Jesus is the Word of God
Here are some more Revelation sermons I've preached recently.
Revelation 13-14 (recorded afterwards at home)
I'm preaching the last four chapters in the next month (So all you pre and post millers have about a week to convince me before I preach chapter 20!)
Preached on money on Sunday. Here's the sermon - Matt 6:19-24 was the text.
Here are some other sermons on money that have helped me. Check them out, but be warned:
These sermons could seriously harm your wealth (i.e. your earthly treasure !)
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Mark Prentice on Matt 6:19-24 (seriously awesome)
John Piper on Matthew 6:19-34 - part one and part two.
Tim Keller on Radical Generosity (2 Cor 9:6-15), Treasure vs Money (Matt 6:19-34), Grace and Money (Acts 4:32-37), Two Men with Money (2 Kings 5:13-19; Luke 19:5-10)
Anything by KP Yohannan (Update: links now work!). Why not start with Christ's Call part one and part two. Or how about Investing Your Life in the Harvest part one and part two
And once convicted - why not give to Gospel for Asia. I dare you to find a better kingdom investment!
Download this sermon. Close your eyes, raise your hands and worship the ascended King of Glory!
By the way if I die, I want all my blogroll entries to be replaced by Dev's blog - it's brilliant stuff. Go check it out.
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He began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." (Matt 26:37-38)
He fell with His face to the ground and prayed. (Matt 26:39)
"Abba, Father," He said, "everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will." (Mark 14:36)
Being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. (Luke 22:44)
During the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death (Heb 5:7)
"My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done." (Matt 26:42)
Perhaps no bible story has had more impact on me than the account of Jesus praying in Gethsemane. It haunted my teenage years especially. It said to me: 'This is what honouring God looks like. This is the epitome of religious devotion - overwhelmed to complete prostration, loud cries and tears, commitment to the point of death.' And I attempted to emulate this. Not in practical, daily 'thy will be done' service - no, no! Instead I would attempt to re-enact Gethsemane. I'd sneak out of the house at night and find somewhere really scary - a forest in dead of night was best. And I would literally fall on my face and ask God to take my life, to make me His servant, to do whatever He wished with me. (Of course I imagined that His wishes would be awful, dark and painful). Nonetheless Gethsemane had taught me that this was the way and so I'd try (unsuccessfully) to work myself up into some kind of hyper-serious state of emotional sincerity. I was massively aware that I was falling short of offering the required... what? devotion? gravity? sacrifice? Whatever was needed, I was painfully aware of lacking it. But I made my dramatic teenage offering and waited for the results. But no angel came to comfort me. No spiritul blessing was poured out. No command from heaven. Just an overwhelming sense that heaven was silent and my devotion was clearly not sufficient to rouse Him.
And, over time, my response to this was 'God doesn't want me, I don't want Him.' I wandered from Him for years. But it was Gethsemane that brought me back. Because all of a sudden I saw what should have been most clear all along. I'm not at the centre of Gethsemane! I'm sleeping with Peter, James and John. I'm the weak, flesh-driven, good-for-nothing follower who cannot stay awake even for one hour. But Christ! He prays to the Father. He intercedes for His worthless, pathetic friends. He offers to drink their cup. And suddenly it all fell into place. Christianity was not about me burying my face in the dirt for Him. He buried His face in the dirt for me. It's not about me stooping low enough to be worthy. It's about Him stooping lower still because I'm not. I don't offer my life to a silent heaven. The Man of heaven offers His life for a silent, sleeping, sinful me.
Gethsemane is good news. There's so much more to be said. But perhaps it's said best by my favourite preacher on this my favourite passage: Click here for Mike Reeves on Gethsemane. Well worth the free registration! Check it out.
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Today I listened to this talk by Robert Reymond addressed to men in the ministry. If you are a minister of the word, listen and be humbled. If you know a minister of the word, listen and learn how to pray for them.
The talk finishes after 47 minutes, the Q&A afterwards isn't particularaly illuminating, but that 3/4 of an hour is holy fire! Now I know I've spoken against completely identifying holiness with 'the quiet time' and there's a bit of that here, but do yourself a favour and listen in.
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Some wonderful quotes which he used:
Robert Murray McCheyne on the congregation's greatest need:
My people's greatest need is my own personal holiness.
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A prayer of Luther's:
Lord God, You have appointed me as a Bishop and Pastor in Your Church, but you see how unsuited I am to meet so great and difficult a task. If I had lacked Your help, I would have ruined everything long ago. Therefore, I call upon You: I wish to devote my mouth and my heart to you; I shall teach the people. I myself will learn and ponder diligently upon You Word. Use me as Your instrument -- but do not forsake me, for if ever I should be on my own, I would easily wreck it all.
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John Newton on the terrible dangers of pride:
While human nature remains in its present state there will be almost the same connection between popularity and pride, as between fire and gunpowder: they cannot meet without an explosion, at least not unless the gunpowder is kept very damp.
This never made it into my sermon 'Why the Cross?' It's a side thought raised by the question why God doesn't simply forgive us...
Forgiveness is always costly. Whenever people say ‘Why doesn't God simply forgive?' I often wonder what they mean by the word ‘simply'. Anyone who says forgiveness is simple has clearly never tried it. Forgiveness is always painful, costly, messy, heart-wrenching. Forgiveness always involves sacrifice.
Look at this verse from Proverbs:
Proverbs 15:1 A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.
Have you ever been in an argument where you're exchanging harsh words with another. And, as this verse describes it, anger is being stirred up and stirred up and stirred up. In that situation what is it like to answer a person with genuine gentleness? They speak harsh words to you - what's it like to answer with gentleness. It is painful, it is hard, it is a sacrifice. It is not just water off a duck's back. It's not a simple matter of forgiving and forgetting - it involves sacrifice.
And this proverb describes it is as a sacrifice. You see the phrase ‘turns away wrath' is a special phrase in the bible that's almost always associated with sacrifices. It's sacrifices that turn away wrath - anger is turned away from you because it's turned on the sacrifice. And this verse says: if you're in an argument and you answer someone gently it's like being a human sacrifice. If we've ever tried it, we know that's how it feels. Forgiveness is always sacrificial.
And nowhere is this more true than at the cross. In the bible, the cross is described as the place where Jesus turns away God's wrath. At the cross the wrath of God is turned away from us and turned onto Jesus. So think of the cross as the place where all our harsh words against heaven are met by the gentle answer of Jesus. His grace heals and restores us but it's costly to Him. The cross is the costly, sacrificial forgiveness of God. But there really is no forgiveness that's not sacrificial.
Think of it from another angle. When Jesus tells us to pray ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us' the prayer literally is ‘forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.' Our sins are like debts. Now if you cancel someone's debt - that's great for them. But the debt doesn't just vanish. There's still a cost - it just means that now you bear the cost, rather than them. It still hurts, it's still costly, it's still sacrificial to forgive.
So again, think of the cross as the place where all our debts to God are cancelled - it's wonderful for us. It's massively costly to God - He absorbs the debt, He makes Himself liable, He pays off our arrears. That's the cross. It is free and full forgiveness for us, but it is a costly, sacrificial forgiveness, for God. Because all forgiveness is sacrificial.
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I posted recently on the importance of trusting the Son of God in hard times, not simply the sovereignty of God. These thoughts have arisen again as I've been preaching on Revelation 4 and 5 recently. It's pause for thought to see John weeping aloud in the very throne room of God! (Rev 5:4) Heaven without Christ is hell!
Good thing the elder in heaven didn't comfort the way we ordinarily do... "Do not weep, haven't you seen the throne? It is very impressive isn't it?" John has seen the throne. He is weeping in the face of it! No the comfort for John is the Lion-Lamb - Christ. He is the One who turns weeping into cosmic praise. Let's make sure our comfort is similarly Christ-focused.
Here are my sermons on Revelation 4 and Revelation 5 if you're interested.
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I'm preaching on Revelation 5 on Sunday. Really looking forward to it. I've taken the opportunity to read Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon on Christ as the Lion and the Lamb: "The Excellency of Christ." In it his thesis is that the Lion-ness and Lamb-ness of Jesus represent...
"...an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ."
I enjoyed much of the sermon.
I was also dis-heartened by much of it.
Why?
Well Edwards does not crudely assign all Lamb-ness to Christ's human nature and all Lion-ness to His divine nature. But that's often the flavour of things. And so he says things like this:
In the person of Christ do meet together infinite glory and lowest humility. Infinite glory, and the virtue of humility, meet in no other person but Christ. They meet in no created person, for no created person has infinite glory, and they meet in no other divine person but Christ. For though the divine nature be infinitely abhorrent to pride, yet humility is not properly predicable of God the Father, and the Holy Ghost, that exists only in the divine nature, because it is a proper excellency only of a created nature. For it consists radically in a sense of a comparative lowness and littleness before God, or the great distance between God and the subject of this virtue. But it would be a contradiction to suppose any such thing in God.
Do you see how straight away Edwards has a pre-formed conception of what humanity and divinity are like - a conception that sits ill with the Glorious-Humble God-Man! The essence of glory and humility are decided in advance of considering the Lamb at the centre of the throne. (Ironic given that this is a sermon on Revelation 5!). If Edwards was determined to have Christ define glory and humility, the direction of the argument would be very different.
Now if Edwards' logic is followed (humility is only proper to creatures) then what we have is a divine nature for which humility is impossible. How then can Edwards see Christ as humble? Well it must be only according to his human nature. To ask whether the Person of Christ is humble would receive the answer - according to His human nature yes, but according to His divine nature, no. This opens up two problems.
Edwards' next point is this ...
In the person of Christ do meet together infinite majesty and transcendent meekness. These again are two qualifications that meet together in no other person but Christ. Meekness, properly so called, is a virtue proper only to the creature. We scarcely ever find meekness mentioned as a divine attribute in Scripture, at least not in the New Testament.
Now it's very telling Edwards should want the New Testament to speak of the divine attribute of meekness. Surely the decisive argument against his position - the argument against which he must guard - is that, pre-incarnation, the LORD is spoken of as meek. And the truth is, He is spoken of as meek - 2 Sam 22:36; Ps 18:35; Ps 45:4. What's strange is that Edwards goes on to quote Psalm 45 to prove Christ's majesty (v4), failing conspicuously to spot His meekness proclaimed in the very same verse! Now here is an OT description of the God Messiah - and He is majestic and meek. It is not His humanity per se that makes Christ meek. In His pre-incarnate Person He is already meek. In this way we see that the incarnation is a revelation not a concealment.
Let's look at one last quote:
In Christ do meet together self-sufficiency, and an entire trust and reliance on God, which is another conjunction peculiar to the person of Christ. As he is a divine person, he is self-sufficient, standing in need of nothing. All creatures are dependent on him, but he is dependent on none, but is absolutely independent. His proceeding from the Father, in his eternal generation or filiation, argues no proper dependence on the will of the Father. For that proceeding was natural and necessary, and not arbitrary. But yet Christ entirely trusted in God...
Now where does Edwards get the idea that the Son (at any point) relied on Himself? (From Calvin yes, but where in Scripture!) There is perhaps no statement about His own identity that Christ makes more frequently than that He depends on His Father. Are we to believe that this is a new state of affairs (again the incarnation concealing rather than revealing)? Do we imagine that the One eternally in the bosom of the Father was eternally self-sufficient?
Edwards echoes the distinction Athanasius made between begotten and made - that His begotten-ness was a matter of nature, it was not a matter of will (which would imply ‘making'). But saying the eternal generation was natural and necessary does not get Edwards off the hook regarding the Son's dependence. He is still, as the creeds say ‘God from God'? Is that not genuine and on-going dependence? Does He not receive His life and being from the Father? And does not the Father depend on the Son to be Father? Etc etc.
All this is a playing out of a non-trinitarian concept of aseity that's defining Edwards' concept of ‘divine nature.' Here are some problems:
Now it's ironic that all of this is based on thoughts from Revelation 5. Because here we read
"You are worthy... for you were slain." (Rev 5:9,12)
It's the death of Christ that causes His worship. It's His very Lambness that we will praise into all eternity. Revelation 5 tells us to accord all divine honours to Jesus not in spite of but because of His death as a human sacrifice. The deity of Christ does not exist apart from His Lambness but is most brightly manifested in it.
Therefore there are no extra bits to Jesus. His divinity is precisely in His being as the Lamb (and the act this implies). His humanity is not locked off from His being as God. There is not 6 feet of insulation between Jesus of Nazareth and divine life. Jesus is divine. Even as He is Jesus in all His Lamb-ness.
And He is, in all His Lamb-ness the revelation of the Father. Our notions of God should not lie behind glass in pristine majesty. They are laid bare at the rugged cross.
So, yes, Christ's excellency does indeed consist in an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies. But these excellencies are true to the very depths of His Person, true to the depths of eternity, true to the very depths of God.
Worthy is the Lamb
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My sermon on Romans 3:21-26 is here. Audio is here.
I preached on 'Why the Cross?' on Sunday. Thanks to all who gave help to this sermon.
In the end I guess I did a version of an old style law-gospel talk. Basically it ran - sin is very serious, thank Christ for atonement.
Now I'm aware that such a shape to preaching has both a long pedigree and a number of dangers. The dangers of this kind of preaching seem to me to be:
But bearing in mind these pit-falls, there is much to commend such an approach. And I had a go!
Check it out here if you like.
Do you think my fears of law-gospel preaching are unfounded/insurmountable/irrelevant?
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My sermon on Romans 3:21-26 is here. Audio is here.
I preached on 'Why the Cross?' on Sunday. Thanks to all who gave help to this sermon.
In the end I guess I did a version of an old style law-gospel talk. Basically it ran - sin is very serious, thank Christ for atonement.
Now I'm aware that such a shape to preaching has both a long pedigree and a number of dangers. The dangers of this kind of preaching seem to me to be:
But bearing in mind these pit-falls, there is much to commend such an approach. And I had a go!
Check it out here if you like.
Do you think my fears of law-gospel preaching are unfounded/insurmountable/irrelevant?
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