our hearts. We have it in our homes. And it's our calling to be a people of the Word of God. And if we continue to do so, I am convinced that many, many hungry people will come here to be fed and to be blessed. God will bless his word. Have confidence in it. Amen. Father, there is something peculiarly glorifying to you in the way in which you use obviously weak, imperfect instruments to carry out your purposes. And we know why. It is because the glory goes to you. The people look at the weakness of the instruments and they know that the answer can't lie there. And so they praise you. And Father, it has pleased you to call feeble, imperfect, limited men to bring your voice to your people. This is how you speak to your people. And we pray, O God, that you will raise up more and more men with a passion to preach the Word of God. Father, there is something especially powerful as the people of God gather together, as their corporate prayer arises to you, when that moment comes, when Christ speaks to his church. Again and again, we have felt it in this building. We have heard your voice. We have praised you. And Father, we live in an age when the simple preaching of the Word of God is increasingly despised. And men are trusting rather in their own techniques and strategies and their technology and abilities. And we pray, O Lord, that we may be a people with absolute confidence in your mighty, living, infallible Word. We pray that you will honor the preaching of the word here in this building in the years ahead, that you will continue to use it for your glory. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.