The Sovereignty of God and the Possible

I don’t know how people pray who don’t believe in the sovereignty of God to do the impossible. Because all the things I want to happen are impossible. If they’re possible I’ll do them.

Pastor John Piper

http://jamsco.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/john-piper-good-quotes-part-6/

Creeds and Confessions - Quotations

At the New England Reformed Fellowship’s annual Bolton Conference (held Oct. 25-26, 2013) Carl Trueman spoke on the topic the role of creeds and confessions in the church.  Here is some of what he had to say:

“Scripture is the norming norm, creeds are the normed norm.” Scripture is always our ultimate authority – but we can still say that creeds are a church’s normative doctrines and practices, because they were created from Scripture. In that sense, creeds have authority.

“If you don’t write your creeds, no one can critique them. Creeds strip us of magisterial authority.” Despite common misconceptions, creeds actually dis-empower pastors from a form of papal authority. Creeds lay out the church’s stances on scripture and a.) Let everyone search the scriptures and evaluate the pastor’s stance and b.) Keep the pastor from imposing personal preferences (Don’t smoke, or chew, or run with those who do, etc.) Saying “No creed but the Bible” makes the pastor king of interpretation.

“Notice – no creed has the words ‘we just’” Trueman was taking a jab at the lack of thought we often put into our prayers – the words “we just” don’t make their way into a thought through confession, nor someone who is praying with depth of belief based on rich tradition.

“We all operate from a tradition, whether we acknowledge it or not. Some write it down, others don’t.” Every pastor I’ve ever known who is against creeds uses an English Bible – which means their beliefs are founded on a lexical, textual tradition. They would also take issue with other faiths who claim the Bible as creed, like Mormons or Muslims. The difference is, some of us make this tradition clear by writing it out, and others don’t.

Carl R Trueman is Departmental Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. He is editor of the IFES journal, Themelios, and has taught on the faculties of theology at both the University of Nottingham and the University of Aberdeen.

Excerpted from http://scribblepreach.com/2013/10/29/carl-truemans-top-10-quotes-on-creeds-and-confessions/

The Importance of Expositional Preaching.

Subtitle: Why Are Some Churches Spiritually Ill?  Maybe it’s the Food….

By food, I mean the analogy used in scripture indicating the Word of God.   Perhaps some spiritual illness we see today can be traced to the pulpit or to the congregational ambivalence towards the preached Word.  An antidote to spiritual illness in a church is most always connected to worship and the faithful exposition of the Word of God.

However, there seems to be a tendency in some churches to avoid expositional preaching.  By expositional preaching I mean that preaching which begins with the preachers determination to present, explain, and apply the text of the Bible to his congregation. 

As Dr. Al Mohler has stated, “expository preaching begins with the text and works from the text to apply its truth to the lives of believers. If this determination and this commitment are not clear at the outset, something other than expository preaching will result. The preacher rises in the pulpit to accomplish one central purpose: to set forth the message and meaning of the biblical text….Once the meaning of the text is set forth, the preacher moves to application. Application of biblical truth is a necessary task of expository preaching.”

T. H. L. Parker (Professor Emeritus at Oxford, U.K.) describes preaching like this: “Expository preaching consists in the explanation and application of a passage of Scripture. Without explanation it is not expository; without application it is not preaching.”

The Q & A portion of the 9Marks website outlines expositional preaching this way:

An expositional sermon is a sermon that takes the main point of a passage of Scripture, makes it the main point of the sermon, and applies it to life today.

In other words, an expositional sermon exposes the meaning of a passage of Scripture and shows its relevance to the lives of one’s hearers. That’s it.

This means that an expositional sermon does NOT

1.     Need to focus on just a verse or two.

2.     Need to present complex exegetical arguments or endless historical background.

3.     Need to be dry, lifeless, or removed from people’s lives.

4.     Confuse the primary point of a passage with any legitimate application of that passage (that is, use a verse to say what you want to say).

Dr. Mohler again writes, “….in many churches there is very little reading of the Bible in worship, and sermons are marked by attention to the congregation’s concerns, not by an adequate attention to the biblical text. The exposition of the Bible has given way to the concerns, real or perceived, of the listeners  The authority of the Bible is swallowed up in the imposed authority of congregational concerns.

In many churches, there is almost no public reading of the Word of God. Worship is filled with music, but congregations seem disinterested in listening to the reading of the Bible. We are called to sing in worship, but the congregation cannot live only on the portions of Scripture that are woven into songs and hymns. Christians need the ministry of the Word as the Bible is read before the congregation such that God’s people—young and old, rich and poor, married and unmarried, sick and well—hear it together. The sermon is to consist of the exposition of the Word of God, powerfully and faithfully read, explained, and applied. It is not enough that the sermon take a biblical text as its starting point.

How can so many of today’s churches demonstrate what can only be described as an impatience with the Word of God? The biblical formula is clear: the neglect of the Word can only lead to disaster, disobedience, and death. God rescues his church from error, preserves his church in truth, and propels his church in witness only by his Word—not by congregational self-study.”

This may explain why some Christians and some churches struggle in worship and are therefore spiritually malnourished.

 

http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/10/14/falling-on-deaf-ears-why-so-many-churches-hear-so-little-of-the-bible-2/

http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/08/21/the-sheer-weightlessness-of-so-many-sermons-why-expository-preaching-matters/

http://www.9marks.org/answers/what-%E2%80%9Cexpositional%E2%80%9D-sermon

Evangelism....what it is and isn't

The Christian call to evangelism is a call not simply to persuade people to make decisions but rather to proclaim to them the good news of salvation in Christ, to call them to repentance, and to give God the glory for regeneration and conversion. We don’t fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not converted; we fail only if we don’t faithfully tell the gospel at all. Evangelism itself isn’t converting people; it’s telling them that they need to be converted and telling them how they can be.

Mark Dever is Senior Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and founder of 9Marks Ministries.