Lessons for Handling the Scriptures

0:09 Hey, let's just have a word of prayer. Father, thank you for your word to us this morning. Thank you for the grace and clarity with which it came home to our hearts. and as we think about sitting under the Word and then being teachers of the Word, we acknowledge our entire dependence upon you and our desire to become better at what we've committed ourselves to do. We pray that the interaction we have now will serve to that end, and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Well, I don't want to tell you that I am unprepared for this. I am prepared, but I'm not really prepared prepared, because I like this context that gives the opportunity for immediate interaction. And so I'm not planning on sort of giving you anything, all of the best things that I've ever thought about preaching, because I haven't really thought on any great things about preaching. But I think it said somewhere that I was going to do the Lucas lessons. Some of you will actually know what that means, and if you do, then you know these lessons. I don't have them all. But Dick Lucas is now 101 years old, an Anglican clergyman.

1:26 He's still living in his own apartment in London. He has minders that look after him. He loves having visitors. His short-term memory is completely gone, so he asks you the same question immediately after you've just answered it, but he is wonderfully kind, and so on. And he was tremendously effective as a minister in the center of London and became most adept at speaking to the business population of the center of London—the folks who were at the very heart of the guys that make money in London. And his church is settled in Bishop's Gate, which is right in the heart of the city of London. And so he began to do these Tuesday lunchtime sessions. And at those lunchtime sessions, the men would come, and he told them that if they came, they would be able to listen to his talk, get a sandwich, a bowl of soup, and be back upstairs again in their offices within 45 minutes. So, in other words, he determined that he would never speak for longer than 22 minutes.

2:44 And if you go online and get his Tuesday lunchtime sermons, I think you will be both encouraged and deeply challenged. And part of the ability that he had to get things across so succinctly, was that he had very clear understanding of certain things that he was endeavoring to do. And so, one of his favorite illustrations that he liked to use when you were with him was this.

3:16 And he would draw that line there, and he would say, Are you impressed? And we would all say, No, not particularly. What is it? And he'd say, well, it is the line. And this is the line of Scripture. If you go below the line, you are then devaluing what is in the text—so the sort of thing that Herschel was talking about, swerving away, watering it down, seeking to say less than it says. if you go above the line, then you may be tempted to somehow or another advance the thing in some way, whatever it might be. I think he would have said certain aspects of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He was talking in the time of the charismatic renewal, particularly where the temptation was Scripture plus or Scripture minus. And so he said, Make sure that you stay on the line. Pretty good. And one of the reasons that he was good in 22 minutes was he never deviated from the line. One of the others that he liked was the triangle. And I'll go through these quickly.

4:34 And so, this is Scripture. And this is Cleveland. And this is Corinth. he said, you've got to be careful that you don't go from Scripture immediately to Cleveland, because we're studying 1 Corinthians. And 1 Corinthians was not written to Cleveland. It was actually written to Corinth. And therefore, your journey from your proclamation here and your unfolding of the text, has to go first to Corinth before it then goes to Cleveland. One of the others that he had was—I think he had this one, I think it was—this was the text. He said, Read the text, and then ignore the text. This is failure, and then apply your agenda.

5:50 Okay? So you read it, then you don't pay any attention to it, and then you, on the strength of having ignored it, then you say whatever it was you were planning on saying in the first place, in which case you should never even bother to insult the people by actually reading from the Bible. He also was very clear on—he was very concerned about what he called mental arithmetic, whereby you know what the answer is, but if somebody told you, said to you, now, explain to me how you get there, then you don't even know how you got there. You just perhaps—you knew that twelve-eighths were ninety-six, and twelve-twelves were 144, 74, and eight nines were 72, because you knew it in your mind. But beyond that—and he said, you've got to be careful you don't give them mental arithmetic sermons, whereby you're not actually instructing them in such a way that they understand how you're going. And it really is a danger—and especially it's a danger if we're just the masters of three points.

7:07 If every passage of Scripture that we go to, we can manage to come up just with three points, and that's where it goes. This is him speaking now. He says, if you breed your congregation on the three-point thing—not that he was saying it was wrong to a three points. But what he was saying was, if the congregation just is taught to get, you know, like, the three points, that's all they ever do. And so, it's very, very important that you actually lead them to where you're going. The other one is F and T, okay? Okay? So, he says, F is for framework, and T is for text. All of us come to the Scriptures with some understanding of framework, so that we know that the Old Testament leads into the New Testament, and so on, and whatever it might be. But also, when the framework with which we come to something begins to predominate. So, I mean, jokingly, if you remember, the guy who was a very convinced Baptist said, you know, this morning, we're going to deal with Genesis, where God asked the question, Adam, where are you? We're going to ask, where is Adam? How did Adam get there. And finally, a few thoughts on believer's baptism. Okay? So, in other words, the framework—he had to get there. So, what he would say is, make sure that you're operating from a big T and a small F, rather than a big F and a small T. Not arguing for the absence of a framework, whether it's a covenantal framework or whatever way you want to do it. But the framework has to be dictated to by the Scriptures. The Scriptures, the framework has to emerge from

9:14 Scripture, and then the framework, whatever it is, has to, at the same time, be submitted to Scripture. Maybe one other—and I could get very creative on this one. Okay, so these three things, what I'm trying to represent here, are—one of these lines is exposition, one of these lines is application, and one of these lines is illustration. And so, it's customary, especially young guys will always ask, well, what do I do? How do I do? How do I make the application? Where do I make the application? Do I put it here, do I put it there? Where do you bring in the illustration? What are you doing with that? A long time ago, I think just because of people I watched and listened to, I decided, forget all that. Or we could change it into a Venn diagram, actually, I suppose, but that's actually beyond my capacity as well. I'm not sure I know what a Venn diagram is. But anyway, no, where the three things, right, the three circles and where they all meet is where you're functioning. So, I did this at my brother's place, Southern Seminary, I think one of the very first times I was there. And they asked me to do something with the D. Min students, or I don't know what it was. And after I had said my piece, a student came up to me and he said, Dr. Begg, he said, I don't know if you understand, but you just completely contradicted what the previous speaker said this morning. And I said, wow. I said, who was he? He said, well, he's actually the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. I said, well, I don't know. What did he have wrong?

11:21 And actually, what I think I was on about—and I'm overstating this just for the fun of it—but I think what I said was, beware of starting your thing with a big illustration. Okay? So, beware of the sort of like— I was flying from X to Y. I looked out of the plane. We were just over Nebraska. When all of a sudden—and then you start to tell them about what happened, and then it descended, and then the thing and everything else, it goes like that. And then there's no immediate indication on your part or on their level of understanding that this has got anything remotely to do with what you're about to say.

12:15 And so the transition says, and so let's return to the text. And the reaction of people is, no, no, we like that stuff about flying. Do more of the flying stuff. It's the same danger when it was trendy—I don't know if it's still trendy—to show video clips to make a point. Don't do that! Don't upstage yourself! Don't show a clip from Chariots of Fire where the guy is doing his thing, and then expect everybody to come back and listen to you. And so, the whole idea of relaxing—this is what I would say—relax and to your own self be true when it comes to the way in which you weave these things around. And let the genre of the material that you're dealing with establish what you're doing at any given point in time. Because if we fall into the trap of always doing it in the same way, then we're gonna have to press the text to fit our framework of proclamation. And it's wonderfully liberating and instructive to our congregation when we're not doing that at all. I mean, if you and I can tackle, for example, the epistle of James in the same way that we are seeking to unfold the narrative of the book of Ruth, because we've decided that what we're looking for here is the A and the A1 and the A2 and the B1 and B2. We've got to be prepared to set ourselves completely free from that and allow ourselves to be caught up in the text that we're seeking to unfold, so that we've been transported back into the period of the judges, where in all of the chaos at that time, we have this amazing providential story of what has happened to a lady who has suffered a triple bereavement. And if we're going to say, point one, the people are,

14:25 where do you get point one? Do you ever do that with your grandchildren when you're reading a story. Point one. There's no point one. It was at the time of the barley harvest. Have you ever smelled barley? If you go to Edinburgh, you'll smell barley, because they're making beer out of barley. You can smell it when you walk down the street. And why does it tell us that the barley harvest—well, it gives us a geographical point, it gives us a historical point, and it gives us a flavor point. Anyway, I'll take you forward from here, because I do want to say some other things about the whole preaching thing. And have you read Gary Miller's book, Saving Eutychus?

15:15 One person. Two purposes! Three purposes! I see that hand! Four! Okay, so the rest of you haven't read this book, I suggest you get it. Gary Miller, saving you, because he wrote it with a colleague. He's the principal of the Presbyterian Seminary in Brisbane, Australia, and he is a bright fellow, despite the fact that he's Irish. He's actually very clever. And he did his PhD on the book of Deuteronomy. He's a wonderfully engaging guy. But the thesis of his book is straightforward, if you think about it. Paul preached, right? Without any cell phones ringing, he preached. And he preached so long that Eutychus fell out of the loft, and he had to revive him. Gary says, well, it's one thing for Paul to do that over a long period of time, but what about our ability to cause that kind of drop into the third stages of anesthesia within 20 minutes of our starting to talk? So, we've got to make sure that we save ourselves and our congregations from the experience of Eutychus. I don't remember all of the book, but I do remember that I found it very helpful when he talked about three things, in practical terms now. He talked about pace, pitch, and volume in our actual use of our voices, of the way in which we deal with things.

16:59 Pace? Very, very fast. Or very slow speaking? Volume? Loud! Volume, I guess. Pitch? High? Low. All of these things are involved in the use of our voices. And it's fascinating to me how little time is spent on those of us who use our voices being trained, even by somebody helping us. For example, the church I go to at the moment is a church that is pastored by a fellow who was on my team. He's Nigerian, he is humble, and I think he wants me to know how humble he is by speaking as quietly as he does. But I have to talk to him midweek and tell him, Brother, I've got 74-year-old ears, and I can't hear you. And if I can't hear you, I guarantee you there's other people who can't hear you. So speak up! Speak up! And modulate your tone. Make sure that—I mean, there are pictures—I mean, John MacArthur was a huge hero to me. But Johnny Mac, in my experience, he got up to about 25,000 feet almost immediately, right? He was there. We're there. Whoa, here we go. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Every so often you might just come down for a little bit, and they go right back up to where it was. Well, he had no where—in my humble opinion, he'd nowhere else to go, because he'd already reached his climbing altitude. Anyway, all of this simply to say, these things matter—pitch, pace, volume, but more than that, tone. Tone. And what I mean by tone now, I'm helped by thinking of what Tim Keller had to say. And Tim Keller—I took classes with Tim Keller at Westminster before he went to start the church in Manhattan. And I remember I used to sit in those things and

19:06 say, How does he even come up with this stuff? How is it that he's able to think in this way? because he just has an amazing ability to take something, as it were, and just turn it at a slight angle and show it to me again in a way that when I'm looking at it, I never saw that. And it wasn't like magician stuff. He's very, very good at that. And we all have things that we're good at and things that we're not good at. But have you listened to him when he talks about the text of Scripture, the context into which we are proclaiming the Scripture, namely, our congregation. It's similar, actually, to what Goldsworthy does. If you've never read Goldsworthy, who is also an Australian and from out there, Brisbane—no, no, Moore College, Sydney— he talks about fusing the horizons. That, first of all, we need to fuse the horizon between our understanding of things and our grasp of the Scriptures. Then we have to bridge the horizon between what we have grasped from the Scriptures and the congregation to whom we are speaking.

20:26 We cannot assume that they can get from A to C, because we never gave them B. And then we have to recognize that there is another horizon that goes beyond that, which is where our congregation go out into the community to convey the things that we have been learning together from the Scriptures. That was a digression. But Goldsworthy, Gospel Hermeneutics is a very helpful book, especially if you're trying to figure out where your hermeneutic is. But this was Keller. And you forgive me if I'm just telling you stuff you already know, but here we are. So, he talks about text, he talks about context, and then he talks about subtext—the subtext. He says, when you go into a building, When you go into a congregation, there is a subtext that is not overt, but it is recognizable.

21:29 And then he says, here's one. Subtext number one, you go into the church, and the subtext is, aren't we great? Aren't we great? This is our church. This is what we believe. We are this, we are that, we don't this, we don't that, we want you to know this, and so on. And he says that it is a subtext of reinforcement. So, we are saying, this is who we are, this is what we believe, and we really want to make sure—I'm trying to make sure that I am conveying this consistently to my congregation so that they are protected from everything else that might be outside. But also, making it such that the person who's been brought by his business colleague is saying, well, where do I fit in this thing? And of course, if your approach is, you know, in your opening prayer, and, Lord, we pray for all those hell-bound sinners that are here, like my bank manager and Mary Reynolds. You know, it's immediately—we separated ourselves. What were we trying to do there? Anyway, it's a subtext of, Aren't we great? That's a reinforcement subtext, he calls it. Aren't I great? Aren't I great? Now, this is a subtext where the pastor is wittingly or unwittingly wanting to make sure that everybody knows that he's, you know, really pretty good. And he has mugged it up, and he's increasingly self-conscious.

23:19 Self-conscious preaching is a disgrace, and it is a disaster. We cannot—you can't be thinking about how well you're doing while you're doing. It's the same thing with a golf swing, actually. You've only got one thought in a golf swing. You get three thoughts, and you're done, and taken away and bringing it back. So, he says—we want to stay away from that. He says that that kind of performance subtext is fundamentally a form of selling. It is for the benefit of the insiders, and it is motivated towards growth. The third one, he says, is a subtext of training. So, first one is, aren't we great? Aren't I great? Third one is, isn't the truth great? Isn't the truth great? He says, so this is a subtext of training. And this is what he calls News You Can Use. News You Can Use. So he's providing the congregation with news you can use.

24:31 Let me pause for myself there and say—I don't know if later today when I speak I'll mention this or not—but Ashton, who died in his fifties, who was the minister at the Round Church in Cambridge, he talks very clearly about our primary motivation in doing what we do when we unfold the text is not to give the people an understanding of what the text actually says with a few pointers that they can take home with them so as to be able to apply what it is they have learned. You say, well, wait a minute. No, no. Listen to what he says. He says, our primary focus is that in the proclamation of the text, we will all have an encounter with God.

25:43 that the reason the Word of God is coming to us in the vehicle is coming to us is in order that we might meet God, we might encounter God, and he might encounter us. Then and only then are we going to move forward to the, what does this mean to me, and how does this apply? The last one that Keller has. He calls, he says, Well, aren't we great? Aren't I great? Isn't the truth great? And he calls this one—and these are just arbitrary that he invented, let's not kid ourselves—he calls this, Isn't Christ great? Isn't Christ great? So, number one is the reinforcement, number two is the performance, number three is the training, and number four is the worship, he says. So what happens is, the way the preacher approaches the text, the way in which he engages in everything that happens in the service, is pointing always away and to Christ. It's not, aren't we a great church? It's certainly not, aren't I a great preacher? It's certainly not even, this is a Bible training course, it is, isn't Jesus Christ great? So that all that we're doing wherever we are in the text—and, of course, he was big on Clowney preaching Christ in all the Scriptures, which, of course, is perfectly understandable—but he wants to make sure that anybody who's there, the motive, he says, is to change what our heart most sets its affections on. That's the subtext. That we are looking to God by the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures to change what our hearts most set their affections on, which he says works both for the believer and for the unbeliever. Because we all need to have our hearts changed so that our affections are full of Christ. And for the unbeliever, we're able to say, when that is the

27:50 subtext, there are some of you here today who have never ever considered the fact that the answers to the longing of the human heart, whether it's for forgiveness or focus or identity, wherever it might be, are actually found in Jesus. And that's why this morning we have found ourselves moving very quickly from David and Goliath to the fact that the significance of the victory of David over Goliath was simply to point forward to the great king who was going to come and who would triumph over everyone. He is Christ's victor, as we just saw. I don't know if you find that helpful, but there it is. When we come to the text, you've got to come to the text as agnostic. I have found that the hardest passages are the ones that have been the biggest help to me. Because I have to acknowledge, I don't know if I have a clue what this means. Right now, that's why I said to him last night—him being the great Dr. Mahler, I mean, Herschel—I said to him, I'd like to know what you wrote for Ezekiel. Right? Because I read Ezekiel again this morning, and I thought about him again. I thought, What did you write for Ezekiel this morning, for that would be good for your grandchildren? And so, you come to the text, and you go and say, well, I gotta find out, at base level, what this is about. That is good, because there's no place else to go. When we come to passages that we're most familiar with, the danger is that we miss stuff. Because I know what this is. I know what this passage is about. I know. I hope you've never preached on the guys who brought the cripple to Jesus, and I hope you never preached on it and use it as an opportunity to encourage people to invite people to the evening service.

29:46 You know, so it's a big guilt trip. Well, think about those guys. I mean, they'd bust their butts to get the guy there. And some of you want to even get out of your car and invite somebody in. And the people go home, oh, that's terrible. That was horrible. If we did that, if we were tempted to do that, we'd miss the whole point. Jesus said, Son, your sins are forgiven. anybody in their right mind says, No, we never came for that. What do you think we brought him here on a bed? We didn't bring him for an invisible forgiveness. We brought him for a physical healing. And the Pharisees said, That's ridiculous. Who could say things like that? Only God. Their theology was right. Their application was wrong. They couldn't understand who Jesus was. And so we have the opportunity when we preach that to say, What was Jesus doing there? Well, he was putting his finger not only on the man's basic need, but on everybody's basic need.

30:43 And so, some of you may have come to church this morning, and you think, if only I could fix that, or fix that, or fix the next thing. Well, the Bible says is that we got something that needs fixed, that we don't even know needs fixed. And that's what it is. So, I just diverted from course there. When we come to the text of Scripture, we have to ask the question, what is it actually saying? Why is it there? Why is it saying it in this way? So, for example—I don't want to tease this out—but if you take Paul is talking about temptation in 1 Corinthians 10, and James is talking about temptation in James 1. It's the same subject, but it is addressed differently, and it's addressed differently for different reasons. But if we're not asking those questions as we come to the text, we can easily just go off. And we don't fall foul of what I call the parody of the, you know, the home Bible study questions, which the text—the guy who's leading the Bible study says, you know, I think there's some things we should ask as we have looked at this passage tonight. Question number one, how does it make you feel? And we'll talk about that for a little while later on. Secondly, what does it remind you of that you'd like to share? And we can all share.

32:17 And thirdly, if you'd been there, what would you have written? And finally, what, if anything, would you like to change? Right? And the people sitting around saying, I'd love to share. I'd have to share what it means to me. But we haven't even found out what it means. So what it means to Mrs. Jenkins may be very good for her, but it's totally irrelevant to what we're doing. And so, but if our stuff from the pulpit has that kind of flavor to it, especially when we move away from the thought that we want God to show up here through his Word, that the way he is determined to do this is different from a Bible study. It's different from a fellowship group. It's different from your life groups. Don't you believe that? I hope you believe that, because it's fundamentally important. One of the professors in Glasgow wrote a piece called How Shall We Hear Without a Preacher?

33:25 and he actually quotes chapter 8 in the book The Trellis and the Vine. And he was asked to review the book, and he says there was a tendency in this book which becomes clear in chapter 8. Chapter 8 has the heading, Why Sunday Sermons Are Necessary But Not Sufficient. Why Sunday Sermons Are Necessary But Not Sufficient. I want to just quote, because here's the thing. In small group studies, incidentally, where you have to interact, if you've noticed, not everybody can handle that. Not everybody can handle it personality-wise, and not everyone is used to being in a setting. Take whoever it is—a mom who is a wonderful mom and raising her children and everything else, and she gets put in a room where they ask, And what is your opinion on such and such? She just clams up in herself. It's not something she does. Or a guy who—it usually works best with people are very vocal and perhaps at a certain level of education where they've been used to that kind of thing. But when you put people who are not in that kind of thing in there, then it changes the dynamic. It alters it completely. Well, of course, God's primary focus is not for everybody sitting around a small table, but it's for the people. Gather the people—Gather the Jeuteronomy—gather the people that they might hear my word. That the prophetic ministry of public proclamation is one of the last things in the whole world where you get rich, poor, black, white, bright, dumb, fat, thin, everybody else, all sitting in the same room, listening to one person proclaim one thing from one book. And that is why, of course, the response to it is, well, that couldn't

35:38 possibly be right. Feil, in addressing this, says, Preaching is a unifying activity, where the whole Christian body—preacher as well as hearers—come together to hear what the Lord is saying. What the Lord is saying. Speak, O Lord, as we come to you to receive the truth of your holy word. Take your truth—this is me before I preach, not just in the pew—take your truth, plant it deep in us, shape and fashion us in your likeness. Now, when the congregation comes together without expectation, the preaching then has to be expository—unfolding, applying the text, rather than using it as a trampoline to give a boost to our own speculations. When you preach in this way, it encourages people to read the Bible for themselves. It's effective not when people are entranced by the ingenuity of the speaker, but when they say, That's clear now. Why didn't I see it before? As more and more of the Bible is expounded, people grow not just in knowledge but in grace. Why? Because it is the Spirit himself, who takes the words on the page and by the preacher's faithful though imperfect words, leads us together to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the living Word.

37:17 Now, either we believe that or we don't believe it. And if we believe it, then it actually sets us down where we need to be, sets the Scriptures forward in the minds of all of us, and sets Jesus as the ultimate preacher. Today, if you hear his voice, don't harden your hearts. I always tell my congregation, you hear my voice. I got a squeaky little voice. There's nothing to my voice at all. I know you hear my voice, but did you hear the voice of Jesus? I heard the voice of Jesus say, Come unto me and rest. I heard the voice of Jesus say, I am this dark world's light. Look unto me, your morn shall rise, and all your days will bright. I came to Jesus as I was, weary and worn and sad, and I found in him a resting place, and he has made me glad. Because I heard a voice of Jesus. That's why it's the mystery when you preach. People tell you afterwards, you know, when you said such and such, I said, I never said such and such. I don't say that to them, I just nod. But I go away, and I said, I never, ever said that.

38:20 They heard something I never said. Well, hopefully it wasn't heresy, but it wasn't, Because what they heard was the Spirit of God applying the truth in their context to their situations. I could have said A, and they heard B. It's a mystery, isn't it? Well, I'm quoting from this. Yeah. Preaching also leads the church in a way that house groups and one-to-one studies, however excellent in themselves, cannot. You say, you got a thing about these studies, do you? No, I don't. I got a thing about preaching. I got a thing about you doing what you're doing. I want to encourage you to get at it, and with the help of the Spirit of God, get at it good, however excellent in themselves. By their very nature, groups are often led by those who do not have the time for the in-depth study of the Bible, which is essential to all true preaching. A strong pulpit ministry, as one of its beneficial effects, will produce people hungry to learn more, and this will express itself in the proliferation of groups eager to study together. This is excellent and to be encouraged. But if such groups begin to be seen as alternatives to the pulpit, then instead of unifying the body, they will cause the growth of cliques, places where the discontented can express their dissatisfaction with the ministry and where the Bible is no longer in the driving seat. It is essential that such groups are loyal to the pulpit ministry and want to help people to apply it to their lives. And preaching, further, can address the whole person in the way that a group study can't. Incidentally, one of his other things was you've got to find the melodic line in the text. You find the melodic line. What it means by that is the melodic line, which is… If Fingles gave, or whatever. Right. So, you can hear that. It's

40:30 gonna come back. I've forgotten music from school, but you got the thing, you got the recapitulation, and you got the Constitution and the justification, all those things. So, I think, for example, I think I wrote something like that down here. You can tell I told you I wasn't really prepared for this, because I didn't want to… Everything that you said, was that from the trellis and the vine? No. He was referencing the trellis and the vine. That did not come from the trellis and the vine. That was a guy commentating on—he was reacting to the heading in chapter 8 that it is—you can trade one off against the other. When you can find what I just said? Well, no, it was from 2011, and it was in a church magazine in Glasgow. But his name is Bob File, F-Y-A-L-L. He's retired, and he wrote it under the heading, How Shall We Hear Without a Preacher? And given the remarkable world in which we live now, I'm pretty sure AI will be able to find it for you, or fake it if he can find it for you. Yeah, I just wanted to say that one thing about the melodic line.

41:57 like. If I wrote a letter to my granddaughter and said, I will meet you at Camp of the Woods at 10 o'clock on Thursday. And in that letter to her, I also made comments about her cousins and about her aunt and her uncle and various other things.

42:30 Somebody could find that letter and be so interested in the cousins and the aunts and the uncles and the other extraneous details that were mentioned in it that they would actually missed the melodic line. The point was, I'll meet you at such-and-such on Thursday. And so, that then argues for the way in which we determine—like I did yesterday, I said, I don't want to get in dealing with these things. I'm not going to start on whether it was verse 9 or verse 10. I'm telling you that just so you know, but also because when we deal with texts like that. We've got a time frame, we've got a context, and we've got to determine how many of these stones we're going to pick up. Because if you start picking up them all, you know, the series becomes, you know, whatever. Yes, sorry. Sir?

43:24 basically, would you differentiate the approach of preaching on the pulpit versus maybe like publicly in the street evangelistically? Would your approach be similar or different? Oh, well, the context is different. Actually, I was just in—my wife and I were in Amsterdam, and I hadn't seen people preach in the street for a while, and there were guys out there in street chain. And actually, screeching might be better than preaching, but no, I mean, I…

44:04 Yeah, you've got to distinguish, because in that opportunity—and I did a lot of outdoor preaching when I was a student, as scary as all can be—but you're dealing with that. You've got to find somewhere a point of contact. But the didactic element of it, of conveying the truth of the gospel particularly, is still with the longing that beyond my squeaky voice, the voice of Christ might be heard. In that respect, it's the same. But the context is vastly different. Yeah. And we could also talk about evangelistic preaching, which there's not much of it in local churches because of the way in which people have decided arbitrarily that the church is just for us to be nurtured and admonished and encouraged, and evangelism is something that happens either in the evening or elsewhere. Packer says, you know, that if you preach the Bible, every sermon will at least tangentially be evangelistic. So that to draw a sharp divide between would not be good. Sorry, there was another hand. Yep!

45:30 How do you think through trying to gather the church for the union service versus small groups? How do you think through that? Is it in opposition? I would favor this, or are you doing this? Do this before you do that? Yeah. Well, I've lived through that one. And I was so stupid when I came to America, even dumber than I am now. And so, I just assumed that the way it was in Scotland was the way it should be here. And so, we always said a morning service and an evening service. But what I inherited was a context where if they had an evening service before me, it could have been held in the pastor's study. That's how few people there were. And so, I went about it in a different way, and I began to do an evening service that had a significant focus on the children in the congregation.

46:31 I was 31. The congregation was largely young. Tons and tons of young families. And so, I started there. I was still preaching, but I did a series with the children called What the Lord Jesus Means to Me. He's my advocate. He's the bread of life, and so on. and I said, Next Sunday will be the letter B. I want you to go home, talk to your mom and dad, and come back and bring it in. And then they all came up on the front, and we sat on the floor, and we read out the people's answers, and then we came up with the bread of life, or whatever it was. But in that context, what happened was that the young families then were engaged, and I was actually teaching the parents about who Jesus was as I was teaching the children. And so, we built the evening service out of that, largely. The addition of…

47:25 See, I wouldn't see any of these things in opposition to each other. I would see them all complementary, in the best of contexts. So, what he's saying here is, when you really have a good pulpit ministry, and your people are learning to love the Bible, read the Bible, want to convey the Bible, then it's perfectly understandable that they want to get together and be able to do it in that way. Then it becomes the issue of the Lord's Day. And what's fascinating to me is that although I've modeled what I modeled over 42 years, I think—Bob can correct me—but I don't think any one of the guys that has gone from us to a church plant actually has an evening service. Now, that doesn't matter if you're convinced that the Lord's Day ends at noon, because then, you know, you've got nothing. But if you have—I mean, if you talk to Sinclair Ferguson, he'll always say, when people ask me, tell me about your church, how many people come, I say to them, I'm only want to know how many people come to the evening service. And of course, that shuts the conversation down real fast, and it makes us all feel bad if we don't have an evening service. But, brother, context really matters—who you're dealing with, what the vibe is. There's nothing sacrosanct about the times of the services, right? But I always told the guys with me, I'd give up the morning service before I gave up the evening service. And that was partly because the evening service had a vibrancy to it that the morning didn't, because there's still a cultural cachet about morning services. It doesn't mean anything to the watching population that your car park is filled on Sunday mornings. What really begins to disturb them is when it's filled on Sunday nights. And now they want to know. So, why would you go twice? Why would you go twice? Didn't you get it fixed the first time? And we had guys in our church who came to faith in Christ from good backgrounds, you know, respectable people who believe that a good God, if he exists, will reward nice people

49:34 for doing their best. And when they became Christians, the thing that really triggered the animosity on the part of their families was the fact they went back to the evening service. Because what it said was, this really matters to us. And we don't want to overplay that, but, you know, if you go out there and play, if you get a tea time at 8 o'clock in the morning, and you're finished by 12, and you have lunch, and somebody says to you, another 18? What do you say? You don't say, are you kidding me? Do this again? You say, yeah, let's go. I love it. I want to do it again. Yes, sir. I love your series on 1 and 2 Samuel. Would you reflect on preaching narratives on Sunday mornings?

50:28 Oh, yeah. His brother's asking about what I did on 1 and 2 Samuel. The reason I did 1 and 2 Samuel was because one of the guys on my pastoral team, when we were in a transition, he said, Why don't you do 1 Samuel? And I said, I can't do 1 Samuel, because I don't understand the chronology. If you've done 1 and 2 Samuel—we were reading Kings this morning in Mary McShane, where Solomon's bumping off everybody, and David's finished. And he said, Well, you can figure it out. And so he laid the challenge down for me. So, when I said, The things that I found harder have often yielded more for me. Now, so I launched off, and I figured, when I get to the hard parts, I'll deal with it then, rather than map it out. So, I was following my nose in those things. And so, I was making fresh discoveries for myself, and I think that sense of freshness then came across to the congregation. So, they said, The pastor's learning, and we are learning. And part of my learning was because of John Woodhouse, who wrote the commentaries in 1 and 2 Samuel. My friend Christopher Ashe, when I was speaking to him on the phone, he said, What are you doing? I said, I just started 1 Samuel. He said, Do you have Woodhouse? I said, No. He said, Get Woodhouse. And so I got Woodhouse, and then basically this man called John Woodhouse just held my hand from Australia, which was okay, until he started to write to me and tell me that during COVID he was watching me And he says, I love what you're doing on 1 Samuel. Well, I had to phone the guy up and say, well, no wonder you love it. It's your stuff, for crying out loud.

52:23 And so I had the privilege of going preaching in Sydney with him, and I had him come, and he spoke at basics, and I wanted him to come, because I wanted to tell the congregation, Here's the answer to 1 and 2 Samuel. It wasn't plagiarism. It was his unashamed dependence upon his ability to work his way through. And in a very gracious act, he just dedicated his second volume on kings to me, thanking me for my friendship and for always reminding him that the main things are the plain things and the play which was a very lovely gesture on his part made me weep when I got it yeah oh sorry sir What is the column melody, or how do you find it?

53:21 Oh, yeah, on the—how do you find the melody? Yeah. What is it? Yeah, well, it's basically—what is, if you like—well, let's take John 14. What is the melody line in John 14? It's not about the death of a Christian. It's about the departure of Jesus and the promise of his return. That's really the melody line. The fact that we preach about, you know, when you die, it's okay because Jesus said that. That's not it. If we take—how could you come here without your Bible? If you take—let's take 1 Corinthians 15. What is 1 Corinthians 15? I think it is—if you get verse 1, what is verse 1 of 1 Corinthians 15?

54:15 There you go. I want to remind you of the gospel of which you have received and on which you have taken your stand. Now, then we have all of 1 Corinthians 15. And then it goes to verse 58. Be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, inasmuch you know that your labor on the board is not in vain. Why? Because what he's been on about is the unfolding, the part of the text, the melody line, if you like, runs from verse 1 right through to verse 58. That's the kind of thing. There's no magic in it, brother. Nobody knows what it is. You can tell them, you know. But John's thought, like nobody else I've ever encountered, is masterful at threading the needle through the text. People would say, but he didn't do it this way because he didn't say, verse 1 says this, verse 2 says this, verse 3 says this. No, his exposition was actually better than that. And he had the capacity to find that line and to do it in such a way that no matter what you're reading of start, If you read it before you preach it, I guarantee you, you'll say to yourself, I don't think there's a better way to explain this text than he has just done, because he was so effective at establishing what the melody line was that ran through the text.

55:58 Why is it important for pastors to be well-read? I think it is fundamentally important. And I always say to fellows, you know, the joke that I have about the Chuck Swindoll Book of Illustrations, have you heard that, where I said, get rid of that book? Because he used to give it away like our boys doing here, like, if you win a prize, you get a Chuck Swindoll book of illustrations. I said, give it away. Give it to your mother. And they think, oh, he doesn't like Chuck Swindoll. I do like Chuck Swindoll. I think those illustrations are fantastic. But guess what? They're Chuck Swindoll's. They're not yours. So, the breadth of your reading is going to contribute? How could I give you that quote from Cicero? Now, if I found that Cicero quote in Chuck Swindoll's thing, then I couldn't do that. That's not mine. Once in a while, I've tried like a baseball illustration. I don't know squat about baseball. And as soon as I get started on it? It's like… And the people are like, What's going on there? I say, Well, I don't know what I'm talking about. And in my head, I'm going, You shouldn't have tried that. Don't try that.

57:32 To your own self be true. You won't hear me giving talks on… You won't be using illustrations from pi r squared or 2 pi r or the periodic table of the elements, because I flunked all that stuff. I don't know what that stuff is. I never cared at the time, and I care even less now. But I listen to other people, and they're able to give these illustrations, because that's the world in which they live. If you're an engineer by background, you're going to approach it very differently from somebody like me, because I've got guys on my pastoral team, one who's in one of the church plants. He was an engineer. His progression through the text is masterful. I can't do it. He's linear in his thinking. And his linear thinking comes out. He's true to himself. If I try to sound linear in my thinking, and people say, What are you talking about? You're over here, you're over there, you went up there, you don't know where you are right now. Exactly. To your own self be true. But I guarantee you, reading is the key to speaking. And the reading of the Bible, incidentally—if I make one final plea for the reading of the Bible—it is very troublesome to me when I hear pastors reading the Bible in such a fashion that they don't actually believe in the perspicuity of Scripture. So, when you are following along with them, they read it poorly. Well, why would you read it poorly? Why would you read it casually?

59:04 It says, Judge not, and you will not be judged. Condemn not, and you will not be condemned. And because they never practiced, or whatever it is, it comes out as, Judge not, and you will not be judged. Practice in your bedroom. Don't stand up and do that here. And the same way when you preach. Don't subject me to the fact that you're working through the text, and you say, Well, I suppose there's another way of saying it. I'm sitting listening, and I'm going, Please don't say it. Why? Because if there's another way of saying it, that's what you should have said the first time. And you should have figured out the other way of saying it before you stood up here to say it. That's what preparation's called. Don't subject me to your sermon prep while you're preaching. Do the prep. If you need to write it out in full, write it out in full. Especially where syntax is hard to come by, especially where phraseology is difficult. Master it! Get it down! That's what happens in every other discipline of life.

1:00:16 One of my pilots is here—now, I know that I have a pilot, but I call him my pilot—but But those jokers, you see them. It's pouring rain. They got an umbrella, and they're walking around the airplane underneath. I'm like, what are you looking for under there? That's the vice captain, not the big captain. He doesn't do that. He sends the other guy out. They're doing the thing down there so that they don't have chaos up there. You know, I want to hear—you know, So, people say, How is your pastor? Is he good at preaching? No. But he's a really nice man. He's a really nice man. Well, isn't that good? Yeah. How's your pilot? Is he any good at flying? No. He's a really nice man. When he comes on, he says, there is every likelihood that we will not crash. I think we have to stop, right? Sorry. Because they got the Chick-fil-A or whatever it is.

1:01:17 Hey, brethren, thanks for your patience. You can tell, look, here I am, 74 years old, and when I told you this gets harder, not easier, that's not to discourage you. That's to encourage you never to give up. Our reach always exceeds our grasp. What we're trying to get to is further out than what we get to. And it's some mystery. Lord, we thank you that you choose to put your treasure in old clay pots so that the transcendent power will be so obvious belonging to you. Thank you for each other. Lord, we want to exhort and encourage one another. Anything that I've said that's unkind, untrue, unhelpful, or unwise, banish it from our recollection, we pray. And if there's that which sets forward your purposes, then we want to take it as from you, and we pray that we will always be a help and never a hindrance to each other as we seek to follow Christ in the