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Well, I fear that I may immediately
discourage you this evening. You would think that by this
stage in life I would pay attention carefully to the directives that
were given me for coming to an event like this. First of all,
that it is an expositors' conference, and I'm going to speak thematically.
Secondly, that it is preaching Christ in the Old Testament.
and I'm going to preach him from all over the place. So if you're
very fastidious about these things, I'd like you to know up front
so that you've now got over that and we can proceed accordingly.
We're going to talk about preaching Christ, and that ought to be
very straightforward, but it isn't. because it is possible,
and some of us to our shame have done this, i.e., worked our way
through one of the Gospels, the Synoptics or John, and have managed
to go all the way through the Gospel and have preached it in
a surprisingly non-Christ-centered way. It's quite surprising, isn't
it, that you can take a Gospel which is all about Jesus and
work your way through it in a way that doesn't actually really
present Jesus. systematically and consecutively
expound in the Scriptures is not necessarily the same thing
as a Christ-centered exposition of the Scriptures. And if it
is possible to get it wrong in the New Testament, then think
how dangerous it is in attempting it in the Old Testament. It would
be tedious for me to work my way through all of the dangerous
and difficult ways in which this happens, but some of us are familiar
with it. Some of us were brought up on a kind of teaching of the
Old Testament that found Jesus in places that, frankly, mystified
me even as a boy. that taught me messages that
were important theological messages, but I couldn't for the life of
me understand how the man got from here to there. But he did
it with great alacrity. For example, you know, in Genesis
40, is it, where you have the dreams and you have the baker
with three baskets of bread on his head? Have you ever had anybody
teach you that that is the doctrine of the Trinity right there? That
the three baskets represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit? That's the kind of allegorical interpretation that we need to
stay as far away from as we possibly can. So when we're thinking about
it, we're thinking about doing it properly. We're thinking about
doing it in a way that the Bible constrains us. And at the end
of Luke's gospel, as you know, Jesus provides a master class
in Old Testament interpretation. The familiar words there, as
Jesus is encountered by the two fellows, or the couple perhaps,
on the Emmaus Road, and they're unaware of the fact that it's
Jesus. And in that ironic encounter, as he reveals himself to them,
and then later on we read that he opened their minds to understand
the Scriptures, and he said to them, Thus it is written, that
the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the
dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be
proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem
You are witnesses of these things, and behold, I am sending the
promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you
are clothed with power from on high." And the phrase that is
important, I think, for us to notice is when he says, these
are the words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,
that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the
prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. It's important
for us to recognize that the Old Testament was never intended
to exist by itself. It's not as if somehow or another
God wrote the Old Testament, and they said, oh, I'd better
write another testament. The Old Testament finishes like an
unfinished symphony, because it is written in such a way that
points us forward to the fulfillment, as we've been thinking about
so wonderfully from Psalm 2. And when you move from the Old
Testament and into the New, when the lights finally go on for
the apostles, when the fulfillment of the word of Jesus to them
and through them in Pentecost becomes apparent, then Peter
is able to write and he's able to say that the prophets were
inquiring about this matter of salvation. They were like men
standing on their tiptoes, looking down the corridors of time, and
they were the ones who were setting forward Christ. Paul does the
same thing when, in his confrontation with Agrippa, he's able to say
to him, I'm not here with some kind of newfangled message. Everything
that I have been saying and everything that I say is entirely in keeping
with the law and with the prophets. I am simply, if you like, expounding
the Bible. So, it's pretty straightforward,
isn't it, that we should expect to see Jesus in the Old Testament,
because that is the way the New Testament teaches us to read
it. And there's a great encouragement,
isn't there, in learning to read our Bibles backwards, because
as we recognize the fulfillment of things, then we can go back
and we can see it there. And of course, as we read it
forward, we recognize, too, the foundation that is laid for us. Now, as I've said, I'm going
to address this thematically at least this evening, and I
hope you're not put off by that. And I am going to, in the course
of these three addresses, use the munis triplics of Calvin,
his way of not just Calvin, but he and others, who found in these
anointed categories of the Old Testament, of prophet, priest,
and king, a wonderful way for providing a Christology and a
theology that help not only to navigate through the Old Testament,
but also to understand the totality of the Bible. It is, of course,
possible for us to deal with these things in a way that is
cold and largely ineffectual. as a result of seeing them simply
as categories, almost as a formulaic methodology, without being brought
into the warmth and into the endearment of Jesus as the anointed
prophet and priest and king. And so it is imperative, if we're
going to be brought to it in that way, that we understand
their purpose and also that we use them properly. And tonight,
this question of the true prophet. The anointing in the Old Testament
was there for the prophetic ministry, for the priestly ministry, and
for the kingly role. And what I want you to notice
is, first of all, that when you read in the Bible, you realize
that this role of the prophet is a role that is required, or
it is a role that is necessary. It is there for a particular
and for an express purpose. God has purposed in this way
to provide for his people in the prophetic word. And in essence,
God gives us prophets because we need them. We need them. In fact, there is an inherent
judgment in the provision of each of these categories. We
need a prophet because of our ignorance, we need a priest because
of our alienation, and we need a king to subdue us on account
of our rebellion. So, when we encounter the Word
of God through the established servant of God in the prophetic
ministry, it is there because of the nature of humanity, as
we again have been helpfully reminded of this evening. So
from the very beginning of the Bible, as God passes his judgment
on the circumstances following the fall, and into chapter 6,
and he says, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great
in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of
his heart was only evil continually. Okay? So the heart of man is
evil, and the thoughts of man are wrong. You follow through
in the Old Testament, the fool has said in his heart there is
no God. That's not an indication of the mental capacity of this
individual. It is an indication of his moral
perversity, of his rejection of the rule and the reign of
God. When Paul picks this up in Romans
chapter 1, he tells us the exact same thing. that behind a facade
of wisdom, they rejected the God who had made them, they began
to engage in idolatry, and their thinking became futile, and their
foolish hearts were darkened. So, how is the darkened heart
of man—how is the mind of man that is bent away from God—to
be reached? through the prophet. Thomas Watson,
in his Body of Divinity, comments on how natural darkness scares
us. Natural darkness scares us. You
say, well, I'm not afraid of the dark. Well, good for you,
but I sometimes am. Sometimes when I find myself
in a strange place and I can't find the light, I may be a little
afraid, especially when my wife's not with me to help me. Because
if ever I hear a noise in the night, I always send her downstairs.
She's a much braver person than me. Maybe it's just me, but I could
be afraid of natural darkness. He then goes on to say, but isn't
it interesting that although a man may be afraid of the natural
dark and a fear of falling, that man is not afraid of spiritual
darkness? That spiritual darkness, it says
Watson, is not accompanied with horror. Men tremble not at their
condition. Nay, they like their condition
well enough. Well, of course, we understand
that, don't we? Men love darkness rather than light because their
deeds are evil. In fact, man—quay man—is so blind
to the fact of his blindness that he doesn't even know he's
blind until the prophet comes and reveals his blindness before
his eyes are ever opened. Now, this is, of course, of fundamental
importance as we think about not only our understanding of
the Bible, but our dealing with our friends and neighbors in
the world in which we live. Because of our sin and our fallenness,
the Bible says, there is actually no intellectual road from us
to God. There's no intellectual road
from us to God. If it were simply a matter of intellect, then the
brightest people in the world would all be believers. But it
isn't, and it obviously isn't, and it purposefully isn't. Luther
talks about how we're turned in upon ourselves, that our view
of the world and of ourselves we may think is a neutral view,
but the Bible says, no, it's not. It's skewed. It's biased. I don't know if you've ever engaged
in crown bowls. If you've seen it traveling in
Britain, you have a beautiful flat piece of grass like a putting
green, and then they put a little white ball out in front of you,
and then you roll a ball at it. It doesn't seem very interesting,
until you take up one of the bowls, and you realize that it
is impossible to roll the bowl straight. because the ball has
an inherent bias in it. You can either make it, you can
play it as a cut, or you can play it as a draw, but you can't
roll it straight because it is inherently biased. And the Bible
says the heart of man is inherently biased, that we create all kinds
of idols for ourselves. And as man, every day in a thousand
ways, I am tempted to make myself the center of the universe. So
what does God do? In his mercy, he sends his prophets. Into our darkness, into our stupidity,
into our foolishness, in his grace, he speaks his Word to
us. And that's why, when you read the prophetic books of the
Old Testament, you have this amazing clarity and striking
forcefulness. Isaiah doesn't pull his punches,
neither does Jeremiah. Ezekiel certainly doesn't either. And we can go the whole way through.
The gods of the idols, he says, are absolute nonsense. They can't
do anything for you at all. What a strange thing that you
would cut down a tree, and you would chop it in half, and part
of it you would use to light a fire so you could cook your
food, and the other half you would prop up outside your house,
and you would come and worship it. How strange that humanity
would do such a thing. How would you know which end
to use for the fire and which end to worship? Oh, don't put
that in the fire, that's my God. No, no, that wasn't the God,
that was for making the bacon. It's a pathetic picture, isn't
it? Yet it's the picture of 21st century America. What do people
need? They need the word of God. Now, you don't have to look hard
for the condition and for the necessity of it. Just my local
newspapers are replete with the evidences of man's need, the
requirement of the prophetic word. For example, this is a
quote from the local newspaper talking about the spirit of religion
and so on. It is the celebration of the
belief in the existence of an eternal energy. An energy—call
it grace or love or God—that sits out there waiting for us
to channel it into our being. That achieved, we can release
the genuine humanity that exists in all of us. What does that
even mean? Don't you think that there's
a need for a prophet to stand up and say, this is what God
says? A prophet to come and deal with
our ignorance, if ever we're to know God. In the past, God
spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and
in various ways, and in these last days he has spoken to us
by his Son. The promise that God had given
to Moses of the one who would come here in Deuteronomy 18 points
us all the way forward to the arrival of the Lord Jesus. So,
from a prophet required or necessary to a prophet revealed. Moses is the first major prophet,
and as God identifies him and gives him that role, he says
to him, I'm going to raise up for the people a prophet like
you from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his
mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him. Isn't
it interesting, that notion? I will put my words in his mouth.
And as we were thinking again, the word that Jesus spoke was
the word that the Father gave him to speak. He spoke the words
that the Father told him. He says, I'm not making this
stuff up. This is the word. The very terminology in Deuteronomy
18 is there on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17. Well, because
what does the voice from heaven say? Exactly what is said in
Deuteronomy 18 here. This is my beloved son. Listen
to him. Listen to him. Why? Because he
is the prophet. He's the one I told Moses about. He is the very embodiment of
us all. Now Calvin says that the minds
of the pious had always been imbued with the conviction that
they were to hope for the full light of understanding only at
the coming of the Messiah. And when you read the New Testament
in light of that, you realize the extent to which that had
actually taken hold in the minds of people. For example, an unlikely
indication of it, perhaps, Jesus sends his disciples off to go
into town and get something to eat. He sits down by the well,
and along comes the lady who sits down beside him. She's had
five husbands, and she's got a live-in lover. And she's there
to get her water. Jesus doesn't immediately address
the issue of her morality. He doesn't actually get onto
the issue very quickly. He simply says, you know, I would
be very grateful for a drink of water if you would be good
enough to give it to me. And in the course of that conversation,
where does she begin? I can see that you are a prophet."
Oh, really? How did you see that? I can see
that you're a prophet. And he continues the conversation.
And then she moves from there, and she says, you know, when
Messiah comes, he'll explain it all. You see the connection?
There's a prophet that's going to come. She knows. She's a Samaritan. She knows enough of that to say,
the way you're talking sounds like a prophet. When the Messiah
comes, he will explain it. And then the great penny drops
when he says to her, Ego, I am he. I, who speak to you, am he. Now, it was as a prophet that
Jesus was first acclaimed by his contemporaries. At the feeding
of the 5,000 in John chapter 6—and we don't need to turn to
all these passages, you can do it for your homework, but you
can also check and see if it's actually there—but at the feeding
of the 5,000, what is the response? Surely this is the prophet who
is to come into the world. At the raising of the son of
the widow of Nain, when he stops the funeral procession—who stops
a funeral procession? Who speaks to a corpse? He speaks, and listening to his
voice, new life the dead receive. Why? Because he is the prophet
of God. And as the boy is raised, and the crowd responds by saying,
a great prophet has appeared among us. When Nicodemus comes
in John 3 under the cover of darkness at night, he leads in
much the same way. He doesn't use the word prophet,
he uses the word teacher, but the inference is the same, isn't
it? I know that you are a teacher
come from God. Well, and Jesus turns to his
friends and he says, by the way, he says, what's the word on the
street about me? I'm interested to know what are
people saying in the markets and in the bazaars? And of course,
they immediately said, well, some of them say you're a prophet.
Really? Yeah. Now why would they say
that? Because the entire Old Testament,
in one line, is looking constantly for the prophet who will out-profit
all the prophets. For the one who will not simply
speak the Word, but for the one who will actually be the Word. For the one who will not simply
inform, but will be the one who transforms. And Jesus actually
accepted the designation of prophet to a certain extent. after he
goes into the synagogue where he had been brought up—in Nazareth,
remember?—in that dramatic encounter where the scroll is given to
him, and he reads from the scroll, "'The Spirit of the Lord is upon
me. He has anointed me to proclaim
good news to the poor, the recovery of sight to the blind,' and so
on. And when he had finished reading, he handed the scroll
back to the attendant, Luke tells us, and he took his seat. He
sat. Kind of like Psalm 2. He sat. And they knew that the teacher
sat, the teacher didn't stand in the synagogue, he sat in the
synagogue. And he sat down, and the eyes
in all of the synagogue were fastened on him. And they wondered,
what in the world will he say now? I wonder what he has to
say about this amazing passage. There's not a person in the room
could ever have imagined what he was going to say. Today, this
scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. I am the embodiment
of all that is written of me there. I am the prophet. Let me give you a third word.
I have three R's in my notes, but you don't need to be unsettled
by that. But the requirement or the necessity
of the prophet, the revealing of the prophet, which runs all
the way through. And we could have put this under
the same word, but just the word, the recognition of it. The recognition
of it. Because as the ministry of Christ
unfolds, And this is why all of these words, the prophet,
priest, and king, always have to be considered together. It's
almost wrong to deal with them apart from one another because
they all bleed into each other. But as the ministry of Jesus
unfolds, the designation prophet can actually contain all that
Christ is. You know, he's more than this. Of course he is. Because as we
will see, he's the priest who's going to offer himself as a sacrifice
for sin. He is the king who will sit on
a throne that will never come to an end. So prophet can't contain
him. It helps us, and it's a good
designation, and it fits. But eventually, the whole thing
collapses under the weight of its fulfillment in the Lord Jesus
himself. Because ultimately, he must be
recognized not simply as a messenger of revelation from God, but as
the very source of the revelation from God. He is both the source
of it and the fulfillment of it in himself. That's the significance
of, today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Now,
think about that in relationship to these disciples. Don't you
feel sorry for the disciples in part? I vacillate between
feeling sorry for them and thinking, what a bunch of duds they really
were. I know that's not very nice to
say, but since none of them are here and they can't hear me,
it doesn't really matter. But they were not a good group. I would have got rid of them
pretty early on. And definitely by the time of
the crucifixion, I would have just said, hey, thanks, guys.
I'm going with girls from this point out. They are the only
ones that are still with me. You're a bunch of deadbeats.
I am coming back again. I told you I would. When I come
back, I'm starting with an entirely new group, because frankly, you
have just not got it at all. Incidentally, for all of you
who are pastors, there ought to be a great sort of sidebar
word of encouragement in that, in that here is the greatest
teacher who ever lived, who is a very incarnate God himself,
who spends three years of intensified ministry with these guys to whom
he gives himself, performs miracles, teaches them, has little sleepovers
with them, and everything else, and at the end of the day, they
have no clue what's going on. When the women come back with
the tale of the resurrection, it seemed like foolishness to
them. They said, what a bunch of nonsense. Who ever thought
of such a thing? They weren't all sitting somewhere going,
hey, it's going to be Easter tomorrow. This is fantastic.
No, they were all buried in despair because it was over. The prophet
had said his word, but it had all come to nothing. The salvation
history was buried in a Palestinian tomb. We're done and we're finished
with. and the two on the Emmaus Road were now rehearsing it in
past tense terms, weren't they? They were talking about all the
things that had happened in Jerusalem when the stranger drew alongside
them. "'Why are you troubled?' he said. "'Why do doubts rise?'' That's
actually later on. Sorry, I misquoted that. What
is this conversation that you are holding with each other as
you walk? And they stood still looking sad, and then one of
them named Cleopas answered him. And here's the irony. Are you
the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things
that have happened there in these days? It's fantastic, isn't it? He's the epicenter of what's
been happening. You must have been away visiting
somebody or something, you know? And he doesn't go, hey, wait
a minute. He goes, what things? I love
this of Jesus. You know, he's teasing it out
of them. It's beautiful. And they said to him, well, we're
actually talking about Jesus of Nazareth. Oh yeah? A man who
was a prophet, mighty, in deed and word before God and all the
people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to
be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hope," past tense,
that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all
this, it's now the third day since these things happened.
A bunch of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb, they came
back, they'd seen a vision, and so on. But frankly, it didn't
amount to a thing. And Jesus says, Oh, you foolish
ones, how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the
Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And
beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted
to them in the Scriptures all the things concerning himself. Have you ever thought about why
it was that in the opening gambit they said, are you the only person
in the whole of Jerusalem that doesn't really know what's going
on? Why Jesus didn't just go, hey, it's me. What are you talking
about? Look at me, I'm Jesus. Shazam,
I'm here, look. He doesn't do that. Why not? Because the confidence of heaven.
is in the Scriptures. He didn't give them a Bible study
just for the good of their health. He was the prophet of God. And
it was imperative, if these fellows were ever going to get it right,
to understand that the entire book was about him. The entire
story finds its fulfillment in him. That every prophetic word
that has ever been spoken and all of the pointers that have
been given all the way through the line find their embodiment
in Jesus. And then it says their eyes were
opened and they recognized him. And then, of course, their response
when they were talking with one another, they said, you know,
he opened the scriptures to us and our hearts burned. He opened
the Scriptures to us. He didn't do a performance. He
didn't do a miracle. He just taught them the Bible. That's what prophets do. That's
what pastors and teachers do. That's what we do. Don't we? And the one who teaches is the
one who transforms. He opened their minds, it says,
so that they could understand the Scriptures. And that was
in order that their preaching should then bear testimony to
this same truth. So I think I can finish there
with this thought, which is that the anointing of God on Christ
the Son in his prophetic ministry is, if you like, not simply there
in order that Christ might carry out the office of teaching, but
in order that the whole body of Christ might then in turn
continue in the power of the Spirit to preach the same prophetic
word, which is Christ in the Old Testament, Christ the fulfillment
of prophecy, Christ the embodiment of God in everything that is
capable in humanity. In other words, and track with
me on this, in other words, in our preaching, In our preaching,
we are called to participate in the ongoing office of Christ. In other words, our preaching
is to be prophetic. not pathetic, prophetic, and
not prophetic in terms of extra biblical words because you had
pizza the night before and you got some bizarre thing to say,
but prophetic in the way in which it says, this is the Bible, this
is what it says, this is who it introduces us to, and I'd
love to tell you about the one who is prophet and who is priest
and who is king, the one who has come and his word is utterly
reliable. His word is utterly true. He
speaks into the darkness of our age. He shines as a light and
so on. That is the responsibility that
is then entrusted to us. So the prophetic dimension, it
comes in our exposition of the scriptures. He expounded the
scriptures, their minds were illuminated, and their hearts
were stirred. That's good. Exposition. Minds illuminated and hearts
transformed. And that's the privilege we're
given. Calvin again writes, and I guess
that's for the thought that was in my mind. I forgot it was in
my notes. He received anointing, not only for himself that he
might carry out the office of teaching, but for the whole body
of Christ that the power of the Spirit of God might be present
in the continuing preaching of the gospel. In other words, we
then have the privilege and responsibility of taking up, if you like, the
mantle of bringing the Word of God to bear upon the context
and culture of our day and our time in such a way that identifies
the fact that we are simply bearing testimony to this person and
to this work. And Jesus, before he leaves his
disciples, tells them, "'All authority in heaven and earth
has been given unto me.'" There is no place in the entire universe
where Jesus Christ is not Lord. Your office, if you go to work
in an office and a bunch of pagans in there, they're driving you
nuts, and you're frightened to speak up for Jesus, you shouldn't really
be too frightened. Jesus is Lord over the whole
shooting match. He's the Lord of the universe, you know. Now,
that makes such a difference, doesn't it? So, in our preaching,
we are then participating in this ongoing ministry. And he
promises us his presence, and he promises us his power. And
in the apostolic ministry of Paul and the rest, what is it
that they are actually saying? We are therefore Christ's ambassadors,
as though God were making his appeal through us. I think it's
Calvin who says, isn't it a mystery that the salvation of one depends
upon the voice of another? He's talking about the ministry
of the word of God from the prophet of God in the pulpit, so that
our mouths become the very mouthpiece of God. One day in heaven, one
day in heaven, people in our congregation will be asked, did
you listen to your pastor? and they'll say no. And God will
say, you didn't simply reject your pastor, you rejected me.
Because he was my word to you from the scriptures in that moment
and in that day. That's why when we say to our
congregation, today if you hear his voice, Do not harden your
hearts. How can they hear his voice,
an audible voice from God? What are you talking about? No,
if you hear his voice. And what a mystery that God deigns
voices like ours, squeaky voices like ours, funny voices like
ours, in order that he might point to the reality of what
it is. Murray, Professor Murray, was driving in the car with Willie
McKenzie of Christian Focus. That's before Professor Murray
died, obviously. Otherwise, it would be a really
macabre journey. But knowing Willie, you know,
from Christian Focus, nothing would surprise me. Anyway, they
were driving. I hope that's streaming right into
the Hill of Fern. Anyway, they were driving in
the car, and Professor Murray says to Willie McKenzie, he says,
hey, Willie, he says, I got a teaser for you. What's the difference
between a lecture and preaching? So Mackenzie tried a few things,
this, that. No, Murray said, no, no, no,
no, no. Eventually he said, I give up.
Murray said, preaching is a personal, passionate plea. It's not a lecture. It's a personal, passionate plea.
Mackenzie said to him, In what way do you mean that? He said,
in the Pauline way. We beseech you, on Christ's behalf,
be reconciled to God. Some of our preaching is informational,
but it's not life-shaping, and it's not life-changing. some
of our congregations have decided that the reason they come to
church is to get a little bit more information about whatever
section of the Bible we're in, and hopefully two or three practical
tips as to how they might be able to introduce that to their
lives. So we have big swathes of information,
information, information, and then, oh, by the way, here's
the takeaway or whatever it might be. But you couldn't possibly
call that really expositional preaching or with a prophetic
edge to it. There's no passionate plea in
that, is there? No, we beseech you, we implore you, on Christ's
behalf, be reconciled to God. And not just in the pulpit, but
in our everyday events. Some of us are not in pulpits,
that's all right. But still, we speak to our friends and our
neighbors in that way. And instead of patching other
bits and pieces into it, we'd be better just to stay with the
straightforward statements of these things, so that everybody
would understand that our confidence is in God. Listen to Luther.
He said, it is a right, excellent thing that every honest pastor
and preacher's mouth is Christ's mouth. It's the right, excellent
thing that every honest pastor and preacher's mouth is Christ's
mouth. You see, that's what makes it so striking. When Isaiah says,
I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and I said to myself, Man,
I'm a great preacher. No, he didn't. He said, I'm a
man of unclean lips. That's why in James it says,
you better not try becoming teachers if God doesn't call you to be
teachers. After all, he says, are you really going to tell
me that out of the same mouth comes salt water and spring water
and fresh water and out of your same mouth comes the things you
say when you're driving your car and the things you say when
you're standing in your pulpit? the very mouth of God, that God
would deign to use such a mouth. James S. Stewart, who was a wonderful
preacher in Scotland a long time ago, when he was giving the lectures
in 1952 to Yale Divinity School, he spoke about how when the apostles
hit the streets of Jerusalem, their preaching ministry had
with it, he said, a waft of the supernatural. A waft of the supernatural. And what was it? Well, it was
actually just a straight, wonderful exposition of the Old Testament.
Once Peter got his head on straight, how else could you come up with
that amazing sermon that he preaches on Pentecost? He's got it all
buttoned down. Why? Because just what Jesus
said. I'm gonna go away, it'll be better for you boys, because
the Holy Spirit will come, and when he comes, he'll fix this
stuff. You will finally get this. That's
why he's stuck with them. And if I can quote Tillich here,
without causing trouble, in his book The Trivialization of God,
he says, when the word of the gospel is preached, Christ walks
among his people. It's the miracle of Christmas
all over again. Christ clothes himself in humanity,
spurning the language of angels to speak with the tongues of
mortals. when the word of God, when the
prophetic word of God embodied in Christ, inscripturated for
us and put in our mouths, is then heard. Let me draw it to a close by
saying this, and finishing in a similar way to our earlier
if, then, we're going to engage in this kind of ministry and
follow in the pattern of Jesus and do as he has directed us. Three things, and just I'll point
them to you, and we're done. What is required? Well, first
of all, courage. Courage. You know, This is not
an easy environment that we minister in anymore here. At least, I
don't find it so. The only people to be afraid
of in our society are people who think they know something.
The cluelessness is the best, you know. You can have an opinion,
You know, it's like the Cleveland Orchestra is one of the best
orchestras in the country, and they make beautiful music. They're
world-class musicians. But if you went there some Thursday
night and you found that everybody in the orchestra was just playing
any tune they wanted, all simultaneously, you would say you'd want your
money back for your ticket. And how would they get to that?
Well, just by deposing the conductor. They just depose the conductor.
We don't want a conductor. We don't want a conductor, and
we don't want a score. We just want to play whatever we want
to play. After all, it's true for me. It might not be true
for you. I want to play my music. You play your music. That's where
we are. The world in which we live, we've deposed God, the
Creator. So now we all play our own music. Now, we have the responsibility
prophetically to go into that world and say these things that
are here to say as the word of the prophet. There's no problem. You can put a t-shirt together
that says, I am the way, the truth, and the life on it. Put
that on, walk around. No one will have a problem with
it. But you better not complete the verse. It's the rest of the
verse that'll get you hung. No one comes to the Father except
through me. That's what Jesus was saying.
And we have to have courage to stick with the non-negotiables,
the truth of the incarnation, the reality of what it means
that Jesus made a substitutionary sacrifice for our sins, the truth
of the resurrection, the reality of his ascension, the promise
of his return. Courage. Let me encourage you
to be courageous. Not bombastic, not rude. Courageous. Secondly, compassionate. Compassionate. Winsome. recognizing the people to whom
we speak. The congregations to whom we speak come from all kinds
of backgrounds, don't they? I mean, some of us, if we had
gone to—and I was preaching from Second Timothy yesterday, trying
to at least, and the section that says, these are the kind
of fellows who worm their way into the homes of silly women,
King James Version, or weak women, ESV, or weak-willed women, NIV,
anyway, there's a bunch of women like that. And I said, you know,
I don't suggest that you go tomorrow back into your community and
say, oh, hey, you look like one of these silly women I was learning
about yesterday. And I said, I don't think that's
a good way to go at it. Some of us, if we'd gone to the
woman at the well, we'd have torn strips off her. We would
have gone at her hammer and tongs. Hey, what are you doing out here?
You're notorious. Jesus said, could I have a drink
of water? Why? So that he could give to her
the living water so that she would never thirst again. People that are in our congregation,
some of them have sordid lives. Many of them are sexually messed
up and horribly confused. A lot of them are just totally
skeptical. And the prophetic ministry of
Jesus was as direct and unerring as could ever be discovered,
and yet was as winsome and as endearing as you could ever find. His most stinging rebukes were
reserved for religious hypocrites. But he was condemned by the same
religious hypocrites for going to a party at Levi's And they
marveled that he talked with the woman. What are you doing
here? Why are you doing this? I'm the
prophet of God. Courage, compassion, and confidence. Confidence. Confidence in Christ
and confidence in Christ's word. You know, there's a tremendous temptation to a sort of unjustifiable diffidence. You've
got polar extremes, I think, in the pulpits of America. You've
got people who are just giving it big licks over here, and then
you've got people who are over here who don't want to offend
or say anything or do anything at all. So, if the prophetic
ministry of Jesus is the ministry entrusted to us, not as the apostles
were receiving it, but as we receive it as inscripturated,
then let me encourage you to be confident in your opening
up of the scriptures. Confident not in yourself. Be
yourself, forget yourself. But confident in the word that
we speak. and say to people, now come on, follow me to Bethlehem
and let me introduce you to this child who is born to be king. Climb up the hill of Calvary
with me and see him there, the one who has come as the priest
who will deal with our sins and deal with our alienation. There's
nothing like this story to compare in the entire world, nothing. And we have been entrusted with
it. Isaac Watts, in his amazing hymn, which begins, join all
the glorious names of wisdom, love, and power, and it runs
to probably nine verses, has penultimately the verse, great
prophet of my God, my tongue shall bless thy name. By thee,
the joyful news of our salvation came, the joyful news of sins
forgiven, of hell subdued, and peace with heaven. Jesus was
the prophet of God. Father, thank you that you sent
Jesus. Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you
came. Holy Spirit, won't you teach us more and more about
who he is and all that he has done. We pray, gracious God,
for one another tonight as we think about the awesome responsibility
of being called into pastoral ministry. of realizing the cultural
environment in which we work. the loss of any real realistic
sense of a God who stands outside of time and who is separate from
his creation. In the midst of all the incipient
pantheism of our day, help us, Lord, to be confident enough
to upturn the thinking of our world, a world that says, the
problem, if there is a problem, must be outside of me. And the
answer, if there's going to be an answer, must be inside of
me. Help us, Lord, to be confident enough in the truth of your word
to upend that thinking and to say, no, what the Bible says
is that the problem is inside of you and the answer is outside
of you. Outside of you in one who came
to speak with such clarity that he would penetrate the walls
of your own rebellious heart. and woo you and win you to himself.
Lord, help us with these things, we pray. Thank you for the privilege
of sitting in the consideration of the truth of your word. Banish
from our recollection anything that is untrue or unhelpful or
unkind, and grant that that which is of yourself may find a resting
place in our hearts and minds. For we humbly pray in Christ's
name, amen.
2 - Preaching Jesus as Prophet
Series 2014 Expositors Conference
| Sermon ID | 92314128566 |
| Duration | 47:35 |
| Date | |
| Category | Conference |
| Language | English |
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