John H April 20th, 2008
Our pastor preached a cracking sermon this morning on 1 Peter 4:1-6. It’s worth listening just for his explanation of what Peter means by saying “whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin”. (Here are three clues: (1) it’s much the same as what Paul is saying in Romans 6:3-6; (2) involves water; (3) begins with “B”. 
).
Listen using the player below, or click here to download the MP3.
John H September 26th, 2007
As a follow-up to my posts on John Stott’s farewell sermon (1 | 2), my wife was talking to some friends of ours today whose pastor was at this year’s Keswick Convention, and who described how Stott ended his sermon.
At the conclusion of his sermon, Stott asked everyone to bow their heads for a few moments of silent prayer. Everyone did so, and when they lifted up their heads again and opened their eyes – the stage was empty.
No rousing send-off, no applause, no presentations of flowers – nothing, in short, to distract attention from the Christ whom Stott has proclaimed so effectively, and with such modesty and humility, for so long.
While we’re on this subject, a recording of Stott’s Keswick sermon can be downloaded as an MP3 for £3 here. Even better, the All Souls Langham Place website’s sermon archive contains hundreds of recordings of Stott’s sermons from the mid-60s onwards, available free-of-charge (though with free registration required).
Searching through the sermons is not for the faint-hearted – a better search facility wouldn’t hurt – but there’s a lifetime’s-worth of great preaching there. You could do worse than start with his 1971 series of sermons on Ephesians, which I’m currently working my way through.
(Note: you may find, as I have, that the All Souls MP3s don’t work very well. You’ll need to make sure you save them with a .mp3 extension (rather than “.kont”, whatever that is) and then use a program like Audacity to import them and re-export them as new MP3 files. Very frustrating, but worth the effort.)
John H September 22nd, 2007
In my previous post, we saw how John Stott’s final message to the church he has served for so long is: “Be Christlike!” In the final section of his sermon at this year’s Keswick Convention, Stott looks at “three practical consequences of Christlikeness”.
First, Christlikeness and the mystery of suffering. Stott observes that of all the ways in which Christians try to understand suffering, “one way stands out”:
…that suffering is part of God’s process of making us like Christ. Whether we suffer from a disappointment, a frustration or some other painful tragedy, we need to try to see this in the light of Romans 8:28-29. According to Romans 8:28, God is always working for the good of his people, and according to Romans 8:29, this good purpose is to make us like Christ.
Second, Christlikeness and the challenge of evangelism. Why do our evangelistic efforts so often seem to fail? Stott suggests that “one main reason is that we don’t look like the Christ we are proclaiming”:
There was a Hindu professor in India who once identified one of his students as a Christian and said to him: “If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at your feet tomorrow.” I think India would be at their feet today if we Christians lived like Christ.
From the Islamic world, the Reverend Iskandar Jadeed, a former Arab Muslim, has said “If all Christians were Christians – that is, Christlike – there would be no more Islam today.”
Finally, Christlikeness and the indwelling of the Spirit. It’s all very well saying we have to be Christlike, “but is it attainable?” As Stott goes on to remind us:
In our own strength it is clearly not attainable but God has given us his Holy Spirit to dwell within us, to change us from within.
And (having already quoted Michael Ramsay), Stott cites another former archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who used an analogy from Shakespeare:
“It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear and telling me to write a play like that. Shakespeare could do it – I can’t. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like that. Jesus could do it – I can’t. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could write plays like this. And if the Spirit could come into me, then I could live a life like His.”
Stott then concludes his sermon with the following words, which could also function as a summary of what he has preached during his sixty years of ministry:
So I conclude, as a brief summary of what we have tried to say to one another: God’s purpose is to make us like Christ. God’s way to make us like Christ is to fill us with his Spirit. In other words, it is a Trinitarian conclusion, concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
And all the people said: Amen!
John H September 22nd, 2007
I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth…
When a saint and servant of Christ like John Stott says something like that, you sit up and take notice, especially when the words come from his final sermon. Dr Stott finally retired, after sixty years of ordained ministry, at this year’s Keswick Convention, with a sermon entitled The model – becoming more like Christ. It’s a sermon that shows why Stott has been such a blessing to the church over the past six decades, and why he will be sorely missed.
Stott begins by considering a question which “perplexed” him as a younger Christian: “what is God’s purpose for His people?” He considers the answer given by the Westminster Shorter Catechism (“to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever”) and briefer statements such as “love God, love your neighbour”, but declares none of these to be “wholly satisfactory”. He continues:
So I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth and it is – God wants His people to become like Christ. Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God.
Stott identifies three biblical texts which underline Christlikeness as God’s past, present and future will for his people: Romans 8:29 (God “predestined [us] to be conformed to the image of his Son”), 2 Corinthians 3:18 (we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”) and 1 John 3:2 (“when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is”).
“[I]f we claim to be a Christian, we must be Christlike,” Stott concludes, citing 1 John 2:6, before going on to look at five ways in which we are to be like Christ:
Paul is urging us to be like the Christ of the Incarnation, to be like the Christ of the foot washing and to be like the Christ of the cross. These three events of the life of Christ indicate clearly what Christlikeness means in practice.
Every chapter of the first letter of Peter contains an allusion to our suffering like Christ … This call to Christlikeness in suffering unjustly may well become increasingly relevant as persecution increases in many cultures in the world today.
“We state and commend the faith only in so far as we go out and put ourselves with loving sympathy inside the doubts of the doubters, the questions of the questioners and the loneliness of those who have lost the way.“
Hence “All authentic mission is incarnational mission” (a statement that will raise hackles in some quarters, and I suspect Stott well knows it).
Stott concludes his sermon by looking at “three practical consequences of Christlikeness”, which I hope to look at in a separate post.
John H June 9th, 2007
In my previous post, I described how David Jenkins (in his 1956 sermon, “There is no God”) proposes two questions that we can ask ourselves as those who worship God, rather than as outside observers of the phenomenon of worship, in response to the atheist’s cry that “There is no God!” (This is reminiscent of CS Lewis’ distinction between “looking at” and “looking along”.)
The first of these is this: “Can we really do without that to which such notions as perfection, transcendence and worshipfulness point?” Jenkins expands on this as follows:
Not merely, “Can we do without as pieces of mental furniture?” Very likely we can. Certainly we can for good stretches of time. But can we rigorously and absolutely exclude from every element of our being, activity and thought all suggestion that there is “more than” the sum total of other selves like us, the sum total of natural phenomena like those known to us, the sum total of the dialectic of history as it is described to us by the secular historian and so on? …
Or is there in worship an activity of response as well as, or even rather than, an activity of creation and self-projection? Can we believe that perfection, that the dimension of transcendence wherein lies the worshipful, is a mere notion?
Jenkins describes his second question as “perhaps the reverse of the first”:
Why does atheism have to be justified, and why does doubt about God’s existence have such penetrating and anguished quality? Is it because God is not a being like other beings, not in the sense that God does not exist, but rather in the sense that God is the one being whose existence cannot be a matter of indifference? That is, is it because God is the one being upon whom all beings depend?
It might, therefore, be one of the signs of God in human intellect is precisely the peculiarly intensive quality of the doubt that arises about God’s existence and the need to assert atheism rather than to treat the whole issue of God’s existence as “not a proper question”.
Not that Jenkins expects these to be knock-down arguments that atheists will find persuasive. As he concludes:
These signs, however, real as I believe them to be, are not proofs but pointers, not substantiations but signs whose true significance can be evoked only by the witness of the Christian church and the proclaiming of the word of God.
None the less, they remain as constantly fretting signs that we are made by the transcendent God for the transcendent God and that our folly is to say “There is no God”, while our joy and peace comes as in worship we confess God as “the one who is” and as “God of gods and Lord of lords”.
John H June 9th, 2007
No, don’t get excited, not that bishop of Durham.
While NT Wright is a major figure in world Christianity, for anyone aged over 35 or so here in Britain, the phrase “bishop of Durham” is still likely to conjure up images of Wright’s 1980s predecessor, David Jenkins. Jenkins became notorious for his apparent dismissal of the traditional view of the resurrection as “just a conjuring trick with bones”, which delighted news editors everywhere, since an “unbelieving” bishop provides so much better copy than the regular old “believing” kind.
Long before Jenkins became bishop of Durham, he preached a sermon entitled “There is no God”. This title might appear to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about him, but in fact he provides a fresh and illuminating perspective on atheism and the question of God’s existence. I have not been able to find a copy online, and the book from which it is taken is now out of print, but if anyone interested is in reading it then please email me or request it in the comments and I can send you a PDF.
Jenkins opens his sermon, preached in 1956, as follows:
“There is no God.” Is it only the fool who says there is no God? Surely the declaration of atheism has been made by some of the most sensitive, the most passionate and the most serious of human beings.
Indeed, following a discussion of philosophical issues such as the ontological argument, Jenkins continues:
If you have not sensed the strength of the arguments for atheism, it is more than probable that you have not really sensed what we mean when we say we believe in God.
The heart of Jenkins’ sermon is his summary of the various ways in which people have declared “there is no God”: as “a cry nearly of despair”, as an “exultant cry of freedom” or as “a sober statement of fact”:
“There is no God.” A despairing cry: how can perfection exist when perfection means that which is beyond anything now known to exist, that which is beyond our strivings, that which our very strivings testify does not exist? “There is no God.”
“There is no God.” An exultant cry: we are not shut in by any conception, any scheme or any pattern already existing … We are free. “There is no God.”
“There is no God.” A sober statement of fact: we must be content with what we can observe, measure and see … There can be no evidence for that which goes beyond the evidence. “There is no God.”
Not all atheists will share all three of these emphases (my own youthful atheism was a combination of the second and third approaches, as is that of Richard Dawkins). But all will agree on the conclusion: “worship is a mistake … ‘God’ is a mental construction.”
Jenkins acknowledges that there is “no logical step, no proof, from the fact that we conceive of God to the fact that God exists“:
The only thing that the observable fact that a very large number of human beings worship God goes to prove is that a very large number of human beings indulge in a practice called worship.
However, Jenkins then goes on to consider “two questions which we can ask ourselves“, looking at the issue “not as outside observers of the phenomenon [of worship] … but as people who are ourselves part of the evidence which we observe”. I will go on to look at these in my next post.
John H April 16th, 2007
They say that the sign of a good sermon is that you come away thinking how good the preacher is, but that the sign of a great sermon is that you come away thinking how great a Saviour Jesus is. Well, by that test, here (after the fold) is one great sermon:
John H March 21st, 2007
I mentioned in my last post the sermon I heard some years ago by Roy Clements, in which he preached on the whole of Matthew 25 one evening at Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge (D.S. Ketelby was also there, and may be able to correct my recollections of the evening!).
This was classic Roy: lucid, expository, persuasive and unforgettable. None of those qualities are lost by anything that might have happened later (we’re not Donatists round here, after all…). There is certainly more to Matthew 25 than he preached that night, but I don’t think his overall framework, his presentation of what Dick Lucas would call the “melodic line” of the chapter, can be bettered. In the following summary, the usual disclaimers apply: any weaknesses are the result of my fading recollections of a sermon I heard a good twelve years ago, and not the fault of Clements himself.
Matthew 25 follows on from Jesus’ discourse in chapter 24, where he has been teaching of “the sign of [his] coming and of the end of the age”. I assume Clements would take the usual conservative evangelical position (which I share) of saying this chapter speaks both of the events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem in the first century AD, and the second coming of Christ at the end of the age (even if the precise division between the two is not always easy to identify).
This then raises the question of what the disciples are to do while waiting for “that day and hour”. This is the question that the three parables in chapter 25 answer, as follows:
This story depicts a basic division: there are those who are ready for Christ’s return, and there are those who are caught unawares and end up being locked out of the “wedding banquet”.
However, the wise and the foolish bridesmaids all fall asleep in the parable. So taken on its own, this parable could be seen as implying that all you need to be a “wise” bridesmaid is to get yourself ready (lamp-oil to hand) and then you can snooze your way through life with little apparent difference from the “foolish” ones around you. Hence the second parable.
This parable corrects the potential misunderstanding of the preceding story by showing that the life we live while waiting for our master to come and settle accounts with us is not one in which we are to be drowsy and asleep. Rather, we are about our father’s business, doing those good works that flow from the faith that is given to us. I’m pretty sure this is the sermon where I first heard the old line that “we are saved by faith alone, but saving faith is never alone”.
So we now know we are to be prepared, and we know that this preparedness manifests itself in action rather than drowsy indolence. But another misunderstanding can now arise, as we suppose that generalised busyness – or even worse, the pursuit of financial gain (see those talents double!) – are what Jesus has in mind here. Which brings us to the third and final parable.
This parable shows the nature of the works that we are to be about as we wait for the Lord’s return. Not simply “using our talents” or seeking personal gain, but serving Christ as we encounter him in others. (I’m pretty sure Clements took the view that “brothers” here is restricted to Christians; I’m undecided on this.)
[As a separate point (i.e. we're not in Cambridge any more, Toto), it is worth bringing in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's emphasis that this parable is teaching gospel rather than law. The crucial thing about the works described in vv35 and 36 is that the saints are unconscious of these works. These are not works that we ourselves do under our own steam or by our own conscious decision: they are the works that Christ does in and through us, that will astonish us when they are revealed to us at the end of the age. It's easy for us to miss the point that most of the sheep - us! - will already know this parable. Hence it cannot be referring to a "tick-box" approach of deliberately-chosen, self-motivated good works - feeding the hungry, visiting those in prison, etc. - but rather to unconscious works of which we are currently unaware.]
So there, in very brief outline, is the argument of Roy Clements’ sermon on this chapter. I hope it goes some way towards communicating the “melodic line” of the chapter as described by Clements: we are to be ready; we are to be active; and those activities are to be directed towards serving others. A lot more can be said, and needs to be said, about each of those parables, but that basic framework still strikes me as sound.
John H February 11th, 2007
Our pastor’s sermon this week (delivered by one of the elders, as our pastor is on holiday) was based on 1 Corinthians 13:1-7. As with Dick Lucas’ definitive sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, our pastor was keen to stress that this is not a cuddly “hymn to love”, but was instead aimed directly at the Corinthians’ chief failings as expanded on elsewhere in the letter. As Lucas puts it:
No girl in Corinth wrote to the apostle with the request that he speak at her wedding when next he came by, on the grounds that he wrote so marvellously about ‘love’; if she wrote at all it would be to warn Paul about the angry and resentful reception he might expect from the elders as a result of his plain speaking.
For example, in verse 1, Paul compares speaking in tongues – very popular among the Corinthians – with the “clanging cymbals” used in pagan worship. In other words, as our pastor put it:
Paul takes [the Corinthians] back to their days of pagan idolatry to show them that speaking in tongues without the love of Christ behind it is as useless as pagans worshipping idols. Ouch.
But our pastor is never happier than when he is disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed, and he obviously felt the need of the former at this point in the sermon:
We must be careful here, because I think we can often come down too heavily on the Corinthians. Speaking in tongues is not an issue among us. But perhaps a bit of modern updating for Lutherans might do the trick.
He then goes on to offer the following rewrite of verses 1 to 3 for contemporary Lutherans (I’ve adapted this slightly to fit in more closely with the ESV text):
If I preach, teach and confess the true, unadulterated Word of God as expounded by the 1580 Book of Concord, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have The Lutheran Hymnal and, understand the proper distinction of Law and Gospel, and if I know that I am justified by grace alone, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give £x a week to the church, and occasionally show up to services, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Spot on. As our pastor went on to say:
Often, Lutherans take pride in their wonderful heritage and begin to sound a bit like the Corinthians with their tongue-speaking. That, I think, is a pretty close equivalent to what Paul was saying to the Corinthians.
He stressed that this is not to say that the Bible, the Lutheran Confessions, the liturgy, Law and Gospel etc are not “vitally important”, any more than Paul was devaluing spiritual gifts:
[H]e just wanted [the Corinthians] to use them correctly: in love. So it is with us. We use the Bibles, the Confessions, the liturgy, our stewardship in love to God and in service to one another.
To listen to the sermon, click here, or click here to download it (MP3). As mentioned before, it is not our pastor you will here, as he is on holiday. But that’s quite authentic in itself: after all, Paul’s letter would have been read out to the Corinthians by somebody else!
John H May 14th, 2004
I mentioned to a commenter (correction: on a comment on Andy Bartus’ blog) that I would try to post Dick Lucas’s exposition of 1 Corinthians 13; saying this more in hope than in expectation of finding a copy on the web. But now, thanks to the miracle of Google, here it is.
Lucas points out that 1 Corinthians 13 is a much-abused passage, almost invariably ripped out of its context in 1 Cor 12-14 and taken as a free-floating “hymn to love”. In fact, St Paul’s purpose in writing the chapter was a lot more pointed, as Lucas demonstrates in this exposition (which is worth printing out and reading carefully, with the text to hand). Lucas uses this as an illustration of why preaching is so necessary, as without explanation people are liable to misinterpret and misuse even (or especially?) a key chapter like 1 Corinthians 13.
As Lucas points out:
No girl in Corinth wrote to the apostle with the request that he speak at her wedding when next he came by, on the grounds that he wrote so marvellously about ‘love’; if she wrote at all it would be to warn Paul about the angry and resentful reception he might expect from the elders as a result of his plain speaking.
For those of you who have never heard of Dick Lucas, he was for many years the minister at St Helen’s Bishopgate, a large conservative evangelical Anglican church in the City of London. He was also one of the founders of Proclamation Trust, which has probably done more than any other organisation in the UK to promote sound expository preaching.
Now in his late 70s, he is continuing to travel around speaking at churches and preaching conferences, with a real desire to pass on to younger generations of ministers his passion for expository biblical preaching. He is easily the best preacher I’ve ever heard, and he also has a rather acerbic and biting wit, which makes him engaging, if not always relaxing, company.
One of my favourite Dick Lucas comments comes from when he preached at our last church a couple of years ago. He announced the text – 1 Timothy something-or-other – and said, “I’m not going to tell you the page number. The Bible is the most important book in the world, and if you don’t know your way round it then you should do.” That’s the spirit!
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Wandering Hedgehog
