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by
John Piper
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April 21 - May 17, 2020
Barclay’s Autobiography
can’t help wondering whether the theological weakness of many pulpits today is owing to the facile dependence on the anemic, unbiblical theology of commentators like Barclay.
Carl Lundquist, the former president of Bethel College and Seminary.
Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.
Paul wrote with wisdom “given to him,” and Peter means wisdom given by God (as 1 Cor. 2:13 says).
Psalm 119:18, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.”
By inspiring some things hard to understand, God has unleashed in the world desperation which leads to supplication—the crying out to God for help.
Yes, it is the Lord who gives understanding. But He does it through our God-given thinking and the efforts we make, with prayer, to think hard about what the Bible says.
Or, more accurately, education is helping people (young or old) learn how to get an understanding that they didn’t already have.
The emotional quality. The affectional tenor. The mood.
“Pursue the tone of the text. But let it be informed, not muted, by the tonal balance of Jesus and the apostles and by the gospel of grace.”
This means that the preacher will know how to honor the local tone of the text and the way that tone sounds echoing in the vicinity of other texts.
Marinating your mind in all of Scripture and basting your brain with the ladle of prayer will enable the tender to sound more appropriately tough and the tough to sound more appropriately tender—depending on the text.
In the end, when a preacher expresses a fitting tone, it is the work of God;
Shape the tone by the gospel climax. Shape it by the tonal balance of Jesus and the apostles. But don’t let it be muted.
What is at stake on Sunday morning is not merely the upbuilding of the church, but its eternal salvation.
Therefore, since preaching and the pastoral ministry in general are a great means to the saints’ perseverance, the goal of a pastor is not merely to edify the saints but to save the saints.
“Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim. 4:16).
We as pastor needs to watch over ourselves and our teaching. We must not focus so much on our teaching and yet allow our lives to be anything less than perfect for God. This is not only necessary for ourselves but also for our hearers. If we can't save ourselves from the temptation and the evil one, we definitely can't give our hearers what is needed.
Our salvation and the salvation of those who hear us week after week depend in large measure on our faithful attention to personal holiness and sound teaching.
The salvation of the elect is not automatic.
The Corinthian believers had fallen into sin.
The eternal life of the elect hangs on the effectiveness of pastoral labors.
“destroy” (apollumi).
is destroyed, he is lost.
What is at stake in pastoral admonition and in preaching is not merely the church’s progress in sanctification but its perseverance in final salvation.
We must remember this: there is no standing still in the Christian life. Either we are advancing toward salvation, or we are drifting away to destruction.
“Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” (Heb. 2:1).
So I say again, the way to save yourself and your hearers (1 Tim. 4:16) is not to arrest the growth of your people by a meatless diet of “salvation messages.”
The way to save the saints is to feed them all the Scriptures, for it is the Scriptures “which are able to make you wise for salvation” (2 Tim. 3:15).
For eternity is at stake every week.
When the heart no longer feels the truth of hell, the gospel passes from good news to just news. The intensity of joy is blunted and the heart-spring of love is dried up.
When we don't take the seriousness of sins as real, we will no longer feel the need to reach out to others.
We take a megaton of truth upon our lips and speak it with an ounce of passion. Do we believe in our hearts what we espouse with our lips?
Sometimes there is a disconnect between the heart and words.
ever. “These will go away into eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:46). Even if I try to make the “lake of fire” (Rev. 20:15) or the “fiery furnace” (Matt. 13:42) a symbol,
The Bible speak of Hell.
I was a son of hell (Matt. 23:15), a child of the devil (John 8:44) and of wrath (Eph. 2:3).
I must feel the truth that God’s wrath was on my head (John 3:36); His face was against me (Ps. 34:16); He hated me in my sins (Ps. 5:5); His curse and fury were my portion (Gal. 3:10).
Scripture, remember, remember, remember the horrid condition of being separated from Christ, without hope and without God, on the brink of hell.
“Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).
When the heart no longer feels the truth of hell, the gospel passes from good news to simply news. The intensity of joy is blunted, and the heartspring of love is dried up.
broken, leaping heart will love like Jesus. And the power of the love will be proportionate to the felt fearfulness of our nearness to destruction.
Brothers, we need to feel the truth of hell and the nearness of our own escape. Otherwise the gospel will be vapid, and we will be unable to count others better than ourselves in all lowliness (Phil. 2:3).
The most powerful and painful acts of radical obedience, beginning with remorse for sin, must be motivated by an awakened taste for pleasure in God.
Repentance includes remorse for inward corruption and sin.
But part of that change of mind is remorse for failure to love God and be holy.
The reason this is so crucial is that Jesus said people see our good deeds and give glory to our Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16).
“For your name’s sake you lead me and guide me” (Ps. 31:3).
So we preach for radical obedience precisely out of a passion for the supremacy of God in our people and our world. Without this kind of obedience, the glory of God scarcely shines forth at all from the church in the world.
“But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’
For crying and contrition to be real and evangelical, it must come from the brokenhearted feelings you have for lacking a life of joy in God, not just from the fearful feelings of being threatened with pain.
So the discovery I made was that true remorse and contrition and repentance are born from falling in love with all that God is for us in Jesus.
Between the first and second editions of this book, I took an eight-month leave of absence from my pastoral duties.
